President Obama's virtual town hall gave organizers, including office on new media director Macon Phillips, "an ulcer" because the highest-ranked question was on legalizing marijuana.

This week I was fortunate enough to ask Macon Phillips, the director of the office of new media at the White House, how he is able to hurdle government bureaucracy and create some of the Web’s most innovative uses of social media for President Obama. We all know that the Obama campaign and now administration has set the standard for political engagement on social networks. I’m sure books will be written about just that.

Phillips talked unassumingly about how the White House is using new technology to reach larger audiences, get their feedback, and sort the feedback into manageable bites that then reach the ears of the most powerful man on earth. Phillips also talked about one of the toughest moments for his office, when President Obama responded to questions submitted and voted on by online communities for an Online Town Hall. The conference made headlines when the top-rated question had to do with legalization of marijuana. The President made light of the question asking what that said about online communities. Phillips said the experience gave him a very rough few days in the White House, not to mention an ulcer.

I was glad Macon Phillips took my question (and follow-up) and even happier with his great answer. "Never start a sentence with Twitter" when proposing a new social media strategy to your boss, he said.

What I most wanted to hear, though, was how Phillips sells these cutting-edge ideas internally. Social media is all about trial and error. And when you fail in social media, you do so very publicly (case in point: The question about weed).

Philips said the key was not to frame the conversation in terms of the tools. “Never start the sentence with ‘Twitter,’” he said. He said he convinces the President’s office of the importance of engaging in social media by emphasizing the potential impact. “Wouldn’t it be cool to get thousands of people to watch the President talk about health care and then give him a way to answer their questions in real time?” Is more effective than confusing social media skeptics with lots of technical jargon about the tools that will be used.

He couldn’t have given better advise to the audience. Phillips was speaking to 125 non-profit professionals who work in Washington, DC at the Oct. 22 White House Networking Reception. While non-profits are often touted as the industry most on the edge of social networking, we are far from immune from the knee-jerk responses to innovation. Especially in a year that has cut back so many non-profit budgets, it can be hard to justify spending valuable staff resources on tweets. Social media can feel intangible, abstract and unimportant.

But it’s not.

More and more, we’re seeing that the organizations that embrace social media, are the ones that survive–and flourish. Phillips is at the cutting edge, and we would all do well to follow his example.

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After all, life is more like a flowing stream than a series of blogs splashed in your face, right?

Ok, I’ll stop myself now before going crazy on the “stream” puns here. If you haven’t already heard, lifestreaming is the new blogging.

What is lifestreaming, you ask? It’s a way to pull all that content you’re posting in a million different places (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, oh my!) into one beautiful stream. See a great description from ReadWriteWeb the Wikipedia definition here, and its semi-official blog here.

Please note a special exception: Lifestreaming is NOT lifecasting (see video illustration)…those are two very different beasts. Lifecasting has largely gone out of mode, which I think we can all agree is a great development. People have realized that it is extremely difficult to maintain newsworthy activity every moment of your life.**

**Caveat: iJustine is an exception…people will watch her do just about ANYTHING!

Lifestreaming is about putting the conversation front and center–which after all, is the whole point of social media. Its advocates say it is the wave of the future (I lied, the puns just keep floating to the surface!). Compared to blogging (gulp, yes, I see the hypocrisy) it does feel more natural. You are already sharing links with friends via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other media, so why not congregate all that content in one happy place?

It's all about the conversation

Just Sept. 8, MediaBistro, the go-to site for journalists to hear inside-industry news, created a lifestream of user content. (See opening post here) I would love major media organizations to do the same. People who write in to newspapers often have incredibly insightful and interesting comments (my favorite example of the people’s collective wit here). This would be a great way to better connect with an audience and let them know that their voices matter.

Another use for lifestreaming is its very streamlined nature. Using tools like Posterous you can pull content from all the sites you regularly visit and then export it back out again. Or if you prefer, you can send your content straight to your lifestream and syphon it off to your favorite spots. See a brilliant graph of this here.

That said, I don’t think we should all abandon the blogging ship (that’s pun # seven, if you’re counting) and take on lifestreaming. I see value in both.

Blogging is better:

• For those who work to focus on a specific topic (like me, I keep my lunch box musings in an entirely separate space)
• For sites that hope to establish the impression of editorial credibility (e.g. my all-time favorite women’s blog)
• For people who want to compartmentalize their lives. You may want to share more personal content with friends on Facebook, but be willing to blast your Twitter followers every few minutes with the latest item to catch your eye. Your blog may be reserved for musings that are truly unique and worthy of extra time. Honestly, that is the way I work, and I’m not sure I’d want to change it.

Am I missing any major points here? Educate me in the comments section below!

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