Obama to Host ‘Twitter Town Hall’

 President Obama will welcome some of his Twitter followers to the White House next week for a Twitter Town Hall, where he will answer questions about jobs and the economy that people across the country can begin posting today, using the hashtag, #askobama.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and executive chairman who recently returned to the company, will be the moderator of the event, to be held Wednesday afternoon in the East Room.  He will pose the questions to Mr. Obama who will answer them for about an hour in front of two gigantic screens that will display the conversation on Twitter in real time.

It will be streamed live at http://askobama.twitter.com andhttp://wh.gov/live.

Twitter will select the questions, using curation tools and a group of Twitter users to help identify the most popular questions raised both before and during the event. Twitter will be relying on its own search and curation features as well as a company called Mass Relevance to help find questions and topics that are most frequently mentioned.

Macon Phillips, special assistant to the president and director of digital strategy, said that the event was an opportunity for the Mr. Obama to use the Twitter platform to hear directly from people outside of Washington.

“Twitter offers a compelling way to not only get information out but also to understand what people have to say about an issue,” he said. “That is why we are doubling down on our online engagement efforts.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Obama visited Facebook’s headquarters in California and fielded questions from Marc Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer. The event was live streamed and the questions and answers were displayed on Facebook’s platform.

Mr. Phillips said that there has been a new emphasis on using social media platforms throughout the federal government to help bolster customer service efforts as well as deliver, listen and collect information.

“It is a tool that helps people do their jobs,” Mr. Phillips said. “All of the people who have official White House accounts would tell you that it is a really helpful way to engage with people and bring in new ideas and be aware of new issues that they otherwise might have missed.”

Earlier this month, members of Mr. Obama’s campaign team announced that he would be posting his own tweets on the @barackobama Twitter account from time to time, signing them, BO. With more than eight million followers, that account is used primarily for his re-election efforts while the@whitehouse account is used for administration news and updates.

Adam Sharp, Twitter’s manager of government and political partnerships, said that the curators chosen by Twitter to help select the questions would be a politically and geographically diverse group. He said the curators would ask the people in their communities to highlight what they think are the most important questions for the president to address.

Curators will also be reposting questions and posting their own.

“We will have highly-engaged Twitter users from around the country to provide that geographic diversity to help identify good questions, “ he said. “This helps us make sure that we are addressing the concerns that the Twitter universe cares about. “

To participate, Twitter users need to include the hashtag #askObama when posting their question.  All questions with the hashtag will be included in the selection process. If Web users do not yet have a Twitter account, they can visit http://askobama.twitter.com to sign up and join the discussion.

For those @WhiteHouse followers who want to be considered to attend the Tweetup next week, they can sign up online at http://WhiteHouse.gov/Tweetup, according to Kori Schulman, deputy director of digital content, Office of Digital Strategy.

Ms. Schulman, who is the person behind the @whitehouse account, said that the goal was to have more events at the White House so that posters can engage more with senior administration officials and with each other.