In the article, Kutcher prognosticates that the next big wave will be “no-touch” technology: “high fashion bracelets that track your health. Your movement. Your sleep. Your activity.”

That future, it appears, has already arrived. At an event called Espacio held earlier this year, our partner agency in Mexico, Levytation, used coded bracelets to enable attendees to update their Facebook pages with a mere flick of a wrist. With a third of the 15,000 people in attendance outfitted with bracelets, Levytation created a ripple effect online that is estimated to have reached hundreds of thousands of people.

Click to view slideshow.The blending of the in-person and online experience represents an opportunity for marketers to get more bang for their buck from special events – before, during and after.

Most marketers realize the power social media tools like Facebook and Twitter offer for building buzz about concerts, conferences, parties, etc. Facebook invitations are a great way to both spread the word and provide an individual page to link back to from all other social networks.

Twitter hashtags allow attendees to live Tweet an event, letting all of their followers know where they are and what they’re doing. By following these hashtags, people not in attendance can monitor, and even participate, in the virtual conversation. Just be sure to assign a specific hashtag for the event far in advance and include it in all promotional materials. You can jumpstart the online conversation by assigning someone from the organizers or its PR firm to Tweet live. Another way to encourage live Tweeting is to set up a large screen to display all the Tweets that include the event hashtag – some people will Tweet just to see their post appear on the screen.

While Twitter, and even Facebook pages, can be updated on the go, thanks to mobile apps, the easier you can make it for users to reach out to friends, the more likely it is to happen.

Levytation made Kutcher’s prophesy a reality at Espacio by inviting attendees to register and receive a free radio frequency ID (RFID) wristband. The wristbands, which were unique to each guest, were linked to their personal social networking profiles. Throughout the event, guests could simply swipe their wristband at kiosks located throughout the venue if they liked what they saw. Doing so automatically posted specific messages, unique to each station, to their Facebook and Twitter profiles.

The technology helped Televisa, the organizers of Espacio, illustrate the theme of the event, “digital wave,” while integrating technology and social networking into the experience.

Levytation estimated that by employing the RFID bracelets, they reached about 650,000 friends and family with news from Espacio. While no measurement system is perfect, they arrived at that number by looking at the average number of friends and followers for Facebook and Twitter and multiplying that number by the number of posts from the event. This is a conservative estimate because users within the age range present at the event tend to have more social media connections than the average user. Another consideration is that the estimate may contain duplicates and it’s difficult to determine how many of the friends or followers actually viewed their profiles that day.

Still, those are results that even Kelso would be impressed with.

-JS

Find this article and others by viewing Jon’s column in the San Diego Daily Transcript.

Google+ is still a fledgling compared to what is reported to be its target competitor — Facebook — but its membership is growing rapidly, and users are already finding ways to use it for their businesses. While similar to Facebook in the sense that it allows users to connect with people they have something in common with to share photos and news, one of the biggest attractions is the way Google+ integrates with other Google tools and services.

The platform has generated plenty of buzz, and estimates indicate that 10 million users signed up for Google+ in the first two weeks.

So what do you need to know about the newest social networking platform?

Video conferences

Forget expensive video conference software, Google+ allows you to “hangout” and have a video chat with up to 10 people. Skype, of course, is also free, but does not allow for such group discussions that are usually necessary in a business setting. Google+ also stands out from other similar tools because the video actually switches from person to person depending on who is speaking. If users are worried about their mic picking up background noise or side conversation, they can easily put themselves on mute. Google+ Hangout also has a chat feature that allows people to type messages to one another instead of speaking. This is particularly useful when there are many participants and you don’t want to talk over each other.

One of the coolest things about Google+ is the ability to jointly watch YouTube videos. This is a great way to show your company’s work and explain it as you go. If the video has audio, the typing chat feature comes in handy here as well.

Networking

While LinkedIn is known as the social networking site for professional contacts, there are some advantages to Google+. For one thing, a contact doesn’t have to accept you for you to add them. Much like Twitter, you can follow people on Google+ and see what they are posting without them adding you as well. However, their privacy settings will determine whether you see all of their posts or not.

Even though these are definite advantages on the Google+ side, it’s doubtful LinkedIn is going away any time soon. LinkedIn has the advantage of hosting your entire resume, showing how you and colleagues are connected, allows professional recommendations, and enables you to search for potential employees by city or specialty. These are things that Google+ doesn’t offer and probably won’t, so it is likely the two will continue to coexist.

Facebook, however, is a different story, and the media is billing this as a battle royal between the upstart and the incumbent.

Compared to Facebook, it’s much simpler to organize contacts into “circles” on Google+. And once they’re organized into circles, you can determine who sees what, since you may not want to share the same information with clients or employers that you want your close friends to see. This makes Google+ an ideal single platform for combining, yet differentiating between your various social and business networks.

Individual accounts only

Even though Google+ has already shown some possibilities for business and more uses will surely surface, Google has not yet developed a specific platform for commercial enterprises. Profiles are meant to be created for individuals. Google has actually asked brands to hold off on creating business accounts, promising that it will be worth the wait.

According to a Google+ post by Google Product Manager Christian Oestlien, “The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.”

As more people join Google+, the benefits of these features will become more apparent. The Hangout feature, for example, seems to be one that stands out, but participants need to be Google+ users and chances are, they aren’t all yet. However, if the platform continues to grow as it has these first several weeks, they surely will be.

-JS