« Previous | Main | Next » 
 
 President Obama Friends Facebook in Town Hall Meeting 
 
 ABC’s Jordyn Phelps reports: 
 
 From Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, President Obama will hold a “Facebook Live” online town hall on April 20. 
 
 Everyone is invited to the meeting, but there’s no need to travel to California to participate. That’s because the meeting will be taking place completely on the Internet and will be live streamed on Facebook and the White House website. 
 
 Participants can post questions for the president on the event’s Facebook wall, and Facebook will be selecting questions during the event. 
 
 For those who don’t have a Facebook account, the White House also has a form on its website that people can also use to submit questions. 
 
 The White House says the economy and the budget are the focus of the town hall. 
 
 “The President will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in the innovation economy that makes America more competitive,” says the announcement posted on Facebook today. 
 
 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg will join the president at the meeting. 
 
 User Comments 
 
 Posted by: Jose | Apr 6, 2011 8:55:49 AM 
 
 Posted by: Mike, CO | Apr 6, 2011 2:41:48 AM 
 
 Posted by: ticejust | Apr 5, 2011 10:25:12 PM 
 
 Posted by: MayBee | Apr 5, 2011 9:51:39 PM 
 
 Posted by: Mike, CO | Apr 5, 2011 5:41:36 PM 
 
 Posted by: jybarz | Apr 5, 2011 4:57:17 PM 
 
 Posted by: Mike, CO | Apr 5, 2011 4:34:22 PM 
 
 Posted by: Ed | Apr 5, 2011 4:34:14 PM 
 
 Post a comment ||||| ... 
 
 please do not show up at Facebook HQ. You can watch and participate via the event's live stream. 
 
 
 
 WHAT IT'S ABOUT 
 
 President Obama will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make in order to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in areas like innovation that will help our economy grow and make America more competitive. 
 
 
 
 HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE 
 
 Facebook will be selecting questions for President Obama to answer during the event. Submit questions now by posting them right here, on this event's wall. As an alternative, you may submit a question via WhiteHouse.gov/facebooktow nhall. 
 
 
 
 STILL READING? 
 
 Then you definitely need to make sure you're a fan of the White House on Facebook! Facebook.com/WhiteHouse 
 
 WHAT'S HAPPENINGPresident Barack Obama will hold a special "Facebook Live" townhall to connect with Americans across the country.WHERE & WHEN IT'S HAPPENINGWhere? Well, everywhere! The event at Facebook's headquarters, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg & COO Sheryl Sandberg, will be live streamed for anyone to watch. Just come back here at the right time: Wednesday, April 20 @ 1:45pm PDT / 4:45pm EDT. Unless invited to attend in person, ||||| Four years ago, candidate Barack Obama brought the long-promised political power of the Internet to bear on a presidential campaign, raising millions and organizing thousands through a groundbreaking website and massive email list. 
 
 But four years is a millennium in the world of social media and the rich, dynamic web of 2012 will bear little resemblance to the stodgy ‘Web 2.0’-era Internet, circa 2008 - and Obama’s re-election announcement Monday was a clear sign that the White House understands that change is in order, even if it means a risky easing of control over campaign messaging. 
 
 Text Size - 
 
 + 
 
 reset AUDIO: Frates on Obama 2012 POLITICO 44 
 
 In 2008, the Obama team maintained remarkable discipline over the free-floating new media by making Obama’s own website the central social network for supporters, executing hostile takeovers of “unofficial” Obama social media pages and taking full advantage of the one-way medium of email. In 2012, however, the Obama campaign and his Republican rivals will have to grapple with the reality that the entire new media world has shifted again. Email and blogs have been declared passé. Meanwhile, raucous social media platforms and carefully-controlled iPad apps are splitting up the new terrain. And total control by any campaign may be a relic of the past. 
 
 The nascent Obama campaign responded to some of these changes by relaunching launching their flagship website, barackobama.com (or MyBo.com, as it is sometimes known), on Monday in tandem with their campaign rollout. The page is a slick, simple website complete with deep Twitter and Facebook integration. 
 
 Users can log in using their Facebook accounts and a bar at the top of the site invites Facebook users to “Invite Your Friends,” showing the names and faces of friends who haven’t joined the site. 
 
 “I think every campaign is wrestling with how to tap and adapt to most of the activity occurring outside of traditional websites – occurring on the major social networking platforms,” said Mindy Finn, a Republican new media strategist who works for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. 
 
 Obama’s 2008 campaign blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, said that while Obama’s main site became of a hub for the Illinois senator’s presidential effort, Facebook served merely as an “embassy.” 
 
 “Our main goal was to reach out to people in those communities, and get them to come to MyBo and get them to interact with our tools,” Graham-Felsen said. “I think this time though, everybody is on Facebook now.” 
 
 And as a result, Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as those of his Republican challengers, will have to engage in these well-known and heavily-trafficked social media spaces much, much more - thereby ceding some message control and risking the potential complications of more unscripted interaction with voters. 
 
 The most important new feature of the political Internet landscape is the massive shift to social media. Facebook — where Obama supporters organized the famous “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” group – had under 100 million users throughout the entire primary campaign in 2008. By inauguration day in 2009, the site had reached about 150 million users. Today, it has over half a billion – a five-fold increase since mid-2008. ||||| WASHINGTON -- In yet another nod to the influence of social media, President Obama announced Tuesday that he will host a townhall meeting via Facebook on April 20. The nation's budget outlook will be the primary focus of the meeting. 
 
 The announcement, made on the Facebook page of the White House, provides another strong indication of how widely used the medium has become in national politics. 
 
 “President Obama will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make in order to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in areas like innovation that will help our economy grow and make America more competitive,” the post reads. 
 
 The actual event will take place at Facebook’s headquarters, featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. But it will be live-streamed for all users and questions will be submitted right on the page itself. 
 
 While this is an official White House event, it may offer some clues to how Obama's 2012 campaign might be organized. The townhall announcement was made just one day after the president announced his reelection bid. His new media team clearly finds the Facebook forum a comfortable one to traverse. But the extent to which they can rely on social media sites over more traditional campaign outreach tools is not an insignificant question. 
 
 On Monday, Politico’s Byron Tau wrote an article describing the “brave new Web world,” confronting Obama -- a world in which email and blogs “have been declared passé.” The piece sparked heavy debate among party operatives, many of whom were critical of the notion that email and blogs were relics of antiquity. 
 
 “I’m not saying Facebook isn’t important,” said one top Democratic online operative. “It is very important. And it is great the White House is engaging people on Facebook. I think what people were objecting to is the thesis of the article, which is that email and blogs are dead and social media has to be the focus in 2012 because times are so different." 
 
 He also noted that older Web tools will remain important for donations: "Most of the money raised is going to come from email. So to say that email is passé is, I think, terribly misguided,” he said. 
 

– President Obama will host his first town hall as an official candidate for re-election—on Facebook. The president will go to company headquarters in Palo Alto on April 20 for the online forum, reports ABC. (Yes, Mark Zuckerberg will be there, too.) Participants can post questions for the president about the budget and the economy here, and Facebook will select questions during the event. It could foreshadow online strategy for the campaign, writes Sam Stein at the Huffington Post. He takes note of a recent Politico article making the case that social media platforms have largely replaced email and blogs as the way to reach out via the web. And Obama's "new media team clearly finds the Facebook forum a comfortable one to traverse," writes Stein.