Update: The good folks at PopVox will be tweeting out links to any legislation mentioned in the SOTU and the Republican response at @PopVox. Handy!
Big news today — my NWLC colleague Danielle Jackson and I are invited to the White House (along with digital communications folks from other advocacy organizations) to live-tweet the State of the Union. Exciting stuff! We’ve armed ourselves with a big spreadsheet of pre-prepared tweets, based on topics that could come up and including links to NWLC resources and other background materials. Should be an exciting night, and besides the @NWLC tweets I’ll also be covering the live-tweeting event itself on @epolitics. Follow it here — I’ve embedded the @epolitics Twitter feed below.
This White House invitation (sent through their Office of Public Engagement) is a classic example of blogger/online activist relations — they can’t exactly give us exclusive information or the other usual goodies we online communicators use to entice online opinion leaders, but they CAN give us a seat in a meeting room in the White House complex, which is pretty damn cool all around. Plus, we’ll have a chance to schmooze with White House digital outreach folks, which provides another benefit. Excellent work all around, and the kind of event that political campaigns can learn from.
Plus, you can get involved: after the speech, Obama’s comms folks will be taking questions online.
10:00 pm EST: Immediately following the speech, pose your questions to a live panel. Administration Officials will answer your questions about the President’s address. In addition to taking your questions, the panelists will take questions submitted via Twitter (using hashtags #WHChat & #SOTU), Google+ and Facebook. Feel free to call on your followers to add their voice to the discussion and share their questions.
Another interesting #SOTU social media angles: Yahoo wants your 140-character analysis of the speech (via Elana Levin), which sounds like political commentary as haiku! Next, Quora will be taking questions that administration officials will answer over the following few days (via A Loyal Reader — thanks, Dad!), and the President will be answering questions directly on January 30th in a Google+ “hangout” (via Lisa Byrne). Quite the social media push from the White House these days…purely a coincidence that we’re in an election year, right?
@epolitics Twitter feed below, after the break. Live coverage should being sometime after 8 pm Eastern…don’t miss it.
– cpd
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