{EAV:e47b9f8ac33e6b9b}Last summer I was invited to President Obama's Twitter Townhall at the White House along with 139 other characters. Despite the grandiose setting and President Obama opening the event with a tweet (pictured here), I was thoroughly disappointed. Why? Because it wasn't really a Twitter Townhall.  Sure, the questions came in via tweets and where asked by Twitter board chairman Jack Dorsey, but all the answers were delivered via video. President Obama gave his answers to the camera in long-form.

Sure, there was a staffer in the room live-tweeting the president's long answers (albeit abbreviated to 140 characters, minus the hashtag), but that isn't the same thing as the president tweeting replies. As far as i am concerned, he might as well have taken the questions via email.

When I participate in a Twitter townhall, I expect it to take place on Twitter. The whole thing. Not just the questions.

After this event I made it my mission to hold a real Twitter townhall. My first outreach was to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. My colleagues at the Center for American Progress were hosting our annual National Clean Energy Summit with the Senator and I thought adding a Twitter townhall about clean energy jobs would be the perfect opportunity. And so did the Senator and his staff... until the news cycle overtook us. At the last minute, plans were changed and Reid hosted a Twitter townhall a la Obama style.

With short notice of the change, plans to host the entire townhall, along with real-time tweets translating the chat into Spanish, on Twitter were nixed. Instead, the Senator fielded general questions on creating jobs via Twitter and responded via video. The last minute change was understandable. The news cycle demanded the larger jobs context and a simpler format. And that is what it got.

But neither the Majority Leader's office nor I were giving up on the pure Twitter play. A few weeks later, Reid's social media director helped arrange a real twitter townhall addressing jobs and the Hispanic community with Senator Tom Udall (D-NM). In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, we put together an amazing Twitter townhall that included the participation of the Center for American Progress (via @AmProg), Senator Tom Udall (himself), the #LATISM community (Latinos in Social Media) and Univision. And it was translated real-time into Spanish via @CAPespanol, American Progress's Spanish language Twitter channel.

I developed a fairly straight forward format that took into consideration some of the quirks built into Twitter. Essentially, the 45 minute-long event went like this: