Twebinars & Plurkshops...mashups of the new and the familiar
Move over webinars and workshops...Twebinars and Plurkshops* are the new, fun ways to facilitate familiar business interactions.
Webinars and workshops are common business meeting practices. What if you could take these very familiar forms of interaction and combine them with the coolest, quirkiest, geekiest apps available today, and Plurk?
It's already being done. People are finding ingenious new ways to use these apps to congregate around topics of shared interest and have meaningful, even in-depth discussions in 140 characters or less!
(*I just reserved the domain name so you'll see a parked page.)
Twebinars
A Twebinar is a "webinar and Twitter mash-up where conversations take place in real-time before, during and after the webinar, on Twitter." Participants use a webinar interface like Go To Meeting, WebEx or Adobe Connect, but instead of asking questions or leaving comments on the internal Q&A panel, the conversation happens on Twitter and can be followed at Hashtags and Summize.
Twebinars are the brainchild of social media technology guru Chris Brogan and VP of Marketing at Radian6 David Alston. The two are planning a series of Twebinars referred to as a "social media summer series" with Chris as the host. They've even set up a Web site to serve as headquarters.
This appears to be a virtual version of what's been taking place at a lot of tech conferences, most famously SXSW. People in the audience and elsewhere are twittering in real time about sessions they're attending. Still, it's a brilliant idea, the kind one would expect to come from the mind of Brogan. Last week's Twebinar, the first in the series, was touted to be a success, a "positive one for the majority involved," according to Chris.
Plurkshops
With Twitter's chronic tech troubles, Plurk has begun to attract attention as the app du jour. (You had to know something else would come along, didn't you?)
It combines the familiarity of an IM interface with something wholly new, a timeline which, in graphical form, displays participant's messages that are limited to 140 characters, similar to Twitter. Friends of "plurkers" click on the message and are given the opportunity to respond in what becomes a threaded conversation.
What's begun to take place are informal "workshops" called Plurkshops, an impromptu term coined by social media consultant Connie Reece. It's being popularized and evangelized by Beth Harte and Amber Naslund, both dedicated Plurkers.
One such Plurkshop, which stemmed from a plurk by Beth, garnered 283 responses. An earlier plurk by Mack Collier received 316.
What's to be made of this?
For me, it's people doing what people do -- creative, energetic, inventive people anyway -- tinkering around with applications and ideas until something new evolves either intentionally or, as in the case of Plurkshops, organically, even impromptu.
The real question is, do either provide any substantive business benefits? I have to suggest that "yes" would be the appropriate answer, for both provide a forum around which people can share ideas -- with brevity and in rapid-fire fashion -- but share nonetheless. One involves the familiar webinar interface as the centerpiece, the other a newly-revised form of communal IM.
I'm sure it won't be long before we'll see Plurkbinars and Tweetshops too (though Plurk makes it easier to facilitate threaded conversations than does Twitter). There will doubtless be other variations on this theme as people continue to experiment. And I won't be surprised if, in a short time, some savvy developer(s) will create an app designed just to facilitate this sort of interaction.
Personally, I love this mashup of the tried-and-true-meets-the-yet-unproven. What are your thoughts?
(Regarding my reserving the domain name Plurkshops.com, I did so to prevent some domain squatter from grabbing it. I'm open to discussing its use with anyone who has a good idea about how to expand the plurkshops concept. It's free and available, just waiting on the right idea. Oh, and btw, plurkshop.com was reserved in 2007, or else I would have gotten it as well.)
