Regardless of the Obama’s approval ratings, the one thing upon which opinion is unequivocable is that the guys pretty damn cool. You never got this sort of fist bumping with Bush – just a few more soundbites worthy of a YouTube compilations. He’s also a dab hand with social media, with nothing personifying his penchant for all things Facebook and Twitter than the latest White House social media project. And just so you know B Dawg is down with the kids, it’s entitled ‘Project Hangout’. Shit getting real.
My street mannerisms aside, Project Hangout represented White House’s ongoing forage into social media territory – something Downing Street hasn’t had as much success with. Remember that botched YouTube channel? Neither do we.
Using his Google+ account, President Obama logged on to the World Wide Web to face 223,000 participants, all of whom had submitted a total of 123,000 questions. In favour of not seeing the president die from exhaustion, Head Of News and Politics Steve Grove selected the most popular questions for the President to answer, as voted for by Google and YouTube users.
Reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats between 1933 and 1944, Obama bought FDR’s formula into the digital age. Despite naysayers accusing the President of churning out scripted soundbites when tackling the problems of unemployment, the Hangout became more and more fluid as time went on – with Obama even requesting one participant to send in his resumé to further examine his query. The problem of SOPA was also addressed directly by the President for the first time, having already responded indirectly with this blogpost .
Regardless of political allegiance, the Hangout represented a great showcase of how to use digital technology to connect with voters, with a huge amount of online conversation generated around the event itself – and that’s not including the participants of the event itself. Whether this will translate into votes is another question.
Project Hangout
February 6, 2012 by
