The White House gets social

We all knew that President Obama knew how to use social networks and the Internet (as I wrote in Obama's Victory Proves the Power of Web 2.0). The new White House website uses a clean design, making it easy to find information such as the budget, policy discussions and yes a blog (what blogger wouldn't want to be the White House blogger?). On May 1st, the president announced full engagement on a range of social networks including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Vimeo

If that's not enough, you can subscribe to the official White House podcast at iTunes. This level of engagement is unprecedented and it gives citizens a high level of access to the government. How much the White House will interact with the citizens beyond providing the information remains unclear, but this president is clearly making every effort to reach out to people wherever they are on the Internet.

What these tools offer is the ability for public officials to speak directly to us without filters. Businesses can take a lesson from the White House and see that these social media tools provide a way to interact directly with customers/constituents. It is a very powerful set of tools, and you need to be thinking about how to use them in your business just as the government has been learning to use them in their's.

For more information:
- the White House 2.0 blog post.

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