Last week, we talked a little about the maiden voyage of the new KU Alumni Association and KUsports.com mobile watch party. Now that we’ve got our first watch party under our belt, we wanted to share a few of the results of the night’s festivities.

The simplest metrics of the night – our figures from Ustream.tv, the service we used to host the live video feed from our party at Kincade’s in Chicago – are extremely promising for a debut appearance. According to Ustream, we hosted 1,245 unique viewers of the Chicago feed, with a total of 443 viewer hours – that’s a lot of cheering on the Jayhawks! The number of simultaneous viewers over the course of the night varied pretty widely as folks dipped in and out of the video stream, but peak viewership hovered at around 200 simultaneous pairs of eyes.

Then, there are indirect metrics to consider. On Twitter, aside from straight retweets of our messages that went out on @KUSports, @KUSportsDeals and @LJWMarketplace, we also received some great user-initiated points of dialogue, like the below:

We also received some encouraging comments on our Facebook posts announcing the watch party, including a few suggestions for future locations – and if you were one of those commenters, be assured that we’ve got your watch sites added to our list of potentials for future parties.

One other point: Underneath the video feed on KUsports.com’s live coverage page, we also displayed a Twitter widget with real-time scrolling of all tweets marked with the #kubball hashtag. This was the source of a little bit of debate, since these #kubball tweets weren’t limited to posts specifically originating from the watch party. In the end, we decided to include all #kubball tweets rather than try to generate chatter on a one-time hashtag just for the party; tweets on #kubball from people at Kincade’s showed up in the main stream, and anyone watching it could still get a feel for the overall talk surrounding the game. That said, tweets on #kubball during a big game can move at a speed approaching election-night Twitter proportions, making it a bit tough to keep up at times – so it’s a matter we might revisit in the future.

Of course, we’d love to hear any suggestions or thoughts you may have as we set up for upcoming games – after all, March Madness isn’t that far away! Got an idea for for how we can make the KU Alumni Association and KUsports.com mobile watch party a more immersive online experience? Please give us a shout in the comments.