Lessons from Skittles for poets and activists described how Skittles’ Twitter-centric viral marketing campaign caught fire on Monday night, and led to huge media attention by Tuesday. It also presented the first lesson from Skittles: Twitter’s a great place for creating buzz. Mr. President, do you like Skittles? presented the Ask the President project, a site where people could submit and vote on their own questions. This weeks lesson: things happen very quickly in the Twitterverse.

Ask the President kicked off on Thursday the 19th, and things were ramping up as we approached Obama’s nationally-televised press conference Tuesday night. White House reporters including Ana Marie Cox, Faiz Shakir, Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper, and Jon Ward were looking at citizen-generated questions from Ask the President and elsewhere … Jose Antonio Vargas mentioned it in the Washington Post … there was a real sesnse of excitment and possibility!

Members of #p2 (”progressives 2.0″ were promoting a handful of questions. Four of these questions were in the top 10 (including What are your plans and timeframe to Get FISA Right?). This wasn’t primarily due to our efforts, of course; some of the quesions we were backing, including truthbites’ video about VA funding, weren’t actually doing all that well in the voting. Still, it was an encouraging start.

Tuesday morning, I saw a tweet to AskPresident from bcreative2003:

@AskThePresident What does the President plan to do about all of the homeless veterans out there?

The @AskThePresident count responded rather unhelpfully, telling bcreative2003 to go file the question himself. Many people find the communityCOUNTS site intimidating, and when you look at the home page it’s by no means obvious just how to file a question. So I decided to help out by filing it on behalf of bcreative2003 — and then putting the promotional muscle of #p2 behind it.

Over the next several hours people including matttbastard, farra, myrnatheminx, annedougherty, UKProgressive, 1Struggle1Fight, maegancarberry, k_michael, and me tweeted about bcreative’s question — including me sending it to Jake Tapper. As the tweet I started this article indicates, it wasn’t helping much in the voting.* Still, the competitive aspects are just a means to an end. The goal is to get the question asked.

At 6:45 p.m., WhiteHouse.gov announced the return of their Open for Questions project — and an online town hall scheduled for Thursday morning.

w00t w00t!

Ask the President declared victory, and rightly so: it’s a huge victory for social media advocates. Kudos to Ari Melber, The Nation, Washington Times, Personal Democracy Forum, communityCOUNTS, and all the coalition paterns. The coalition’s press release noted the buzz on Twitter, and linked to the search feed as one of the places to follow the conversation, so it’s a huge victory for Twitter-based activism as well.

Alas, none of the questions on the #p2 list were asked at the press conference. Oh well. So much for relying on the credentialed journalists.

Two days later, after Open for Questions, White House.gov posted the video of the March 26 online town hall on their site. The blog post featured the President’s example to a question about veterans and unemployment, including this:

The homeless rate for veterans is multiple times higher than it is for non-veterans. That’s inexcusable. It means that we’re going to provide services for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that we’re going to provide services for Traumatic Brain Injury that are the signature injuries of these recent wars. So we are going to significantly increase veterans spending.

… which certainly seems like an answer to bcreative2003’s question to me.

Score one for Skittles — from Twitter to a response from the president in 48 hours. Which brings us to lesson #2 from Skittles:

Things happen very quickly in the Twitterverse
Coming attraction: poets
Next week we’ll shift our attention to 30 Poets/30 Days, a project being organized by my brother Gregory K for National Poetry Month. Greg and I will be co-writing the next post in this series, cleverly timed for Tuesday … right before 30 Poets/30 Days launch on April 1.

Greg’s Twitter, #poetry, #kidlit… and an invitation! on Gottabook is a quick introduction to what @30Poets30Days will be doing on Twitter. For more on the overall project, featuring previously-unpublished work from 30 big-name children’s poets, check out Greg’s announcement post.

jon

* By contrast, Maegan Carberry’s tweet promoting Get FISA Right’s idea Rep. Steve Israel’s tweet pointing people to Why Tuesday?’s video both made a significant impact.

Thanks to bcreative for the great question, Julie for the long hours of design on the #p2 wiki, Tracy and Sarah for feedback on hashtag tactics, all the #p2 and #rebelleft tweeters, and everybody else who helped with the #askpres audience.

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