How We Powered the White House Twitter Town Hall

On July 6th, Barack Obama became the first United States President to tweet live on-air, doing so at the first ever White House Twitter Town Hall, an event in which anyone could tweet in questions to be answered by the President himself. The Town Hall was made possible thanks to the combined efforts of the Twitter team and those of us here at Mass Relevance. It was a resounding success.

Visualization

We were initially approached by Twitter to assist them in the curation and visualization aspects of the Town Hall, and we aimed to not only pull in and pinpoint quality questions to be presented to the President by Twitter Chairman Jack Dorsey (@jack), but also present additional data in a visually stimulating way. We achieved this by using four separate visualizations:

• Geo Topic Tracker
  This map visualization displayed all 50 states and plotted points where Tweeters for specific topics (defined above the map) were located, either using geo data contained in their tweets, or by looking at their profile location. This allowed viewers to see exactly where tweets were coming from in the US. During the event, this visualization was displayed on a large screen behind the President.

• Activity Topic Tracker
  In order to identify the most popular topics, we implemented a visualization that scanned any submitted tweets and found keywords or hashtags that were used more than others. This data was displayed in the form of a bar graph on a large screen behind Jack Dorsey during the event.

• Birdcast Tweet Display
  Certain select Tweets needed to be prominently displayed at the event itself. We accomplished this by using our Birdcast visualization to present the single currently-selected Tweet on a large display centered behind both Jack Dorsey and President Obama.

• Twitter Microsite
  The go-to destination for this event was http://askobama.twitter.com, a one-page website that was designed and hosted by Twitter, and built and powered by Mass Relevance.  This site included live streaming video of the event, a curated selection of on-topic tweets, and a prominent display of the tweeted question currently being answered by the President.

All of these technologies required a dedicated team of on- and off-site members to run as smoothly as possible before, during, and after the Town Hall.

Tweet Curation & Selection

In total, more than 160,000 tweets were sent with the hashtag #AskObama, and a mere 17 were selected as questions (3 of which were selected as followups during the event). The selection process for the Town Hall was therefore required to be as advanced as possible in order for the highest quality content to come through.

To help facilitate the decision-making process about which Tweets would be selected as questions, the Mass Relevance Platform was used to pull in every Tweet with #AskObama, and then automatically separate those Tweets into key topics in order for there to be diverse set of questions presented to the President. Twitter pinpointed popular Tweets by measuring each Tweet’s engagement (Retweets, Favorites, @Replies), and a group of Twitter users (“curators”) flagged other candidate questions by retweeting popular questions in their communities.

Once a question was finally selected, it was published to the microsite and the Birdcast display behind the President in realtime.  No one — not the President, the White House, nor moderator Jack himself — knew in advance which questions would be asked.  Straight from the people to the President.

Conclusion

This Twitter Town Hall could not have gone any smoother, with virtually no glitches or issues with any of the technology utilized in the event. Thanks to the combined efforts of Mass Relevance, Twitter, and the White House, the Town Hall made history by connecting the public with the President of the United States on an unprecedented and unparalleled level.

Additional behind-the-scenes reading: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/behind-scenes-white-house