Oh, just saw Brogan's latest tweet on the Brian Solis post on Twitter tools. How are you using Twitter for your business?

Following is the email I sent (sans the names and companies, plus some spelling fixes).

Wanted to give you a brief recap of what we have seen to be successful with running events online.

1. Find Your Audience Online
This is basic and practical I know, but many companies don't really get a good lay of the land far enough in front of the event to be successful. The idea is NOT to be a total new comer to the conversation and expect people to ride in and support the effort.

Part of this effort should be around ad support and potential sponsorships in those key communities months before the event.

As part of monitoring the online audience, look for themes that arise as part of the conversation. This gives you content fodder for mini-events (#3 below).

So getting some brand visibility is key. The visibility needs to be focused on the influencers.

2. Set Up Your Online Presence
Social media is fueled by reciprocation, be it tagging, friending, commenting or viral applications. But, there's got to be some place for people to see who you are what you're doing. Options (among others) could be a blog or microsite, Facebook group or page. Somewhere that gives you the ability to post content, notices and updates about upcoming events.

3. Create Mini-Events
Trying to get large audiences online is dependent on either: (a) celebrity draw, or (b) unique, interesting and relevant content. In front of the event itself create mini-events such as online chats using UStream or Kyte player. So you can take some people involved with the main show and start creating content and events that would be of interest to your crowd. During these mini-events your always throwing messaging forward to the main event.

4. Cause Marketing
This one has potential to work extremely well. Through cause marketing you can tie the event to a charitable cause. You can leverage the non-profit network to promote the event, and you can do something around say attendance numbers. So for each online viewer we will donate $1 up to 100,000 dollars. Obviously this costs money, and we only recommend this strategy if the organization itself is building a sustainable online community. With cause marketing you're driving lots of visibility and traffic and if the idea is to sustain a community beyond the event then it's an effective and comparatively inexpesnive way of doing it.

5. Main Event
In the online world, we have found promoting an event by communications outreach too far in advance is a waste of time. For exposure use brand advertising or site sponsorships as mentioned in point #1 above. For the event itself use the mini-events as a way to keep people interested then do your outreach online max four days in advance. Have something interesting and exciting to talk about for the outreach (see point #6 below) is critical.

6. Post Main Event
Another great tactic we have used is a post-event community program. That is a live call or online chat after the event where people who just watched the telecast can then get on and talk about it. This gives great reason to do outreach: "Don't forget to tune into the Telecast at 9 p.m., and then join in the Live Chat/Audioconference/Blog Radio Show with XXX immediately after."

7. Create Calendar Items that Can Go Viral
Calendaring for events is one of the main reasons we like Facebook. Events are one of the most viral applications in Facebook. So if I'm interested in the event, I'll click on attending the event, and all of my contacts will see: "James is attending the XXX event at 9 p.m. on Thursday". So if my circle of friends on Facebook are also passionate about the topic, they now see it.

Now, one point not raised is e-mail. This discussion was based on the assumption the client didn't have an active email list.

BTW, most people stumble and fail miserably at Step 1, never giving the following six steps a chance.

This discussion can quickly get more involved than how a company might use Facebook, because now we are talking about the use of intentional business tools. One local company and customer of ours that provides the kind of tools I'm referring to is HiveLive.

With the goal of better understanding a target audience, one of the advantages of using a virtual (online) community platform comes in leveraging multiple audiences. The audiences I'm referring to specifically are employees, customers and partners.

If you can effectively create the space through which these audiences can participate - you are fostering a new means of sharing, exploring and learning. The results? Better communication, marketing, innovation and loyalty.

If you would like to dig into this deeper, Jeremiah Owyang did a comprehensive report on community platforms for Forrester only a couple of months ago.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The value of Collective Intellect for social media monitoring

2. The specific values of online conversational monitoring in terms of base-lining share of voice among competitive brands, identification of themes, identification of influencers and what the sentiment is around a brand.

3. The maturity and differentiation of Collective Intellect's ability to track online sentiment, and approach online monitoring from a "topic net" approach as opposed to a simple keyword approach.

4. Tim's reaction to Google's potential patent-pending technology for identifying key influencers in Facebook, MySpace and others.

5. Tim's advice for getting started in social media (start monitoring with free tools).

Note: This subject matter has become extremely relevant to Room 214's social media agency services over the last two years. On that note, let us know if you are interested in hearing more about strategy, planning and/or tactical outreach efforts used in conjunction with these kinds of tools and data.

1. Greater knowledge of what's online: More than 1/3 revealed they are not confident their current agency is well positioned to successfully take their brand online.
2. Using "pull interactions:" 90% want their agencies to use pull interactions such as social media and communities rather than only traditional "push" campaigns.
3. Leveraging of virtual communities: 94% expressed interest in leveraging virtual communities to understand more about their target audience.
4. Agency executives using the technology: 92% said it was important the agencies use what they recommend.
   
5. Agencies that have "Chief Digital Officers."

Additional noteworthy items desired (actually included as a broader top 10 list) pertain to what many of us would intuitively expect - like an agency's ability to demonstrate an understanding of social media, the ability to demonstrate strategic thinking and analytic measurement for success.

This goes back to the root of any social media program. LISTEN first and learn what your group is thinking, what motivates them, where they spend their time and then and only then can an organization plan its engagement strategy.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. What is Docmetrics, and why should a marketer take a look at this product?

2. The limitations of using standard web forms as a resource to collect sales leads.

3. Statistics of engagement on forms within PDFs vs. standard web forms.

4. The new opportunity considering ROI and measurement: the ability to know who is reading your PDFs, who they are being passed along to, which pages are being read the most (applicable to newsletters, white papers, case studies, media kits, PDFs handed out on USB drives, CD's, etc.)

5. Docmetrics costs and use case

Note: Peter said if you go to Docmetrics.com and mention my name, you'll get a free USB device. There is a free trial on the website. I'd love to hear anyone's feedback on their experience with it.

The role Craig is talking about is going from founder and growing Craigslist, to being the public face of the company, working with the media and being part of a team of customer service reps.

I personally find this role fascinating and refreshing. What better way to serve your company than to be directly involved in helping solve customer issues or responding to customer inquiries.

Imagine the insights and knowledge he gains from personally interacting with the customer.

Which begs the question: Why do so many companies look at customer service as a necessary evil?

Answer: EGO

The people best suited to handle the vast array of customer service issues are not people manning phone banks in India. It's high-level management with a true and deep understanding of the products and service offerings. But these individuals would need to check their ego at the door to start manning the gates.

I do think there is an opportunity in elevating conversational customer reps, those individuals responsible for the Twitter and GetSatisfaction pages to be more senior as these individuals will most certainly become a public figure in the company.