First of all thanks to everyone who joined Chris Brogan and our lineup of social media experts for the first Twebinar on game changing moves – helping people establish new contacts/connections to further the conversation on social media’s use for business. The response was, to put it mildly, overwhelming, and as many of you found out we ended up pushing the limits on the webinar platforms we were using and had to break up the event into two sessions.
As we mentioned on the site, www.twebinar.com, this was going to be an experiment in blending two technologies in order to hopefully enhance the online conference experience. The experiment had three main objectives.
Free-for-all Networking - The primary goal was to introduce many of the registrants, especially those new to social media, to one of the most used social media networking and messaging tools, Twitter. As part of this experiment it was our hope that the open nature of the messaging platform would facilitate connections between the speakers and the participants and amongst the participants themselves, before, during and after the event. This was to be an improvement over the traditional webinar experience where participant connections could not happen during the event and certainly didn’t continue on afterward. I believe this aspect of the experiment worked well.
Best-in-class Content - We also wanted to introduce people to some of the experts in the business, and to hear what they thought were some of the best case studies to reference when doing business in social media. It was meant to be a combination of both new and better-known examples primarily for a “new to social media” audience but hopefully a good refresher for those who were more experienced. The aim was to provide a breadth of opinions and to put faces to the Twitter handles of many of these experts. From the feedback we received again I think this was deemed a success.
Mashing Technologies - Finally, the blending of the two technologies simultaneously. For many, yours truly included, it was, at times, sensory overload. As some of you pointed out, this is the essense of today’s 140 character world. To others, it became overwhelming and with the need to switch between screens, a bit distracting when trying to take in the video presentations.
We’ve begun to review the feedback in detail now looking for ways to improve the format for the next Twebinar coming up on Tuesday, July 22, at 2pm EDT (Register for FREE today by clicking here). We’ve been analyzing the tweets as well as the various blog posts that occurred after the event. Here is a collection of the posts if you are interested. We also held a “plurkshop”, an impromptu session on Plurk, asking for feedback on the Twebinar from those who attended. To see the plurkshop feedback thread please go here.
Overall, here are some of the themes pulled out of the feedback that we will try to address in the next Twebinar on July 22 at 2pm EDT (Register for FREE today by clicking here). Can we….
- put the Twitter discussion stream in the same window as the video stream?
- have a separate # tag for the technical issues questions, and one for the discussion?
- have more live elements, including Q&A, during the Twebinars?
- leave the names of the speakers up on the screen during their interviews and include their Twitter handle?
- try to not have a limit on the number of attendees (avoiding the two sessions)?
- recommend that people avoid using shared WIFI connections that may not have the bandwidth requirements for the video stream?
- have fewer speakers/go deeper with some of the speakers on the topics?
- see the discussion happening without the need for refreshing?
- have more separation/structure between the video and the discussion?
- look into other platforms to carry the discussion other than Twitter?
- not say the word “game changing” so much?
- have access to the video afterwards for reviewing the content we missed?
We’ll be looking to make tweaks to the next Twebinar using this valuable feedback. Stay tuned for more.
And for those that happened to miss the first Twebinar we now have a link to the video available here. This was recorded “as is” during the first broadcast so unfortunately it includes 5 minutes of dead air at the beginning (which I hear we can’t edit out) so please grab a hold of the video timeline and zip forward to about the 5 minute mark if you want to watch it from the true start.
Tags: Chris Brogan, radian6, twebinar
