WH announces P.T. presser on Twitter
Posted: Friday, July 17, 2009 4:20 PM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
White House, Barack Obama
From NBC's Athena Jones
Move over Facebook. The White House has crossed a new media frontier with Twitter, the latest Internet phenomenon.
If you were a so-called "follower" of the Obama administration on Twitter, here's the message you would have gotten from the White House tweeter, dubbed quite simply "Tweetie", last hour:
whitehouse: You heard it here first: Primetime presidential news conference at the White House, Wed. 7/22 @ 9PM EDT
It's just the latest sign of an administration primed and ready to take advantage of every opportunity to connect with the public -- and to circumvent traditional media.
Obama was a different kind of candidate -- not just because he was young and not just because he was a biracial Hawaiian, who spent part of his youth in Indonesia, admitted to using drugs in his youth and could toss a Jay-Z reference ("brush ya shoulders off") into a campaign speech with ease.
One of the most important things that set Obama's candidacy apart from all the others and that helped him break fundraising records, turn red states blue and ultimately, win the nation's highest office was his use of the Internet. His campaign harnessed the Web to mobilize, to organize, to make his supporters feel empowered and informed and a part of something. And he used it to raise small amounts of money from those uber-engaged fans. Twitter is just the latest incarnation of that effort to reach out and connect.
As of 5:15 pm Friday, some 714,125 people were following the White House on Twitter. (Note: The White House has just 284,933 "fans" on Facebook. And John McCain has passed a million followers on Twitters.)
That tap tap of typing fingers you hear is the sound of thousands more people rushing to join, among them the journalists from old media -- and new -- who must now follow yet another "news" source.
