Ahh, social networking. Today's webcast was successful, but I won't have complete numbers for you until tomorrow.
Embedding that Twitter widget (a picture of our webcasting page and the embedded Twitter widget that I used, above) that showed real-time updates of our Twitter feed onto the page that featured the live webcast today seemed to work well -- except it kept scrolling through ALL of our tweets, even ones that were 60 days old! I tried to stop the loop in the java script code but to no avail. Might have to do some more research on how to control how many tweets are displayed when I have a bit more time, but overall the widget worked great..You can find it at:
http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets
Another problem with this widget is, however, that it only displays YOUR feed. It doesn't display everyone who's talking about your issue using the hashtag. This seems to hinder conversation a bit more. It'd be interesting for readers to get a whole picture of the conversation that's happening. I'm looking into using TweetGrid for our next live webcast in hopes to engage our audiences in more of a conversation, rather than just passive readers of our tweets.
According to TweetDeck (also awesome, check it out at: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/) we had about 11 people talk to us via Twitter during the event -- mostly commenting on our speaker's remarks or RT'ing our live tweets. Not bad....! Rigby would be proud of our microblogging - we put a human face to our name and helped reach out to a global audience who didn't actually have to be in Washington to attend the event.
