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Welcome to 2012!

The year where online and mobile, must become a core part of your strategy and how your patrons find and interact with you.

Towards the end of last year, we worked on 2 powerful new products to add to the MyGuestlist arsenal.

The first (and the focus of this post) is one which allows venues to completely manage all table/booth reservations as well as bottle service for those booths, tables or VIP lounges.

It’s now being released as our first introductory offering in 2012 and is simply called Reservations.

Reservations allow your patrons to book tables, booths or special areas of your venue online on your site or Facebook page. You, can then manage these bookings and reservations right from your MyGuestlist account. You can track attendees, purchases and use our world famous iPad app to monitor it all on the day.

Much like with Guestlists, whenever a patron makes a booking or reservation, their details are also added to your database allowing for that ever growing list of data growth techniques to accumulate on yet another avenue. Whether you want to create all the reservations  back-of-house  yourself, or you’d prefer it all to be streamlined from your site to your MyGuestlist account, it’s now available.

Oh and look out for the ability to also sell your bottles and products online along with each reservation. A first in the hospitality world, but one which will allow you to keep your website operating as a 24/7 revenue stream.

Exciting stuff!

Facebook have just launched a new “subscribe” button for websites.

From their blog post on it, Facebook describes it as a button for websites which works just like the Subscribe button on Facebook; once clicked the user will begin seeing the public posts of the person they have subscribed to in his or her News Feed. The subscribe action is also shared — allowing others to subscribe directly via the News Feed stories, and further increasing viral distribution.

All of you will be able to add this button to your websites, much like you do with the Twitter “follow” button today, allowing users one-click access to public updates. The updates from that person will then begin appearing in the subscriber’s News Feed, alongside updates from friends and the pages the user had previously “liked.”

While the introduction of a website button is typically relatively minor news, for Facebook, this is pretty big. It means that the company is directly attacking the entire Twitter model head-on, by allowing for these one-way subscription buttons to be as easy to use and as ubiquitous as they are for Twitter.

Twitter themselves made some new changes recently which they hope will escalate their presence in brand pages and what can be done with them. Considered a major redesign, Twitter has reshaped around for main concepts: Home Timeline, Connect, Discover and Me.

Things are getting interesting.

We usually like to see you all with customised templates of your own, but in case this “time” thing is getting the better of you at this end of the year, there are a couple of templates to help which we’ve added to the template library.

Enjoy!

Facebook has modified its Event pages to hide people who decline invitations.

You can still find out who couldn’t just be cordial and leave the invitation pending by drilling into the renamed “Going”, “Maybe” and “Invited” categories. Facebook’s goal is likely to get more people accurately responding to invitations by making them feel less rude for declining.

Facebook also rolled out a few other refinements to Event pages. If you do decline an invitation, you’ll be prompted to post why on the Event’s wall. This encourages the token invites people send to friends on the other side of the world. These token invites are viewed as needless distractions by some, though others think they are cute ways to remind people you’re thinking of them.

If someone won’t stop spamming you with invites, you can now block them from sending you them straight from the decline step rather than having to visit your privacy settings. Bad news for spammy promoters, good news for everybody else.

If you tag a Place as the location of an Event, Facebook will display a Bing map with a quick link to directions. By rewarding organizers with a map for tagging Events to Places, Facebook can build its location database with where people gather. It will also provide exposure to its maps partner Bing, which Facebook presumably wants to help steal market share from Google Maps.

Unfortunately, Facebook managed to mess up the most basic piece of Event functionality through the update. It’s now hard to tell whether you’re already set as attending or need to respond to an invite because the unclicked “Join” button (needlessly changed from “Attend”) is highlighted blue next to the gray Maybe and Decline buttons. Why has this been made the standard?

Facebook may be trying to make it easy to find the most commonly pressed button on the page, but if all three buttons are unclicked, they should all be the same color.

Facebook Events are basic, and that works well. They became popular through simplicity, and the product was on its way to becoming a backbone of planning offline gatherings. The intentions behind the changes seem sound, but Facebook needs to make it obvious whether I’ve already said I’m attending your party.

With many screaming at the fact that things are just becoming too messy, there is an increasing pressure to make Facebook Events relevant again so that the “Yes, No, Maybe” can once again be respected and used with a sense of honesty and truthfulness to it rather than clicked on with a “meh” feeling.

Facebook Events have lost a battle they once dominated in.

Facebook must re-examine this in order to retain a percentage of the userbase which relies on the Events feature for their event planning and organisation.

We love Infographics!

And since you all send emails, it’s good to finish off the year with one to give you a good understanding on how the email landscape is shifting and adjusting from a consumer perspective so that you can adjust your own templates for next year.

Click on the image to see it in full view and pay attention to the stats on those mobile platforms. Interesting right?

Last week, Mark wrote an email to all Facebook users on the Facebook blog. We found it interesting.

Here it is:

by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 at 04:39

I founded Facebook on the idea that people want to share and connect with people in their lives, but to do this everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times.

This idea has been the core of Facebook since day one. When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key. With Facebook, for the first time, people had the tools they needed to do this. That’s how Facebook became the world’s biggest community online.  We made it easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things about their real lives.

We’ve added many new tools since then: sharing photos, creating groups, commenting on and liking your friends’ posts and recently even listening to music or watching videos together. With each new tool, we’ve added new privacy controls to ensure that you continue to have complete control over who sees everything you share. Because of these tools and controls, most people share many more things today than they did a few years ago.

Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information.

That said, I’m the first to admit that we’ve made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we’ve done.

I also understand that many people are just naturally skeptical of what it means for hundreds of millions of people to share so much personal information online, especially using any one service.  Even if our record on privacy were perfect, I think many people would still rightfully question how their information was protected. It’s important for people to think about this, and not one day goes by when I don’t think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust.

Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us – and we have led the internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share.

But we can also always do better. I’m committed to making Facebook the leader in transparency and control around privacy.

As we have grown, we have tried our best to listen closely to the people who use Facebook. We also work with regulators, advocates and experts to inform our privacy practices and policies. Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission established agreements with Google and Twitter that are helping to shape new privacy standards for our industry. Today, the FTC announced a similar agreement with Facebook. These agreements create a framework for how companies should approach privacy in the United States and around the world.

For Facebook, this means we’re making a clear and formal long-term commitment to do the things we’ve always tried to do and planned to keep doing — giving you tools to control who can see your information and then making sure only those people you intend can see it.

In the last 18 months alone, we’ve announced more than 20 new tools and resources designed to give you more control over your Facebook experience. Some of the things these include are:

• An easier way to select your audience when making a new post

• Inline privacy controls on all your existing posts

• The ability to review tags made by others before they appear on your profile

• Friend lists that are easier to create and that maintain themselves automatically

• A new groups product for sharing with smaller sets of people

• A tool to view your profile as someone else would see it

• Tools to ensure your information stays secure like double login approval

• Mobile versions of your privacy controls

• An easy way to download all your Facebook data

• A new apps dashboard to control what your apps can access

• A new app permission dialog that gives you clear control over what an app can do anytime you add one

• Many more privacy education resources

As a matter of fact, privacy is so deeply embedded in all of the development we do that every day tens of thousands of servers worth of computational resources are consumed checking to make sure that on any webpage we serve, that you have access to see each of the sometimes hundreds or even thousands of individual pieces of information that come together to form a Facebook page. This includes everything from every post on a page to every tag in those posts to every mutual friend shown when you hover over a person’s name. We do privacy access checks literally tens of billions of times each day to ensure we’re enforcing that only the people you want see your content. These privacy principles are written very deeply into our code.

Even before the agreement announced by the FTC today, Facebook had already proactively addressed many of the concerns the FTC raised. For example, their complaint to us mentioned our Verified Apps Program, which we canceled almost two years ago in December 2009. The same complaint also mentions cases where advertisers inadvertently received the ID numbers of some users in referrer URLs. We fixed that problem over a year ago in May 2010.

In addition to these product changes, the FTC also recommended improvements to our internal processes. We’ve embraced these ideas, too, by agreeing to improve and formalize the way we do privacy review as part of our ongoing product development process. As part of this, we will establish a biannual independent audit of our privacy practices to ensure we’re living up to the commitments we make.

Even further, effective today I am creating two new corporate officer roles to make sure our commitments will be reflected in what we do internally — in the development of our products and the security of our systems — and externally — in the way we work collaboratively with regulators, government agencies and privacy groups from around the world:

- Erin Egan will become Chief Privacy Officer, Policy. Erin recently joined Facebook after serving as a partner and co-chair of the global privacy and data security practice of Covington & Burling, the respected international law firm. Throughout her career, Erin has been deeply involved in legislative and regulatory efforts to address privacy, data security, spam, spyware and other consumer protection issues. Erin will lead our engagement in the global public discourse and debate about online privacy and ensure that feedback from regulators, legislators, experts and academics from around the world is incorporated into Facebook’s practices and policies.

- Michael Richter will become Chief Privacy Officer, Products. Michael is currently Facebook’s Chief Privacy Counsel on our legal team. In his new role, Michael will join our product organization to expand, improve and formalize our existing program of internal privacy review. He and his team will work to ensure that our principles of user control, privacy by design and transparency are integrated consistently into both Facebook’s product development process and our products themselves.

These two positions will further strengthen the processes that ensure that privacy control is built into our products and policies. I’m proud to have two such strong individuals with so much privacy expertise serving in these roles.

Today’s announcement formalizes our commitment to providing you with control over your privacy and sharing — and it also provides protection to ensure that your information is only shared in the way you intend. As the founder and CEO of Facebook, I look forward to working with the Commission as we implement this agreement. It is my hope that this agreement makes it clear that Facebook is the leader when it comes to offering people control over the information they share online.

Finally, I also want to reaffirm the commitment I made when I first launched Facebook. We will serve you as best we can and work every day to provide you with the best tools for you to share with each other and the world. We will continue to improve the service, build new ways for you to share and offer new ways to protect you and your information better than any other company in the world.

MyGuestlist is looking for a community manager to take up a full time role at head office in Melbourne, Australia.

Key Functional Areas of Responsibility

• Manage and help create marketing content to socialise and use for social media purposes (e.g. customer videos briefs, customer case studies, blog posts, posts from analysts and customers)
• Support SEO strategies by understanding keyword priorities and how they integrate into content marketing plans
• Provide analysis and recommendations as the program evolves and can be reviewed
• Research and administer social media tools on a daily basis in support of social media strategy
• Monitor and evaluate social media results on a daily basis in coordination with client goals and benchmarks
• Communication to team and management on project development, timelines, and results
• Work closely with the other team members to meet client goals
• Keep pace with social media and internet marketing industry trends and developments

Professional Competencies

• Passion for social media and internet marketing industries
• Understanding of true approach to measuring results on social platforms. No buzz words or vagueness.
• Outstanding ability to think creatively, and identify and resolve problems
• Attention to detail and the ability to effectively multi-task in a deadline driven atmosphere
• Ability to clearly and effectively articulate thoughts and points
• High levels of integrity, autonomy, and self-motivation
• Excellent analytical, organisational, project management and time management skills

Professional Skills & Qualifications

• 1 – 2 years experience in social media marketing with demonstrated successes
• Proficiency in MS Excel, PowerPoint, and Word
• Experience working with popular social media monitoring tools (Google, Radian 6, Twitter Search, Social Mention, Traackr, etc) and popular social media management tools (TweetDeck, HootSuite, etc)
• Experience with website analysis using a variety of analytics tools including Google Analytics as well as internal reporting tools
• Desired: Knowledge of HTML/CSS, WordPress, and website administrations

If you (or a friend-of-a-friend) would like to apply for this position, please enquire here with a submission of your CV.

We wrote a couple months ago about Google+ and its launch in to the social market. Whilst looking pretty, it certainly wasn’t ready for commercial use for businesses and brands since Pages, could not yet be created.

Google+ has now opened up its platform to allow for business pages to be created. You can do so by clicking on the Create a Google+ Page link in your profile.

After you’ve done this, you probably need another brush up on how G+ works, what the differences are between it and Facebook as well as when/how/why you would use it. We’ve found a couple of guides which can help brush the cobwebs off and get back up to speed with G+.

We are excited by what we’re going to see from tech savvy hospitality folk who will utilise concepts such as Hangouts, to offer “Meet-The-Chef” kind of online web chats. Or bars offering a look in to the magic their bartenders weave when making some of their cocktails.

We’re looking forward to see how the best venues in the world begin to use G+ to form a unique experience for their patrons. Let’s wait and see (no, we should do something about it damn it) who will be the first to impress.

A lot has come in this year. And of course just to keep up on all our promises, we still stick strongly by the following three items, which are baked in to our core and something we intend to maintain at all costs:

• We remain Entertainment & Hospitality specific so that 100% of our focus, attention, time, effort and resources all go in to making the marketing at wacky world of bars, clubs, restaurants, promotions and events a much easier, transparent and professional scene.
• Innovation. We are proud (without any arrogance whatsoever) to lead the way in new and emerging uses of a social, guestlist and marketing platform in this industry so we innovate each and every month with new products, updates to old ones and constant new mini-features which creep their way in to a powerhouse of an application making it the world’s most popular and powerful online tool for anybody in Entertainment and Hospitality.
• Transparency and openess. We blog, we announce and we’re proud about what we build. It is a combination of customer feedback and our own innovations. There is no secrecy, no contracts to sign and no shielding of upcoming features or innovation. Our company culture does not permit for closeness or for our work to be veiled in a cloud of secrecy. It’s just not a part of our DNA.

It’s around about that time of the year where we release a number of new features (and products) before the year wraps up. We already have many items in next year’s dev schedule. Some of these include updates to current products, whilst others include totally new ones which we’re sure will blow you away. But as for the year gone by, let’s take a look at what’s been implement in case you may have missed some of it.

Here are just some of what our developers have been able to concoct over the course of just the second half of 2011:

• Online Form Creator and Dynamic Fields: Giving you the ability to customise your database fields and generate website forms (including competitions) on-the-fly.
• Email Backbone Upgrades: This was a huge one for us. We upgraded the email server infrastructure as well as the Email Editor to make emails easier and quicker to send. Many dedicated servers have been spread out across the whole world to spread the email campaigns in a distributed and efficient manner. Real time spam checking on emails, visibility on what your email looks like across major email clients, one-click template imports and a whole bunch more!
• Social Media Products 2 We are introducing a whole new set of features in our Social product. This will include huge advancements to our current offering for both Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and some others out there which you’ll get to see shortly. From events and gallery integration to many other further development, we’re very excited about these new updates.
• Facebook App Creator:  Create applications and add them to your Facebook Fan Page for data growth as well as integration of bookings/guestlists/reservations/events between your Facebook Page and the iPad app (and of course, your database).
• iPad Application: Currently waiting on approval from Apple, we have Version 3 of the MyGuestlist iPad app. Good, solid updates and extra features based on user requests and suggestions.
• Events & Ticketing: Create events, sell tickets, grow your database…PROFIT! Our ticketing platform is currently only available to beta testers and will be available for all in late November. Why are we doing this you ask? Well, we’ll fill you in on another email.
• Magic Series (aka: MyGuestlist Labs): To be released soon. Will contain little scripts and plugins to make your database smarter and more versatile. Some examples: Automatically populate the gender field of people in your database by looking at their name; automatically populating the date of birth of people in your database by searching the Internet for any information; fetching peoples likes/interests/photos from social networks and attempting to rank them socially based on what their interests are. This is a fun little project for us internally and we will periodically be releasing small little updates on this end.
• Table Reservation & Bottle Service: Allow for bottle service, table reservations and booth bookings to be made. Also, collect your $ from them right from your website if you choose.

And these are just the ones we’re able to share. Not only are there more on this list which we haven’t listed, but we’ll also be listening to what users would like to see the most. Because you know, sometimes even users know what the future holds for the industry

Join us on the ride in 2012 as we enable you to step in to the future of marketing & promotions for the entertainment & hospitality scene like you never would have imagined!