The White House's Twitter Page
The White House new media team has much more important tweeters to follow than you or I, including @DHSJournal, @hhs_gov, @CDCflu, and @dipnote (the State Department), among many other federal agencies and departments. We’re not going to be on the Following list any time soon. But actually, now that the White House has joined Twitter, it may well be that the White House will be following some of our tweets.
First, let me make a brief digression. As Twitter users know, one of the most powerful tools on Twitter is search.twitter.com. This search engine allows people to search for every possible term that users type when they post their 140-characters-or-less “tweets”. This opens up Twitter to many different purposes than mere responses to the question, “what are you doing?” For instance, if you’re a beer enthusiast and want to know what people are saying about beer on Twitter, just type “beer” in the search engine, and you will see every tweet that includes the word “beer”. You can then start a conversation with people who are tweeting about beer. But what if you are a beer company? Say you are Sam Adams (I chose a local Boston brand for the sake of convenience–it’s also a decent beer). That’s where things get very interesting. Believe me, this will connect to the Obama administration’s use of Twitter.
Since I joined Twitter in December of 2008, I have went to many meetups of Twitter users, called “tweetups”. Most of these events are full of marketing professionals who are using Twitter to help companies promote their products or services. One of the strongest reasons that companies want to use social media, and especially Twitter, is to find out what customers are thinking about their product or service in real time. They can gain immediate feedback from customers who may be trying a new product line, for instance. (This post describes the differences between marketing with social media and traditional marketing). So, going back to the beer example, if I search for Sam Adams, I find this tweet by @steventurous: “I don’t care if it’s kind of weird and polarizing: I love Sam Adams Cherry Wheat”. If the Sam Adams marketers are curious about consumers’ feelings about the Cherry Wheat, they can refine their search to Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. It seems like this beer is a hit with people–in my cursory search, I tried to find a negative review but couldn’t. So we now have immediate qualitative data about consumer preferences in addition to the quantitative data that companies receive from their sales numbers and other numerical indicators. (Continued below.)
Mmmm...beer!
So by now it may be a little clearer how all of this connects to the White House’s use of Twitter. Obviously, the White House wants to use Twitter to get its message out. But my question is whether the political department of the White House will want to look at voters’ reactions to the President and his policies in real time using Twitter search. For example, maybe the White House wants to find out what people are saying about Obama’s response to the swine flu outbreak. Well, they just type in “Obama swine flu” and find their tweets, like this one: @scotia626 “swine flu over-reaction is a failure of obama’s leadership team”. It seems that many of the criticisms of Obama’s handling of the outbreak on Twitter is that Obama is overreacting, not that he hasn’t taken stronger measures, such as closing the border. The administration can get more specific, and find out citizens’ reaction to the administration’s view that, if schools close, they should close for 14 days. Here is one unhappy reaction and a misunderstanding (profanity edited): “This is soooo [messed] up, Obama wants schools to close up to 14 days for swine flu — this is graduation and prom time.” This kind of reaction may send a red flag to the White House that they need to clarify their message: they are not asking all schools to shut down, but only those with cases of swine flu.
Using Twitter Search obviously doesn’t provide the White House with a large sample of Americans’ reaction, and I don’t want to overstate my point here. Reading tweets on search is often like reading the comments of a blog post, and there is the usual mix of insight and madness in both. My point is simply that Twitter Search provides a very fast and efficient way for the White House to gauge Americans’ reaction to the President’s decisions. Polls provide quantitative data, but Twitter provides immediate qualitative data about Americans’ political views. Knowing that the President has a team of talented and tech savvy new media people working for him, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are using this powerful tool as well. The White House may be following our tweets after all.
