A different kind of townhall

A curious thing happened at the White House’s first Twitter townhall. No one watched the President. The guests were too busy sending tweets, flashing twitpics and hash-tagging on the micro-blogging site to look up from their smartphones. Such is the new world of social media.

President Barack Obama even got in on the action and sent a live tweet, a short message in 140 characters or less. And he patted himself on the back for being the first president in history to do so. President Obama also took more than a dozen questions served up on a large flatscreen monitor and read by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. As expected, President Obama did not break new ground in his views on the deficit and creating jobs. The event has been hailed more as a way for the president to reach new voters ahead of the 2012 election. Twitter, in exchange, gets a high-level endorsement of its importance. “There’s a lot to gain for Obama and Twitter,” said Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capital investor. “The inherent message is that the president is open to communication with anyone in the world with a Twitter account.” But the townhall differed from previous White House events at Facebook and via YouTube. Twitter went to lengths to explain how questions were “crowdsourced” or chosen from the most popular among its Twitter populace of 200 million users worldwide. Dorsey said that of the thousands of questions that were posed, the company chose those that were most “retweeted,” or repeated, such as one by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), known as @speakerboehner on Twitter. He asked, “Where are the jobs?”