I recently listened to a webinar from
Marketing Experiments called
Twitter Experiments: Getting beyond the "now what?"
Very early on in the webinar the Go2Meeting software crashed and kicked out all listeners. A few minutes later the system crashed again; and once more about 5 minutes later.
Normally these technology bugs would have caused me to abandon the idea of listening to this webinar. However, since the topic was Twitter-related I checked the special Twitter subject area (aka Hashtag) which was created so participants could share their comments (aka Tweets) re the webinar.
Several observations re this unusual webclinic:
1. The interest in using Twitter as a marketing tool is so great that, despite the internet snafus, more than 800 participants rejoined and listened to the last half of the free one hour webinar.
2. After the sharing of frustrations with technology problems worked its way through the Twitter system, the Twitter content switched to comments on the webinar presentation. Many of these comments either restated key points of the presenter (which is a good way to get a quick skim of most important ideas); other comments raised new questions and answers not covered by presenters; and even more comments mentioned new Twitter services and tools which the presenters would not be able to cover during the webinar.
3. The volume of Tweets which occurred during the first 20 minutes of the webinar moved #webclinic temporarily into a top 10 most popular ranking of all Twitter topics.
4. The comments from webinar listeners on Twitter about Twitter were more interesting and educational than the comparatively bland content of the webinar.
5. You can view the entire log of Tweets here.
The middle of page 50 show where the crashes begin and community of participants realize the tech problems are not on their computer, but rather with with webinar software. You can view comments as the story progressed by clicking "Newer" on the top or bottom of"Realtime results for #webclinic" page. Page 49 occured after page 50, but before page 48...and so on.
6. The transcript of "#webclinic" Hashtag reveals how easy it is for enterprising Twitter users to quickly assist and establish online relationships with potential clients, vendors, and referrers of business leads.