Candidate Obama ran a great campaign and made amazing use of social networking services to get the word out about his campaign, mobilize supporters, create viral messages, and raise money. When the campaign ended, I wondered if President Obama would continue to use social networking tools or if the constraints of the White House or security would put an end all that open communication and engagement.
I’ve been so happy to see that President Obama is being just as innovative and engaging online.
- Google Moderator gives participants a way to submit questions and vote for the ones they want answered. The White House launched Open for Questions and used Google Moderator to field questions for the President during in online town hall meeting tonight. 92,934 people submitted 104,049 questions and cast 3,604,964 votes.
- The White House maintains a blog. Imagine that, a White House blog. The President himself is not blogging, but the blog does a terrific job of making visitors feel like a White House insider. Here’s tonight’s post on Open for Questions.
- The White House has a YouTube channel that features press conferences, the President’s weekly address, briefings and other events. Some of the videos are available in HD; check out this beautiful HD video of President Obama’s March 21, 2009 address. If you don’t see the video in HD, click the HD link in the bottom right corner of the video.
- The President’s weekly addresses are also available on Vimeo, a niche video sharing site that features only user-generated content, and has stricter content requirements.
- Recovery.gov claims to be “the main vehicle to provide each and every citizen with the ability to monitor the progress of the recovery.” The Web site features news, the full-text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, agency budgets, and more. I especially like the share your story feature.
- I love the slideshows that give us glimpses into the President’s and First Lady’s meetings and visits.
How about you? Are you participating in any of these online initiatives from the White House?
