Hammock has enjoyed working with the National Federation of Independent Business since the early 1990s. NFIB is the nation’s leading small business association, with offices in Washington, D.C, and all 50 state capitals. We work with them to create MyBusiness, their member magazine, and manage NFIB.com, their website.

Every two years, NFIB hosts a National Small Business Summit, a biannual event to explore important policy, business and economic issues facing small business. In the past, we worked with NFIB to create an event website for the Summit, which included news stories from the event. Good, but we wanted to do something more dynamic in 2008.

This year Hammock worked with NFIB to develop a site where small business owners who couldn’t come to Washington, D.C., for the Summit could still participate in the action online. We built and managed a social media site for the Summit with video posting and photo sharing, blogging and knowledge sharing from sessions. We continued the effort post-Summit by developing a digital magazine that is focused on building attendance for the next Summit.

While tools like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter each serve a unique purpose, we've found that pulling them together into one interface can often serve your audience best, particularly when you're sharing information about a single event. While each individual feed is still available, if someone only wants to see the photo updates, for instance, but the event-focused website shows a complete picture of the event -- photos, video and all. For many associations, online marketing is still website and email focused. Hammock's approach is different. We take unique advantage of social media but still provide a central home for all event-related content. If you can't attend, it's the next best thing to being there.