We at Sensis are all about social media.  We blog, we tweet, we are active participants in the real-time conversation that is taking place in Web 2.0.  We love how these tools have been used to facilitate democracy and the political discourse.   But there’s one thing you really need to know about Social Media and Web 2.0:  it’s useless if you don’t have the solid foundations of Web 1.0.

Having drunk my social media Kool-Aid and the White House’s history of new media success, the circumstances were set to love last week’s Online Town Hall on Obama’s health care plan.  But the event fell short.

They had a great Facebook integration with a newsfeed of on-topic status updates, but it didn’t matter.  They deftly used hashtags with Twitter, but it still didn’t matter.  They solicited compelling video questions through YouTube, but it just didn’t matter.

With all of these innovative approaches and platforms for connecting with stakeholders, they couldn’t manage to get a clean video stream with the video content on either http://www.whitehouse.gov or http://www.facebook.com/whitehouse.  It made the whole experience unbearable until I went and found a video feed from CNN that didn’t give me a headache.

Despite all the things that didn’t go well, including one humorous reference to whitehouse.com instead of .gov, I would say that the White House new media team did an effective job of integrating all of these different social platforms into one event.  By crowdsourcing questions and facilitating the digital conversation, the White House provided a vehicle for increasing the inclusiveness of a frequently all-too-distant political process.

My only major non-technical complaint was how overwhelming all of the information was.  I’m a fairly quick reader, but there were several long entries in the town hall newsfeed that scrolled before I could finish reading them.  At first that was frustrating, as it felt like trying to participate in the conversation would be akin to whispering into a hurricane.   Over the next few hours, I saw the real power of this process.  It engaged me in dialogue with my friends who didn’t participate in the actual event.   While “Internet Time” is normally discussed as acceleration, this process extended the event for hours (days in one case) as the dialogue continued.

Today’s big idea: If you can’t manage the basic technologies of the Internet, the most sophisticated tools still won’t help the idea spread.

- Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

This entry is filed under Government 2.0, Social Media, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.