Patent ID: 8539034

Claim:
A method comprising: establishing a target group of a plurality of recipients; establishing a substantially common message to be transmitted via a computer network to at least an on-line portion of the target group; determining which members of the target group are on-line by initially communicating to each respective member of the target group prior to sending an instant message to the respective member and placing into a queue identification information but not the message of each of those respective members of the target group not found to be on-line; and transmitting sequentially the common message as an instant message by bulk message broadcast via the computer network only to each respective on-line member of the target group upon determining that the respective member is on-line, including monitoring available bandwidth while transmitting to maximize use of data bandwidth by adjusting for each message transmission a preset counter programmed to calculate an amount of data bandwidth that has been used during a period and used to determine whether to transmit each message; and receiving an instant message response from a recipient of the common instant message, attempting to select a human agent and forwarding the response to a selected human agent if a human agent is available, and establishing a communication between the agent and the recipient, and if no human agent is available, attempting to select an automated agent and then forwarding a pre-stored message to the recipient if no automated agent is available.