Twitter is growing, and so is its utility to support a range of communications 
applications. One of these is the round table or town hall style meeting. With Twitter, you can get more people involved, and spend much less than you otherwise would to run a physical, in-person event.
Twitter can also be used to publicize these types of forums; the people involved can be encouraged to tweet about it in advance. So, you can use it to get the word out about the topic while also tapping into the buzz surrounding Twitter.
Anatomy of a Twitter Chat
There really is not too much needed to support Twitter chats. You just choose a time slot, topic, hash tag, and allow enough time to line up the panel and get the word out in advance. It helps to have moderators. Others can chime in by using the hash tag; moderators keep things on track and make sure that questions get attention and are answered.
There are Twitter applications that make it easy to track the topic and participate. Handshake 2.0 has an excellent post that goes into more detail about tools like TweetChat, HootSuite and TweetDeck.
I had the pleasure of participating in a Twitter chat last night about the college selection process, organized by Smart College Visit, a great Web resource for college-bound kids and their families. It was very relevant for me as my eldest daughter has been applying to schools. The back story about how I got involved with the event can be found here.
The group, which included other parents and moderators, had a lively discussion; it was fun and we shared lots of useful information.
Participating in this event helped me better understand the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter as a platform to support round tables and town hall meetings. I have listed the advantages above; on the down side, Twitter is not as real time as other tools like instant messaging, and it still is prone to fails – you sometimes get a little delay before the post appears, and weird errors. The choice of the application to support your participation can make a big difference, and I will write a separate post about this.
Moreover, Twitter is not as good as micro-blogging platforms such as Fried Eggs at organizing discussion threads, so it can be a bit chaotic and hard to follow the flow of dialog (I am hoping more people discover Fried Eggs, and that the folks behind it encourage growth of supporting apps).
Finally, Twitter does not have the same integrated video and audio features of real time Web conferencing solutions (on the other hand, you generally need to pay for these, and they can be more complicated to set up).
On balance, however, I would say the pluses outweigh the minuses, and that Twitter can be an excellent way to organize and run your next online event.
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Bob, #campuschat was a learning experience for me, too. The Q & A of a Twitter chat is a lot like jumping into a ball pit and trying only to gather up just the blue balls. What you find you’re holding is an armful of colorful balls. As you know, from having been a guest “panelist,” I created a list of questions to keep the conversation moving, but all along was hoping for dynamic interaction from the participants. We got that. Though the number of attendees was small, the conversation was pertinent and lively to say the least. How often can you walk into a room and engage in a conversation with a group of people all at once?
The next #campuschat scheduled is Wednesday, May 26 at 9 p.m. I hope you’ll chat with us at that one, too!
I have not looked at Fried Eggs, but will most definitely do so. Thank you again for being on the guest panel and contributing to #campuschat!
-Kelly
[...] of the event, to participate in a discussion of the college selection process on Twitter (see my post from last week about [...]