Online chats have really evolved since the days when AOL was king. In this day and age of social media where our online conversations have been condensed down to bite-sized nuggets of 140 characters or less, chatting has moved from the IM chatrooms to Twitter. A natural progression, since Twitter is already being used by millions of people to converse with each other daily.

Through our work with a variety of clients at Tuvel Communications, we've created and executed several successful social media contests & promotions. You can see some examples of our work, here, here and here.

Along the way, we've been able to refine our efforts to maximize results while creating excitement and having fun! By sharing some of our tips, we hope that we can save you time while driving the results that you want. With this in mind, we've created our Top 10 list of ways to ensure that your social media contests & promotions are successful:

I joined Quora and have been using it for a couple of months, after seeing all the buzz about it on Twitter in recent months (and since it's my job to know about these things). Now, you might be thinking "ANOTHER social network? How am I going to keep track of this? And what use could this possibly be to me?" I don’t blame you for thinking this, because I thought the same thing at first. It seems like there's a new social networking site every week, with claims from all over the social mediasphere about how it's "the next big thing in social media." It can get a bit tiresome, ya know?

Now that I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate Quora, I want to give you my initial thoughts, as well as provide a few opportunities and uses for Quora for businesses.

2011 is shaping up to be a busy year here at Tuvel Communications, and we need the help of some social media and digital communications rock stars! Interested in working with us? Here's what we're looking for:

Can you believe another year is almost over and a new one nearly upon us? Time really does go by fast when you're having fun – meeting new people, building new (and valuable) relationships, and learning new things!

We've learned so much in 2010, and we've tried to impart some of our knowledge to you. So, rather than the usual "predictions for 2011" post that seems to proliferate this time of year, here's a quick review of what we here at Tuvel learned in social media marketing in 2010.

The theme of the morning was doing more with less in a global recession. In my presentation entitled The New Biz Dev, I spoke about leveraging the digital environment for business development purposes. My remarks focused on tips, tools and low-cost ideas for utilizing digital communications (including social networking).

We've created, launched and managed social media campaigns and presences for a variety of events, and that includes on-site social media engagement. We definitely have a number of tried-and-true tactics for creating buzz and interest during an event through social media, and I'd like to share some of those with you here.

I even tweeted during the event about my excitement...

Tuvel Communication's Managing Director Mitch Arnowitz recently contributed a guest post at Social Media Today entitled "10 Pitfalls to Avoid in Social Media Marketing." It ended up getting quite a good reaction, including some comments about one of the points made - assigning social media marketing to interns.

Read the article over at Social Media Today (check out the comments as well) and let us know your opinion!