Online town halls - a tool for the times?

There's a lot of chatter right now about online town hall meetings.

One of the best recent examples is the 'Open for Questions' online town hall recently hosted by President Obama - check it out.

A nice extension of the White House's web 2.0 strategy, the President asked Americans to submit their questions about the economy - and other subjects - via the whitehouse.gov website. Visitors to the site were then encouraged to vote for their favourite questions, with the most popular ones then being addressed by Barack Obama live during the online town hall.

The success of this initiative is evident in the numbers - apparently more than 100,000 questions were submitted in just two days and more than 3.5m votes received. Pretty impressive. And note that none of these questions were moderated - they were live on the system as soon as they were sent (possibly one of the reasons legalising marijuana was such a popular topic!)

It's clear to see the potential for this approach in the workplace. Not only are online town halls a great way to extend the reach of a small face-to-face gathering to the entire organisation, but they can also help communicate effectively across regions and time zones and reduce costs.

I'm a firm believer in the power of face-to-face and I'd never want to see it replaced by electronic alternatives, but I really like the idea of extending meetings into cyberspace, integrating them with social media channels and turning them from a one-off event, into a longer term communication process. I think we'll see more of these in the future...

Lee Smith on Apr 3 2009

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