Hi I'm Jason Hoch, Chief Content Officer at HowStuffWorks. Can you really write a letter,
email, or call the President? We're here at the White House and we're going to find out.
Communicating with the White House has changed a lot since Thomas Jefferson moved in in 1801.
The White House of today has to keep up with the expanding technologies that drive communication
in the digital age and look to the future to prepare for the next wave that constituents
will reach out to the President and the US government. So how exactly has the White House
transformed into a modern day social network? Top talent from Silicon Valley has been brought
on board to ensure that the administration stays current and active across multiple platforms.
For example, the White House now has it's first Chief Digital Officer, Jason Goldman.
If you don't know his name, you do know his work. He was a driving force behind the development
of Medium, Blogger, and Twitter. - You know, so I worked in startups for fourteen years
before coming here, this is my first job in government. But I think the thing that's really
surprising is that it's more similar than it is different. You've got really creative
people who are trying to tackle really large problems and those are the type of problems
that we get to work on every day here at the White House. -The current US Chief Technology
Officer, Megan Smith, came to her job from Google, working on projects like Google Earth,
Google Maps, Google Crisis Response, and Google's tech diversity initiatives. - I got an email
from a colleague asking me to come talk to them, and it had never occurred to me. Which
is interesting, this idea of tours of duty for the tech and digital people, we need to
have that and it hadn't occurred to me. So I said, what, go to Washington? And so as
I heard more about the problems, the challenges, the opportunities, and what we could accomplish,
it's of course incredibly intriguing. And so, now being on the inside of that, this
is some of the most meaningful work you can do. The federal government has such a great
impact and the scale, on the lives of the American people and people in the world, that
if we can work together with the extraordinary collages here, the economists, and policy
team mates, communicators, lawyers, others, and bring the tech skills to that, we can
really do amazing things together. - Social media has made it easier than ever to connect
with friends, family and businesses, and the White House has added social media to it's
repertoire to ensure that people can reach the President and government in the same ways
that they reach out to anyone else. If there's a social network, the White House is likely
already there. - Franklin Roosevelt, president Roosevelt, got the fireside chat and the ability
to go into radio, straight into your living room and be speaking with you once a week
and so President Obama gets a twitter handle. - One of the initiatives created to give the
average citizen a voice in government in a responsive, real-time way, is the 'We the
People Petition Platform.' - One of the most remarkable things we did was launch the We
the People Petitions Platform, which is a way for people to directly engage with the
government and talk about issues that really matter to them to get their fellow citizens
to sign a petition. You know it's interesting, the right to petition is enshrined in the
constitution, but the means to do it isn't specified. And i feel it's one of the great
tools that the internet can provide is the ability to actually rally people to a cause.
- This and other digital initiatives are all about making the government more accessible.
But for all the advances in technology and the responsiveness of social media, some citizens
prefer old-school communication, and those avenues have to be maintained as well. The
White House has had a phone since 1877 but it's safe to say that then President Rutherford
B. Hayes could never have envisioned just how ubiquitous phone communication would become
in a relatively short amount of time. The modern day version of the classic switchboard
is not what you might imagine. Today's White House switchboard is housed in a relatively
small office, but the responsibility of the staffers there is huge. They're on call 24/7/365
so that connections can be made any hour of the day or night. And they have to be able
to deal with sensitive and private information. But even good old fashioned letter writing
is still a common way that people share their thoughts with the White House. That means
there's a team on hand to handle the thousands of letters that are sent to the President
every day. Not only are all those notes and letters read and sorted, but as is the practice
of this administration, 10 of them, both good and bad, are selected and sent directly to
President Obama. The President reads those 10 and often responds personally. - The 10
letters a day is something the President asked for the first day he took office. So much
of what we see about the President's interaction with the mail, is based on what he writes
on them and how he writes back, rather than hearing him talk about it. Based on the length
at which he writes back, he really engages with folks who disagree with him but in a
thoughtful way. He writes on notecards that are 4x6 cards and they are usually one-sided
if it's a supporter and two-sided if there's a little bit of a critique in there. Part
of the way that we make folks know that they're heard by the government, is we do try to lift
up some stories and that's something that the office of digital strategy gives us a
whole bunch of new ways to do. There's one that is among my favorites, but not my favorite,
from a guy named Curtis who wrote in 2013 and his husband had had a heart condition,
had contracted the flu which lead to pneumonia and ultimately had a heart attack and he had
not been able to get health insurance because of his preexisting condition. So Curtis was
writing to the President to say that he was grateful to know that other people, although
it had been too late for his husband, would be able to get coverage, even if they had
a preexisting condition. What makes it my favorite is it has this one line in it that
says, "This is just one story Mr. President, but it's our story." And this is like what
we're going for. - As you can see, the modern White House is it's own sophisticated social
network, blending traditional communication with the latest technology to create a comprehensive
suite of connection points, so that people just like you can have your voice heard in
government. As new ways to share ideas develop and take root, the White House of tomorrow
will have to grow right along side the tech industry to keep up with an ever-evolving
socially vocal world. So that was pretty amazing. We took a look inside the White House, the
switchboard, and really where the White House is going with digital and social communications.
Thanks for joining us and as always, join us every day at now.HowStuffWorks.com