Webinar Wire

You Got Your Twitter In My Webinar!

Posted by Ken Molay June 26 2008 10:54 PM EDT

1 comment

There are a lot of people out there who take offense at the coined term "webinar" as an abomination and an attack on the sanctity of the English language. So I'd hate to hear their reaction to today's newly minted buzzword... "twebinar".

Thanks go out to Mary Ann, who forwarded me a story about a new series of online events hosted by Radian⁶. The company went so far as to buy the domain name www.twebinar.com, which not only promotes their upcoming events, but explains the concept and the underlying technologies.

In a nutshell, the company is holding WebEx online events and simultaneously inviting attendees to use the online service Twitter to chat with each other about their thoughts and impressions of the proceedings. This is a social networking phenomenon that has previously been seen in auditorium-based local meetings, most infamously in a widely reported incident at SXSW 2008 where the audience revolted against an interview taking place on stage and demanded more relevant questions and answers.

The first twebinar took place on Thursday, and by all accounts was a hit with the attendees. The company had to turn away attendees after hitting their capacity of 500 for the show. An early review by John Carson of GCI Canada was mostly positive, echoed by comments from other attendees. The biggest problem seemed to be the difficulty in managing two separate application windows and shifting focus back and forth.

I may be an old curmudgeon, but I generally find Twitter to have an unacceptable "signal to noise ratio" as the engineers would phrase it. Too many repetitions and short, valueless contributions that add nothing to the conversation. I also have a hard time concentrating on the presented content when simultaneously trying to keep track of reactions to things that were just said, assimilating responses to the comments, and thinking up my own pithy contributions to the flow.

The funny thing is that most web conferencing consoles (and certainly WebEx) allow the organizer to let audience members see each other's chat messages and comments within the conferencing software window if they want to set it up that way. I'm not sure what Twitter brings to the table that adds extra value, other than letting people participate who are not in the web conference itself.

My biases aside, it's an interesting experiment and it obviously resonates with Radian6's target audience. Anything that gets your webinar participants more engaged and involved in the flow is generally a good thing. Although Sarah Lacy might disagree.

UPDATE June 27: Thank you to David, who lets me know that Radian6 didn't use WebEx after all. Apparently they used Adobe Presenter to prerecord video interviews and basically streamed the playback for attendees. The WebEx system tests on their website fooled me. That's what I get for reporting on something I didn't attend in person!  :)