Personally, I think the best way to do this would be to have a command (I'll use /em for an example) that simply takes everything after it and posts it without a word-based identifier into chat.
For example, "/em Tubby likes pie" would simply output as "Tubby likes pie", without any word based identifier. This not only lets you emote as familiars and such more dynamically, but it also lets the DM illustrate an action that may be happening without directly involving people. For example, he could describe the candles flickering without his name interrupting the flow of the description.
Now, the problem with this, so far, is that you can't really tell who's doing certain actions. For example, if one of my party members is a big, beefy barbarian named Garren, but he's not my character, I can still type "/em Garren puts on a pretty dress and dances with a pony" and have it appear as if Garren did such a thing. The way I'd use to identify a player in that circumstance is to have the text color be the color of the player's ping circles. It'd basically look like the /me text does, except the color would be tied to the color the player selects on his nameplate, instead of always orange. So mine would show up in purple for the games I play right now.
Another option is to set it so that it can read the character journal entries, and it won't let you emote as a character that you don't have access to. However, that'd be REALLY complicated to set up, so I think the colored text is better.
The upside to this is that you can literally put anything in it and have it show up as an action, so I could type "/em The candles on the mantle flicker as a gust of wind blows in through the open window, and shadows dance across the ceiling." And it would show up in chat almost exactly the same as a /me would, except in whatever color I've chosen as mine for that campaign.
And, of course, because this isn't directly tied to any character, it could be used in any macro you need to use it in.
EDIT because afterthought: Possibly set it up so that this command can be disabled by the GM, in case you have a rowdy bunch that keep trying to emote as each other's characters. Globally and on a person-by-person basis would be good. Then again, I'm a huge fan of having almost all commands be set up so that a GM can revoke a player's access to it if s/he deems it necessary, so.... >.>