WASHINGTON – The White House said Tuesday that “thousands and thousands” of tweets have already been submitted for Wednesday’s first-of-its-kind Twitter Town Hall with President Barack Obama.
But White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said it is difficult to tell the exact number since many of the responses so far are retweets, which happens when a Twitter user republishes another user’s tweet.
The conversation between Obama and Twitter users, which will take place in the East Room of the White House, is set to focus on the economy and jobs, although the actual scope of the conversation will be in the hands of the Twitterverse.
A commissioned analysis by Salesforce.com’s Radian 6, released Tuesday, showed that financial security and national protection drive the majority of political conversations on Twitter.
The goal of the event is to have a “national conversation,” that allows regular citizens a voice, whether they live in Washington or Waterloo, said Macon Phillips, the White House’s director of digital strategy.
Phillips said the White House chose Twitter because the service’s real-time nature makes it the best platform for the kind of dialogue the administration wants, a “president-to-country” conversation.
“As the president answers the questions, people can respond and we can keep track of what people are taking about during the conversation,” Phillips said. “We’re not only looking to tell people things, but also looking to hear back from them.”
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and executive chairman, will moderate the event, pulling questions from the service and relaying them to Obama for response.
When Facebook held a town hall at its Silicon Valley headquarters in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were posing the questions to Obama, with some vetted questions coming from the Web.
Twitter will make the decision both in advance and in real-time during the event on filtering the questions to Obama, looking for hot topics using curation tools, and relying on its own search and curation features as well as a company called Mass Relevance, a visualization expert that helps identify the themes and regions driving the conversation.
A team of Twitter users called “July 6 Curators” with experience discussing the economy will help flag questions from their communities through retweets.
Adam Sharp, Twitter’s manager of government and political partnerships, said Twitter is still analyzing the information and has not released a count of the tweets yet.
Phillips revealed that 30 Twitter users would be selected from people who follow the White House on Twitter to show up at the event, tweeting what they see on-the-spot and meeting senior officials afterwards.
To submit questions, Twitter users can include hashtag #askObama in their tweets.
Pfeiffer stressed that knowing how to squeeze more complicated thoughts into 140 characters is important, since more and more people consume information on mobile devices and the ability to be succinct on policy issues is important. With 140 characters per tweet, each tweet consists of approximately 20 to 30 words.
The president, however, won’t have to constrain his thoughts.
“He’s just answering the questions. He’s not typing and tweeting,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary Friday. Obama’s response will be webcast from the White House.
Steven Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago who stresses the value of social media, sees a chance in Wednesday’s event to move the market.
“If President Obama says the debt ceiling negotiations are doing well or doing badly, that could have an impact on the market,” Kaplan said.