Microsoft TownHall: New Social Media Platform for Politicians

Microsoft announces TownHall , an interactive platform that provides a cloud hosted solution as part of their CampaignReady suite that includes other online free and fee based services. It will provide politicians and activist group with a new set of tools allowing them to connect with users across various other platforms. Since politicians have increasingly shown interest in using mediums of social networking websites such as Facebook & Twitter to connect with their voters and the general public, TownHall looks set to provide proper integration of Social Media campaigns.

TownHall is delivered with a reputation management system that incentivises users to create profiles. To drive engagement that includes asking questions, answering questions and voting, the reputation system awards points and badges for every contribution made to the community. Any engagement the user has with the website, the data can be collected and used to analyse online reputation management . The data collected is stored in Microsoft’s SQL Azure and can be easily retrieved through familiar tools such as Microsoft Excel.

The source code for the core API & web client is available for free to download, giving developers the opportunity to customize and extend it.

Still early days; it will be interesting to see how this latest offering from Microsoft will take shape.

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