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So you’ve decided to host an event. Maybe it’s for educational purposes, brand awareness, networking, or entertainment. Whatever the reason, you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it, but you want to appear professional and minimize the time spent managing the event details. In the past, you’ve promoted your events via emails and phone calls. Maybe you’ve even sent out a registration form you created in Microsoft Word that attendees had to fill out and fax back.

Now you’re doing the same thing for your latest event. At first, you receive a few phone calls for additional information. Then the email responses start to arrive. You find yourself spending lots of time answering phone calls, returning messages, and playing phone tag. You receive faxes with the registration form filled out, but you can’t always read the person’s handwriting.

You’d like to pull all this information into a single spreadsheet, but you begin to realize the labor-intensive problem of tracking registrant details. You definitely don’t have the time to dedicate to this task.

Wouldn’t an online registration system solve the above problems and make you look professional at the same time?

More great content was shared on day two of MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer. The day’s highlight was easily Dr. B.J. Fogg’s keynote address on why Facebook and Twitter have succeeded. For example, Facebook’s “hot triggers” — those emails that alert us when someone’s sent a friend request, commented on our status, or tagged us in a photo — have helped create ritualistic behavior, and they keep us visiting Facebook, not because Facebook tells us to, but because we want to.

“Email enabled Facebook,” Fogg explained, adding that texting paved the way for Twitter. “Today’s platforms enable tomorrow’s rituals, and winning rituals become the behaviors of tomorrow.”

Most inspiring was Fogg’s suggestion to start small and not to get frustrated if things don’t go well the first time you try something. “Everything big started small,” he said. Fogg made many in the room smile (including me) when he said that small businesses and startups have an advantage versus the bigger companies because of necessity; smaller businesses simply don’t have the resources, financial and otherwise, that bigger businesses do. Thus, because smaller businesses tend to focus on smaller wins, and can be more agile, they’re better positioned to succeed.

Here are some other highlights from day two of the Mixer:

I’m here in Chicago for the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer. No surprise, the main topic this week is how to use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to expand the marketing reach of businesses and organizations. But rather than echo last week’s Wall Street Journal article about social media's growth signaling the end of email, on day one, some of the marketing world’s leading experts were talking about how email and social media can work together.

In one session, Harvey Morris, from the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau, explained that if your customers are more engaged, they’ll want to participate in social media with you and give you their email address. Less engaged customers may only participate in social media and won't give you their email address. He added that social media should be used to spark customers’ interests in what you have to offer, and email marketing should be used to maintain it.

Later, at Wednesday’s keynote session, Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon and the author of Say Everything, explained that new forms of media don’t kill off “old” media like email — they just redefine them and how they're used. It's similar to how people thought the movies might kill live theater, or how television was supposed to kill off the movies. Email will continue to evolve as social media continues to evolve. It's not going away anytime soon.

Suffice it to say, it was a great day for fans of email marketing. Here are some other takeaways from day one of the Mixer:

Ever since the Wall Street Journal wrote on Monday that email is dead, the blogosphere has been buzzing. Gail Goodman, Constant Contact’s CEO, wrote an article about this very subject on Entrepreneur.com in July. “Let me tell you in the strongest terms: This is not the case,” she wrote. To read Gail’s thoughts about why the inbox is still the most important communications tool in a marketer’s toolbox, click here.

Sometimes, making connections can be exhausting if you’re a customer. Case in point: The other day, one of my family’s cars needed of a new set of tires. It turns out they are a fairly unique size and are only made by two manufacturers.

To replace them, I first turned to a company that my father had used when I was younger. It was one that I had previously associated with high quality. I reached out by phone and spoke with an individual who told me he had to check with a supplier and would get back to me later that day. No call came.

Do you currently hold events? If yes, do you conduct attendee feedback surveys afterwards? Take a second to let us know! Once you have voted, you will instantly get to see what other small businesses and organizations have said. Enjoy!

Your website is a powerful tool to attract new business and grow relationships. Is yours doing that? Is your website useful to visitors? Are they finding what they came for? Is it easy for visitors to take the action you want them to? Sure, web analytics can give you data, but it can’t give you the whys. For example, why don’t shoppers complete transactions? Why don’t visitors click more deeply into the site? What you don’t know about your website can lead to lost prospects and lost sales. Gather instant feedback from your customers on your website; here’s how.

Looking over a sea of faces at a networking event the other night, it struck me how some individuals stood out in the crowd while others I barely noticed. The ones that stood out had a friendly look to them and usually a smile on their faces. Since I spend way too much time thinking about email marketing, it struck me how much this visual filtering of the crowd was similar to what I do with my inbox whenever I get a new message.

It’s hard to believe, but a good number of people are not actually looking at your whole email. They are, in fact, just looking at the top area (also known as the preview pane) and judging your email from that, just as I was judging the people in the crowd based only on the look on their faces.

Welcome to my first blog post. I intend to use this forum to reflect on the connections I make with the owners and managers of small businesses and organizations that I interact with on a daily basis.

This past week, I had the thrill of launching my new book, The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing, at Rothman’s men’s clothing store in New York City. Roughly 100 customers, friends, colleagues, and family members joined me for the event, which was a great opportunity for me to personally make some new connections. 

It’s only fitting that my first blog post is about the connection I made more than 20 years ago with the owner of Rothman’s, Ken Giddon.

Forget all that talk that social media is going to have a negative effect on email. According to a recent report by the Nielsen Company, people who are heavy users of sites like Facebook and Twitter actually use email more than those who are lighter users.

Nielsen’s study revealed that the time heavy social media users spent using email significantly increased between April 2008 and April 2009, from around 80 minutes to more than 180 minutes. As the chart below illustrates, there’s a wide gap between those heavy users and those who do not use social media as often.