Sorry I missed your post among all the spam. You make great points and hyperbole aside, I never meant to say that posting on local forums isn’t worthwhile. It definitely is. The only thing is it’s a very time-consuming and laborious process. I think it is worthwhile to start a thread about your event on any related forum you can find. Not just national forums like Yehoodi but even the smaller local forums like aseda.org in Atlanta. However, I don’t think it’s worth going back and posting an update on each forum every time you book a new band or secure a cool venue, or every time a new price-increase deadline is looming. It’s just too much work for very little return. Those things are much better posted into a twitter or facebook stream.

Now, I don’t mind seeing that their “pre-registration closes in 4 days!!!!” Really, I don’t, even though I’m not going to their event. What I do dislike is the medium they chose to use to tell me because now I can’t just process the information, decide it doesn’t pertain to me right now, go on about my life, and let the post fade into the history of my feed. By sending that info as a message, they are now forcing my hand and making me take some action, even if it’s only to delete the email. Seems like a small thing, but like you say, deleting tons of message and emails gets old.

As for diluting the stream, that’s the nature of advertising. But I’m not sure what you think you get from a group that you don’t get from a fan page. Basically, for the purpose of mesagging users, everything you get in a group, you also get with a fan page. PLUS your posts make it into their stream. There is one thing missing from fan pages: the ability to send an email to all users. But you can do that from an event-page, so you’re not really losing that option, at all.

You make a good point about the national crowd not wanting hear about your local weekly event, every week. But that comes down to the organizers knowing their audience, not diluting their brand, and not spamming their fans with irrelevant info. If it’s a “FubarEX” fan page, people want to hear about “FubarEX”, not Mom & Pop’s weekly Swing-Throwdown. (I apologize if these are actual event, ha!) An organizer wanting to do a good job of marketing their event should realize that and act accordingly. Otherwise, they will get their posts marked “Hide” by their fans. But even then…to that user, their fan page is practically the same as a group. So have you lost anything?

What about starting a new friend page for your event and becoming friends with people instead of fans or groups? It would allow you to both show up on the news-stream as well as email and invite folx? Or do they cap the #s in something?

The fantastic point of it all is that for your Twitter/Facebook promo to work, you must first promote in “traditional” means — emails, local forums, local list-serves etc. Of course, only a small percentage of individuals will subscribe to your announcement list. If you then rely on the Twitter/Facebook only, you fail to reach the majority of your potential audience.

This brings me to a touchier subject: age-ism. Sure, a certain group of tech-savvy individuals are on Facebook and Twitter, but there’s a significant portion of the population that is not. By restricting advertising means to Twitter/Facebook you lose access to this population as well.

People self-subscribe to local forums and even larger ones such as Yehoodi; only a percentage of those will respond positively to a solicitation to join an events list-serve. (Use all the buzz words you want, you’re talking about using twitter as an announce-only list-serv.) Because of this, any advertising method that requires subscription to the service is inherently a diminishing return. As years progress, you draw fewer and fewer new folks to your list and many of the folks on your list become in active. At the end of the day, on it’s own the list is meaningless.

Twitter and Facebook are useful tools, but they will only ever make sense in the context of broader promotional efforts.