President Obama went to Silicon Valley this past week to do a town hall meeting at Facebook. I was in high hopes as I tuned in to the live broadcast. Finally, the perfect forum for Mr. Obama to speak about technology, social media, the Internet, reforming STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and math), and promoting entrepreneurship.

No more generalisms and simplifications for the sake of media sound bytes, this was a golden opportunity for the President to exchange brilliant ideas directly with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (who was moderating) and the audience. A billionaire Internet entrepreneur and the charismatic leader of the free world. Wow. The fusion of cross-discipline brilliance here gave me hopes that the conversation would parallel the creativity and openness seen in conversations between the Dalai Lama and Nobel Prize winning physicists.

So, how many times did Obama or Zuckerberg say the word “Internet”? Twice! “Social media” or “social network”? ZERO!!! Website? ZERO!!! Entrepreneur? Twice. Startup? Once. Innovation? Once.

How is this possible? This was a conversation between the President of the United States (who represents 300 million people and is the political world’s champion of Web 2.0) and the founder of Facebook (who represents 500 million people worldwide and popularized the very platform that helped Obama win the election). During an hour-long conversation they never once said “social network”??? This is insane!!! What a waste!

I analyzed the transcript from the session and could hardly believe the data I found. What follows are word counts for popular topics and ones I added that SHOULD have been popular (see notes at the end for my methods). Bold items are related to technology, entrepreneurship, and education. Red ones shock me the most. Here it goes…

• health (40)
• education (22)
• medicare (19)
• debt (16)
• economy (16)
• hospital (15)
• energy (14)
• deficit (13)
• insurance (12)
• tax (12)
• school (12)
• science (11)
• immigration (10)
• mortgage (10)
• technology (9)
• math (9)
• kid (9)
• doctor (8)
• republican (8)
• research (6)
• teacher (6)
• entrepreneur (2)
• internet (2)
• computer (2)
• startup (1)
• innovation (1)
• web (1)
• engineer (1)
• programmer (1)
• garage (1)
• social network (0)
• social media (0)
• mobile (0)
• software (0)

I realize that Facebook chose the questions and so they’re as much to blame as the President here. But, we all know that politicians can find a way to use any question to talk about things they want to discuss. If Mr. Obama wishes to engage the technology industry to be more actively involved in government and growing the next generation of innovators, he definitely nailed the venue… but he really missed taking advantage of it.

Note: To compile this list, I used Word Counter to get the top 200 words and then, since I was not confident in the accuracy of that list, used Chrome’s find tool to verify word counts. Perhaps there are more accurate approaches but this was all I needed to verify what I felt as I watched the video.

If you do your own analysis, please share it with me here in the comments!