Several webinar software vendors have integrated Twitter into their technology. But I don’t know of any who can solve a request from my friend James…
James would like to be able to preconfigure a list of tweets, each tweet associated with a specific slide in his presentation. When a particular slide gets displayed to the audience, the corresponding tweet automatically goes out on the designated Twitter account.
This would make life a lot easier for a one- or two-person webinar crew who have other things to concentrate on during the presentation than typing or copy/pasting tweets. I can certainly see the value in working out your pithy summarizations of key concepts and synchronizing them with your presentation. It would be a great way to keep a steady flow of information going during your event, it makes it easier for others to retweet important items without having to restate them (perhaps incorrectly), and it could encourage more back channel conversations on each subject.
Obviously this would only work with technologies that upload slides and know what is being shown during the webinar. Conferencing products that rely purely on screen sharing (such as GoToWebinar) don’t have the concept of advancing through slides… They just show whatever happens to be displayed on the presenter’s screen at any moment. So the only implementation I can think of for them is to have a queue of tweets that you could press a button to send in sequence. That’s not quite as nifty as having the software take care of the send for you.
What do you think? Valuable?
