The Whitehouse has official taken the plunge into microblogging and launched their official twitter account @whitehouse today. Another milestone in government 2.0 and social media has been reached.
The Official White House Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/whitehouse
The account was set up and first tweet posted about 2 hours ago putting the time of official release at around 12:20 AM EST on Friday May 1st 2009. I checked the page 5 minutes ago and it had 585 followers, refreshed it and there was 731 followers. So the velocity is there and the potential for this account to reach massive twitter influencer is there, who knows it might hit a million followers even faster then Opera or Aston. 🙂
The first three friends of the whitehouse are all CDC Focused:
@CDC_eHealth
@CDCFlu
@CDCemergency
So it would appear that one of the initial strategic objectives of the twitter account could be to raise awareness of the CDC, most likely because to the hysteria about swine flu that is happening currently in the US.
One of my friends posted a comment on facebook today saying that everyone needs to settle down and stop freaking out about the media focus on swine flu…to which I posted this blurb
“hysteria spreads lies, misinformation and creates unwarranted panic. Fact is you are most likely to die when you get in your car and drive to work on any given day (45,000 people die on the roads in the US every year). The odds of you catching and dying of the swine Flu are extremely small when taken in context against the many ways people die everyday. Word.”
Let me know what you think about this article!
This article was posted here first, they expanded on my Zero Strategist Blog.
Who’s managing the outbound tweets? Anyone know?
Nope but when someone figures it out, let me know!
Let me rephrase, then. I know it’s Katie Stanton (@katiejstanton) and/or her team… but question in my mind is if it’s a team effort or a single person is driving Twitter.
I’d like to know how many folks and how much time they spend to create the feeds. We’re looking into starting a feed here at the state government and need to know more about staff time required.