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 President Obama Friends Facebook in Town Hall Meeting 
 
 ABC’s Jordyn Phelps reports: 
 
 From Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, President Obama will hold a “Facebook Live” online town hall on April 20. 
 
 Everyone is invited to the meeting, but there’s no need to travel to California to participate. That’s because the meeting will be taking place completely on the Internet and will be live streamed on Facebook and the White House website. 
 
 Participants can post questions for the president on the event’s Facebook wall, and Facebook will be selecting questions during the event. 
 
 For those who don’t have a Facebook account, the White House also has a form on its website that people can also use to submit questions. 
 
 The White House says the economy and the budget are the focus of the town hall. 
 
 “The President will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in the innovation economy that makes America more competitive,” says the announcement posted on Facebook today. 
 
 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg will join the president at the meeting. 
 
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 Post a comment ||||| WASHINGTON -- In yet another nod to the influence of social media, President Obama announced Tuesday that he will host a townhall meeting via Facebook on April 20. The nation's budget outlook will be the primary focus of the meeting. 
 
 The announcement, made on the Facebook page of the White House, provides another strong indication of how widely used the medium has become in national politics. 
 
 “President Obama will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make in order to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in areas like innovation that will help our economy grow and make America more competitive,” the post reads. 
 
 The actual event will take place at Facebook’s headquarters, featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. But it will be live-streamed for all users and questions will be submitted right on the page itself. 
 
 While this is an official White House event, it may offer some clues to how Obama's 2012 campaign might be organized. The townhall announcement was made just one day after the president announced his reelection bid. His new media team clearly finds the Facebook forum a comfortable one to traverse. But the extent to which they can rely on social media sites over more traditional campaign outreach tools is not an insignificant question. 
 
 On Monday, Politico’s Byron Tau wrote an article describing the “brave new Web world,” confronting Obama -- a world in which email and blogs “have been declared passé.” The piece sparked heavy debate among party operatives, many of whom were critical of the notion that email and blogs were relics of antiquity. 
 
 “I’m not saying Facebook isn’t important,” said one top Democratic online operative. “It is very important. And it is great the White House is engaging people on Facebook. I think what people were objecting to is the thesis of the article, which is that email and blogs are dead and social media has to be the focus in 2012 because times are so different." 
 
 He also noted that older Web tools will remain important for donations: "Most of the money raised is going to come from email. So to say that email is passé is, I think, terribly misguided,” he said. ||||| ... 
 
 please do not show up at Facebook HQ. You can watch and participate via the event's live stream. 
 
 
 
 WHAT IT'S ABOUT 
 
 President Obama will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make in order to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in areas like innovation that will help our economy grow and make America more competitive. 
 
 
 
 HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE 
 
 Facebook will be selecting questions for President Obama to answer during the event. Submit questions now by posting them right here, on this event's wall. As an alternative, you may submit a question via WhiteHouse.gov/facebooktow nhall. 
 
 
 
 STILL READING? 
 
 Then you definitely need to make sure you're a fan of the White House on Facebook! Facebook.com/WhiteHouse 
 
 WHAT'S HAPPENINGPresident Barack Obama will hold a special "Facebook Live" townhall to connect with Americans across the country.WHERE & WHEN IT'S HAPPENINGWhere? Well, everywhere! The event at Facebook's headquarters, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg & COO Sheryl Sandberg, will be live streamed for anyone to watch. Just come back here at the right time: Wednesday, April 20 @ 1:45pm PDT / 4:45pm EDT. Unless invited to attend in person, ||||| In the end, a 140-character limit was too restrictive for President Barack Obama, whose answers at the first-ever presidential Twitter town hall Wednesday greatly exceeded his message box. 
 
 “I know on Twitter I am supposed to be short,” Obama said on Wednesday, holding forth just a little longer on higher education. 
 
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 reset Obama answers Speaker Boehner's tweet on jobs POTUS tweets his own question to himself Obama’s Twitter town hall POLITICO 44 
 
 Obama, who last year at a press conference misidentified the popular social media site as “Twitters,” opened the event by making history as the first president to livetweet. The ghosts of the historic, ornate East Room might be forgiven for watching without understanding. 
 
 “In order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep,” Obama tweeted to himself at the start of the town hall, signing it “bo.” 
 
 In style and substance, Obama’s Twitter town hall echoed his recent Facebook town hall: Attended by a youngish company executive — this time, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey instead of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — Obama fielded mostly bland set-ups that served as launching pads for familiar talking points. 
 
 “What changes to the tax system do you think are necessary to help solve the deficit problem and for the system to be fair?,” asked almorrison88, in a typical question selected by Twitter. 
 
 While the #AskObama hashtag on Twitter seethed with questions about marijuana, sex, politics, movie references and other titillating topics, the questions culled by Twitter and posed to Obama mostly played it safe with jobs, the economy, collective bargaining and higher education. 
 
 Asked what he might have done differently in handling the economic recession, Obama said he would have better explained to Americans how long recovery would take, and he would have recognized sooner that housing was a bigger problem than he first believed. 
 
 Twitter gatekeepers also let a question through from Republican House Speaker John Boehner: “After embarking on a record spending binge that’s left us deeper in debt, where are the jobs?” 
 
 “Obviously John is the speaker of the House, he is a Republican and so this is a slightly skewed question,” Obama responded, bristling slightly at what appeared to be an unforeseen challenge. “What he is right about is that we have not seen fast enough job growth relative to the need.”
– President Obama will host his first town hall as an official candidate for re-election—on Facebook. The president will go to company headquarters in Palo Alto on April 20 for the online forum, reports ABC. (Yes, Mark Zuckerberg will be there, too.) Participants can post questions for the president about the budget and the economy here, and Facebook will select questions during the event. It could foreshadow online strategy for the campaign, writes Sam Stein at the Huffington Post. He takes note of a recent Politico article making the case that social media platforms have largely replaced email and blogs as the way to reach out via the web. And Obama's "new media team clearly finds the Facebook forum a comfortable one to traverse," writes Stein.