This is the end of a really great week for me - I managed to head along to some Conferences, hear from senior folks at a whole host of companies, attend a drinks reception at the British Consulate, link up with the commercialization team from Edinburgh University and meet with Crawford Beveridge (one of the senior execs in Sun and former Chief Exec of Scottish Enterprise).

One of the trends that came through was the potential for using events to build momentum.

SalesForce.com use events to sell their products:

"We've realized that sending out sales reps to bang on doors just doesn't work so well anymore.  We've increased sales by using our existing customers as a sale agent - a recommendation from an existing customer has a power that we can never achieve.

Every 6 months we host an event to bring all our existing customers together, and invite along a load of potential clients.  We give some keynotes etc but the real aim is to give these guys a chance to chat and find out how each other are using our products. 

In the end folks come to us asking for the sales pitch - if you don't have customers who can recommend you like this then you have bigger problems than your sales team." - Marc Beinoff - Chairman and CEO, SalesForce.com  

Facebook take advantage of external events: in January they partnered with CNN to host the world's largest ever WebCast for President Obama's Inauguration which became the highest traffic day ever on the Facebook site.

But Facebook also create virtual events: 2 weeks ago they launched usernames on the site at a pre-announced deadline.  Jonathan Heiliger, their VP of Tech Ops described it as "like planning a denial-of-service attack on our own site".  In the end over 1m usernames were assigned in the first hour.

There's already been discussion on the blog about Twitter's role in the Iranian Elections.  We've talked a lot about high-growth companies but it doesn't get much higher growth than Twitter at the moment.  John Adams, head of Tech Ops at Twitter, showed a great couple of slides: growth of Twitter in 2008 was 752% (up to 5m active users); he then showed this on a graph of their 2009 growth where the scale was such that the 2008 data looked as if it had almost remained steady.  This really is taking advantage of external events - I don't think anyone at twitter sat down and decided to focus on the Iranian market...

A real focus for us fellows at the moment has to be around how we can create a momentum when we're back in Scotland and I would propose that events are the way to do this.  I'll follow up with the fellows next week because if we can start this discussion now then we can really hit the ground running.