Sorry for the delay in getting this post up—it's been a busy couple of days. I wanted to take a few minutes to give some perspective now that this first one is behind us.
First off, Kudos to Chris Brogan and the folks at Radian 6 for coming up with the Twebinar concept. That's really where this idea came from. When we shared the news that we were going to use Twitter to during the event, the blogosphere reacted: most of the initial reaction was positive, some was kind of mixed.
Overall, I think it's fair to say that Dell folks were pleased with how it turned out. More importantly though, non-Dell folks seemed to appreciate it as well. That said, there clearly are ways for us to do better next time. Neville Hobson raised two good points in his summary post: 1) to use #hashtags and most importantly, to 2) keep the Twitter conversation going during the Q&A session.
Item #2 was a sentiment that a lot of people who took part reiterated. Take a look at tweets like this one from @MelWebster or this one from @thornley, and there were lots more like those. It's clear we need to change that.
And about the hashtags thing—some of us had discussed the possibility before the event. We opted to tweet from @digital_nomads as a group because that tweets from it will be part of the DigitalNomads.com site and we wanted to get discussions going since @digital_nomads tweets are part of that site (on a side note, @davidcushman we will correct the follow-back issue you raised shortly). Some Dell folks said they would have been more comfortable tweeting as themselves instead of the group, which I take as a positive from a transparency perspective. All the more reason to do hashtags the next time around.
For me personally, responding to participants was a blast. This was a learning experience for us. Next time we do this, it will be even better. Thanks to all of you who participated and thanks for your feedback.