White House Launches Official Twitter Account
May 1, 2009 Tags: CDC, Government 2.0, Microblog, Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House
Category: Government 2.0, Microblog, Social Media, Web 2.0 No Comments 
The White House 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. Clearly the following velocity is there and the potential for this account to reach massive twitter influence status is very real, who knows it might hit a million followers even faster then Opera or Ashton. 
Initial Whitehouse Twitter Strategy Focused on Healthcare 2.0
The first three friends + first three posts of the White House are all Center for Disease Control focused, and the clearly they are attempting to promote the use of emerging Social Media, Healthcare 2.0 / eHealth tools for the purpose of public health education and prevention of disease.
This is a really smart move, as it shows both a direct purpose, and integrated strategy upon the initial creation of the White House Twitter account.
It is evident that one of the initial strategic social media / microblogging / twitter objectives of the twitter account could be to raise awareness of the CDC’s new site, eHealth campaign. Most likely because to the hysteria about swine flu that is happening currently in the US. I would probably not be going out on the limb to say that they are probably trying to dispel some of the piggish myths floating around about the H1N1 virus.
One of my friends Josh H 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.”
Let me know what you think about this article and the White House diving into Twitter!
