The White House prepares for the first-ever digital presidential transition
President Obama to hand over social media accounts to the new president in January.
The Obama administration has certainly been the most digital in history. US President Barack Obama is “the first to have @POTUS on Twitter, the first to go live on Facebook from the Oval Office, the first to answer questions from citizens on YouTube, the first to use a filter on Snapchat,” as Kori Schulman, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief Digital Officer, mentions in an official blog post on the digital transition to happen after the election.
Over the past eight years, the President, Vice President, First Lady, and the White House have used social media and technology to engage with people around the country and the world on the most important issues of our time.
The first-ever digital transition will not be easy and the plan may evolve in the process. After all, it is the first time it happens… And it happens on quite a massive scale.
Given the unprecedented nature and scale of the digital transition, we anticipate we’ll learn a lot along the way — so these plans may evolve.
In fact, the digital presidential transition will encompass the many levels of the current administration and The White House channels, and it will include Vice President Biden and The First Lady — and yes, it’ll include their profiles here on Medium.
From the very beginning, our mission has been to reach Americans and people around the world on the channels and platforms where they already spend their time. This work began on President Obama’s 2008 campaign and, over the course of this Administration, has increasingly meant meeting people where they are online, using technology to re-imagine traditional formats, and creating unique opportunities for people to interact with their government.
The White House’s digital strategy has been an inspiration for many social media and digital diplomacy practitioners around the world.
Here on Medium, Obama’s team has experimented quite a bit with long-form content and how to integrate visuals, creating the best-possible experience for the reader.
They were the first to use publications to dive deep into policy content, as they did when they published the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran — known as the Iran Deal — in its entirety on the platform.
Or when they used Medium to published the 2015 State of the Union address shortly before he started speaking.
Because the process is unprecedented, the White House and its Chief Digital Officer Jason Goldman are also asking users throughout the US, “from students and data engineers, to artists and researchers — to come up with interesting ways to archive this content and make it useful and available for years to come.to share their ideas.”
