Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting in the ABA teleconference Online Social Networking Gets Professional. It was an interesting discussion to be a part of, but equally fascinating was the discussion taking place simultaneously online. A feature that is fast becoming the norm, we had a full twitter support session going on behind the scenes – 380 tweets to be exact.
This was the second webinar I've done where we aligned twitter response with the programming (the first was with Lexblog on law firm seo). Some of the decisions were made in advance, such as finding an unused #hashtag (in this case, #lpmsm) for tracking the discussion. We also had JD Supra's Communication Director Adrian Lurssen (aka JDTwitt) sign on to 'live tweet' the discussion. Both of these were critical to facilitating the online portion of the event.
Looking back, I also noticed that my personal tweeting went almost silent. Some of the other presenters did a better job of multitasking the discussion with web interactions (everyone did slow to some extent); but it was a good takeaway – talking & tweeting aren't an easy task.
Another interesting aspect for me was the capture of discussion post-event. The obvious solution would be to read all those entries using the twitter hashtag search linked above. But the better alternative, IMO, would be to head over to LegalTweets.com and let Nicki Black filter the discussion for you.
If you haven't come across Legaltweets.com in your online travels already, I highly recommend it. These topical roundups are especially wonderful after-the-fact. If the conversation is taking place right now, then the best method is still to run the hashtag search, but otherwise… a discussion roundup like this is the perfect time saver.
For those still not understanding the value of twitter, I also can't imagine a better starting point than a site like this that makes conversation streams so clear.
By the end of the day, I really felt like we had the full circle event – good planning, somewhat planned and uncontrolled web discussion (that's good, btw), followed by filtering and knowledge capture. I also suspect we're reaching the tail end of CLE events existing without web participation.
If we're not done already, we will be soon. And I don't think that's a bold prediction.
