Obama’s online town hall provides value through data, not answers

The White House used Google’s Moderator and AppEngine this week to gather topics for Thursday’s town hall meeting.  The tactic was introduced as an experiment by Obama earlier in the week.

The experiment was a success, but it wasn’t free of mess.

The president’s Open For Questions town meeting on Thursday, March 26, used Google technology to collect 104,009 questions from 92,937 people, who ranked questions with more than than 3.6 million votes.

During the Town Hall meeting, the president answered seven questions at length.  A little over 24 hours later, I can’t recall many specifics from his reponses, though. In this case, the process used for this town hall meeting overshadowed the content.

Honestly, the most interesting thing to me during this first attempt at a virtual town hall meeting is THE DATA.  I think we can learn more about the economy from the level of participation, 100k+ questions submitted and 3.6 million related votes than from the few political responses they generated. With this in mind, here’s a high-level overview of participation in the context of social media.

Read More about Obama’s online Town Hall at Social Meteor.com