Organizing Private Dinner Events Around Online Video

Last month, 24/7 Real Media nicely invited me to a private dinner they held in NYC with about a dozen executives to talk about "Video: The New 3.0" The attendees were from MLB, NBC, NBA, ESPN, Verizon FiOS, WallStrip.com and others.

It was probably one of the most useful and productive gatherings I have been at in a long while. While many industry conferences do a good job of arranging networking events, this dinner allowed us to be in a small setting, with no distractions and enabled us to discuss various web video topics for a few hours.

I liked the setting so much and felt it was so productive, that I am now going to be helping to organize these dinner events on a monthly basis, focused around very specific subjects. The next dinner is being held tonight, hosted by Ignite Technologies, and is talking to video in the enterprise. It has a great group of enterprise executives attending from Bloomberg, Microsoft, Vanguard, Citigroup, Honeywell, Lehman Brothers, Canon and others.

So here is my offer. If you are a vendor that wants to organize or participate in one of these dinners and you want to get together a group of executives to get their take and feedback on the market, I will help you organize it free of charge. I will help devise a topic, moderate the discussion and open up my rolodex and allow you to pick who you want to invite, be it customers, analysts or the media. All the vendor has to do is pick up the cost of the dinner.

These dinners are a great way for vendors to hear directly from customers in the industry and make new introductions from companies they may not normally be able to easily get in front of. They are a great way to hear what is taking place in the market and hear how the market is evolving – from real customers.

So if you want more details or want to discuss further, please contact me. Also, if you want to attend one of these dinners or suggest a topic or vertical to discuss, I’d love to hear from you.