On Friday I posted about the Unicom 'Web 2 and Beyond' conference I attended and spoke at in London the day before.

In that post I mentioned that the web site with all the recordings of the presenters had received 178 visitors. As of today at 8am that has now increased to 216.

Whist that is not a massive number in itself it has been done with zero marketing budget. Just mentions in blogs like this by fellow presenters and some of the delegates.

Now let's extrapolate the figures. If we say we will get 20 new visitors per day we will have had 3.5k within 6 months and it will keep going for as long as the site is live. We are still getting visitors to last years conference podcast - the 'echo chamber' at work.

What do I mean? Just like in a physical cave system (read series of interconnected social networks) if you shout out the echo bounces around with little or no extra effort from you. Depending on the cave system it can bounce - rising and falling in intesity - for ages. It is usually impossible to tell exactly what walls and inter-connected cave systems the echo is coming back from. Shout again later and it will not be exactly the same echo but it will have the same effect and if the original echo is still there they will seem to merge and move apart. In some cases potholers have reported the echo being heard miles away through interconnected cave systems.

So it is with the internet and social networks. On Thursday we shouted into the social network 'cave system'. The echo has started. It will be fun to see what happens.

Now the real bonus for people marketing a product or service is this...

Each new visitor pushes the average cost down. The cost of designing and building the microsite and recording/uplaoding the PowerPoint slides and audio over the 2 days was less than £1750. At 3.5k visitors we will be at 50p CPV. Now compare that to the cost of leads from direct mail, advertising, trade shows, seminars etc. Each visitor is in effect a response so please ensure you divide the number of leads by the cost of the campaign.

When I was running Tektronix marketing in Europe (1990 - 1996) we had the following metrics:

- Direct Mail - £10 - £50 per lead

- Trade shows - £35 - £100 per lead (includes cost of stand and hotels etc of staff but not salaries)

- PR - £40 - £120 per lead

- Seminars - £40 - £75 per lead

- Advertising - £50 - £150 per lead

- Sales person cost per client visit - £200 per call

Now these figures are from a few years ago and were not exact science but helped shape our marketing strategy. The above figures excluded our fulfilment costs. The podcast and web site is the fulfilment so the cost of online event marketing really starts to look interesting.

On Friday the CPV was £9.83. Already cheaper than direct mail was at Tektronix. Today the cost per visitor has fallen to £8.10. What will it be tomorrow and next week?

One thing that is a disadvantage in the 'echo chamber' is that we do not get names to do follow-up marketing unless you add reasons for people to 'register' for something.

What could this be? Unicom could run a number of 'added value' programmes where people see a reason to register such as...

• A discount voucher off another Unicom seminars
• Early Bird extra discount for future bookings
• Exclusive seminars and events for 'members'
• Meet the Presenters in private Q&A sessions
• Free access to unpublished materials