Yesterday afternoon I (along with about 60 of my friends, family, prospects, and clients) held a virtual launch for my new book, One Man, One Show: 21 Weeks to Profitable Self-Employment, that really tested the limits of my social media savvy. While running a tele-seminar, webinar, tweets, and Facebook chat I learned a few great lessons about the does and don’t’s in terms of virtual get-togethers. Here are my thoughts:

1. Do use visuals such as slide shows. Tele-seminars can sometimes be difficult to follow. It helps the participants gain traction if they have something visual to fall back on. The portions I did via webinar went much smoother than the portions that were not.
2. Don’t be overly ambitious. In retrospect, 4 hours was hugely ambitious and by the end I was exhausted. If you want to do a big event like that, enlist some other speakers and pepper them throughout the program.
3. Do spend tones of time promoting the event in different circles. Over the course of about 6 weeks I sent out emails, facebook posts, tweets, and personal notes to over 1,200 people (not including the in-person promotion I did at my Chamber of Commerce and BNI). This resulted in 60 people participating in the event at various times. In terms of Web 2.0, you’ll have to touch a lot of people to get a few participants.
4. Don’t wait until the last minute to test your tools. I finally decided that webinar was the way to go about 2 days before the event. This meant, I was testing, learning, and discovering right up until and in some cases, through the event. Just as in other areas of life, test your tools before you have to give the show!
5. Do realize everything won’t go according to plan. Over the past year I’ve participated in over 100 webinars, teleseminars, and virtual events. None of them (even the ones with big names that have big budgets) ever go completely smoothly. Recognize that your technology might hick-up and be prepared for it.
6. Don’t forget to come up with creative ways to engage your audience. In my workshops and client events I always carefully plan out thoughtful and engaging ways to bring my clients/participants into the conversation. Looking back at yesterday’s events this was one of it’s failures. I didn’t do a great job of strategically planning ways to involve the audience and the end result was little involvement.
7. Do enlist your partners to help host the event. As mentioned above, it’s exhausting to talk for a couple of hours in a virtual format. Give your referral sources/strategic partners some publicity and invite them to do a presentation during your event. Another advantage of this is that they are likely to promote your event to their network.
8. Don’t be late by even one minute. A few people mentioned to me after the event that when coming back on after a break it was jarring to hear silence and made them think maybe they were in the wrong place. If your hosting a virtual event show up 5-10 minutes early and chat with your early birds.
9. Do set goals for intended results. When planning for the event I knew exactly what the intended result was. My goal was to sell 30 copies of my book during the event and I came pretty close (22 copies).
10. Don’t forget to have a great time! Enjoy the ability to give a professional presentation in your PJ’s (no I wasn’t in mine for those of you that are wondering). This new way of doing business is a great opportunity for companies looking to reach a wide audience in a low-cost way.

Armed with these do’s and don’t I plan to take on another virtual event again soon. I can’t wait to see all of you there (and I’d love to participate in yours).