I love the way live event chats can feed and build communities.  Used properly, they can create that regular drumbeat that calls an audience back to a site and engages them.  Live events are quick and easy for an organization to launch and have tremendous business benefits.  I wanted to summarize what I view as the four key benefits of live events.

• For the 30 to 60 minutes of a live event – your audience is captured.  These are typically your biggest fans and they can ask any question that they want.  Additionally, while there are many aspects of social media that are hard to participate in (wikis, message boards, etc) asking questions in a live event is pretty easy and has a very low barrier to audience participation.
• The PR Aftershock is has been a huge benefit for many of our clients.  While the audience during the event is great – if care is taken in getting the press and bloggers to participate, and event can typically generate a large number of mentions in the press and on blogs.  Bloggers have been known to literally cut and past their questions and answers from the event into their blog and then link back.
• SEO Lift: When working with clients we coach to not only answer questions, but to answer with all the same keywords that they sprinkle throughout their site to increase their search engine rankings.  As soon as a live event chat is over, a transcript is produced and added to the site,
  producing great search engine friendly content, which typically increases rankings for the content.
• Actionable Business Intelligence: not all questions get answered, but all do have value.  Following an event, our team categorizes the questions and graphs and analyzes them so that the client can now quantify the important topics to their audience.  This data can be used to justify marketing campaigns, design new products, and much more.

I hope this is helpful – as always, I welcome your thoughts and comments below!

-Colin