More than two months after President Obama's Facebook town hall, the commander in chief will team up with Twitter this week for a Twitter Town Hall at the White House.
Starting today, Twitter users can tweet questions about jobs and the economy by using the hashtag #AskObama. On Wednesday, July 6, Obama will respond to the questions in a live event from the East Room of the White House, moderated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Taking a page from NASA's playbook, meanwhile, the White House also announced plans for tweetups. The administration will pull a certain number of people who follow the @whitehouse feed and who registered online to attend the town hall in person. More tweetups are expected in the future.
Decisions about what questions Dorsey will ask Obama will be in Twitter's hands, administration officials said during a Tuesday press call about the event. The majority, if not all, of the questions will come from the Web; thousands have already been submitted. Twitter will partner with Mass Relevance to identify themes and regions driving the conversation, while Twitter search algorithms will identify the most-engaged tweets via re-tweets, favorites, and replies.
The White House actually reached out to Twitter in an effort to use technology to get an idea of the national conversation, officials said. If you're going to communicate with the public, it's no longer sufficient to do it through the mainstream media, they said. An event like a town hall gives users the chance to interact with the president rather than just reading a news story and moving on.
After the event, Twitter said it will publish data about the level of engagement.
For more, follow the @townhall Twitter feed.
The April Facebook town hall took place at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters, with Mark Zuckerberg as moderator, and also focused on jobs and the economy.
Lance Ulanoff contributed to this story.