Tweeting for President Obama

For social-media wannabes, it is surely the job of a lifetime: tweeting for the most powerful man on earth.

The job of social-networks manager for President Barack Obama comes with a warning that this is not a nine-to-five posting and is for a candidate with "strong familiarity with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc". No direct mention of Google Buzz in the current job ad, but I'm sure it will be there in the future.

The president, who is attributed with a great deal of success in his use of social networking during his election campaign, admitted to Chinese students last year that he himself does not tweet since he finds his thumbs too clumsy to type on the phone..

That all changed this week during a trip to Haiti with the First Lady.

And the president's first tweet wasn't from the @BarackObama account. It came from the @redcross account and was written in the third person: "President Obama and the First Lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now." Yes, he tweeted.

The next update on the Red Cross account confirmed that it was the president's doing: "President Obama pushed the button on the last tweet. It was his first ever tweet!"

While the Commander in Chief may not be apt to tweet himself, his press secretary Robert Gibbs says he's taking a different tack with the microblogging account he set up this past weekend.

Mr Gibbs was asked during his daily press conference if he did the actual tweeting himself rather than leaving it to some political flunkie - the latter being the norm with quite a few politicians.

"Inexplicably, yes," replied Mr Gibbs.

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