Looking ahead to next year, in a Business News Daily year-ender, Sharat Sharan, President and CEO of ON24, doubles down on Shiao’s expired prediction: “In today’s cost-conscious business environment, demand for hybrid events—a physical event with a virtual extension before, during or after the physical event takes place—will continue to grow.” That’s a safe bet.

Finally, this webinar from Unisfair actually includes discussion with event organizers who have married virtual components to live events. These events are grasping toward a hybrid event model. I wouldn’t call them strictly hybrid, but they’re getting closer. The presentation by PJ Boatwright, VP of Live Media with Fortune magazine illustrates an opportunity to produce a ultra-high level “invitation-only” event and monetize it with a come-one-come-all simulcast and sponsorship component. One key point worth noting in the presentation by Fiona Bruder, SVP Client Services for George P. Johnson: Three-quarters of brand marketers expect trade shows to integrate virtual components. If this is true, then demand for these services is much higher than the supply. I would venture to guess that fewer than 10% of major trade shows integrate a virtual anything.

Why are the virtual event platform providers jumping on the hybrid bandwagon? Because of a growing opportunity and a lurking threat. The opportunity is obvious: Hybrid is in the air—it comes up whenever I talk to professional event organizers. The lurking threat for platform providers is commoditization of their services. A performance-based virtual platform model is already nipping at their heels. How hard would it be for Google or some over-caffeinated dorm-dweller to churn out an open-source virtual event site?

BusyEvent in their blog entry described a number of interesting ideas for integrating Twitter into the activities of a conference, including digital signage. One comment: they suggest setting up a twitter feed based on the name of the event. I would suggest that the event Twitter feed be delivered under the name of someone associated with the event—conference chair, editor, association executive. A person-to-person feed always grabs the user much more than a “brand” feed. Great Idea: get attendees to provide their Twitter name when they register, and make this information available to other registrants.

Among other things, this blog entry from MeetingsNet contains some good ideas on the use of Twitter as a way to get your audience involved in building conference content, and to battle attrition. Here’s where getting attendees to “follow” each other comes in handy—when they see the feeds coming from their colleagues onsite, they’re going to want to jump in the car. Last week I saw dozens of feeds coming from SXSW conference, and I wish I had been there.

In terms of promotion, Heather Cox, VP, PR, Events and Product Development, FierceMarkets, spoke about integrating content with event promotion on their web sites, and efforts to produce personalized emails. She also emphasized the ongoing importance of split testing their promo, and showed the basic layout for their email promotion, which is the result of much split testing. It’s good to hear that a company is taking split testing seriously in an electronic context. Fiercemarket’s email template would be a good starting point for anyone producing electronic promotion. I see a wide variety of design latitude in event email promotion, which tells me that promotion design is being left to designers: aesthetic in a design sense but clueless in a marketing sense. Fiercemarkets has also experimented with URL’s for events and found that they are most successful with a sub-URL of their media sites. Joy Puzzo, Corporate Audience Development Director, Advanstar spoke about the importance of granular list segmentation, developing a model for successful lists and then modeling those databases externally. She also indicated that list rental agencies are very willing to negotiate these days.