Twitter Gives Obama Town Hall a Real-Time Flavor

Twitter, following YouTube and Facebook, was the latest social media service to get a sit-down interview for its users with U.S. President Barack Obama.

The stylin’ Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and executive chairman, acted as the voice of the people, channeling their “#askobama” questions to the president and offering stats and visualizations of where they were coming from and how they reflected the topics Twitter users were most interested in asking about.

Though these town hall meetings are never terrifically interactive or spontaneous, Dorsey and the Twitter team did their best to make the event feel like it was coming together in real time by using a combination of regional curators and algorithms to choose relevant and popular questions. Dorsey noted more than once that a particular question had been tweeted only a few minutes before he asked it.

After the event, Twitter partner Mass Relevance reported that it had recorded 169,395 total tweets tagged #askobama, with the most questions related to jobs (18,957), the budget (15,000) and taxes (14,777) — which makes sense, since the stated topic of discussion was jobs and the economy.

The organizing group also did a nice job of facilitating the discussion live on Twitter by retweeting the chosen questions and tweeting Obama’s answers. Plus, the event featured Obama typing and posting his very first tweet, which was riveting (not really): “in order to reduce the deficit,what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – bo.”