I recently attended an Elearning Network event in Bristol, which was great fun and included lots of presentations and food for thought. In the afternoon, Jayne Hart and Nic Laycock facilitated a live Twitter chat and Twitter learning session - read Jayne's review to see what a great success it was.

After the event I went away and purchased a TweetReach report of the event (this cost $20). The report, which you can see below, shows the reach of the tweets based on the number of followers someone has and the number of retweets, and so on.

TweetReach tweet analysis for #elnil(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "https://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

The reason I am sharing this is because the reports demonstrates how much Twitter can amplify the conversation. In this case it was a learning event, which included a live Twitter chat, so there was a lot of useful tips and advice being pushed through and around the Twitter network.  It is worth noting at this point that if you want to measure this type of impact you will need a hashtag for the event - the tag for this event was #elnil. The tag enables Twitter users to identify the event - and organisers to promote it, follow it and have discussion for all other followers of the event to see. It also enables you to measure impact, see who participated, and so on.

According to the report, the event's 1,024 tweets (I took the measure from 16-19 June, the event was on 17 June) reached 85,867 people. There were around 25 people in the room.  Remember the conversation around the event did not stop on 19 June and this report measures a certain period in time.

Caveat's aside, the report shows how far a tweet can travel and impact on your conversation - this really is the sharing of learning on a grand scale. The report also provides a list of tweets and a list of the top influencers based on tweets and number of folllowers. This is useful information for organisers and participants to see who else shared the experience so that they can connect with them.

Added to this, I also tried out an app on my iphone - Qik - which enables live video streaming - this meant I coud stream video from the event into the hashtag so that those outside the room following the event on Twitter could see it live. The application also records the footage so you have content post-event too. Here's an example of what  it can do.