31 Aug 10 4 ways your Facebook fans/friends can now be treated like a real database. (World first!)

So for a very very long time, we’ve been asked repeatedly.

What’s the best way of using our Facebook existence to market and promote?

Most of the online world is full of tips, tricks, articles, case studies, tweets, posts and uhhh….”experts” trying to solicit a certain kind of approach to your social media campaigns.

Although we buy into some of these strategies, a substantial amount of these tactics are fluff perpetuated by self proclaimed “social media gurus.” From time to time, we ourselves may give some hints n tips in our newsletter and blog here on how to do certain things, but we never claim there is a magic formula to this stuff and never believe we should put all our proverbial eggs in one basket in terms of purely focusing all our marketing efforts on just social media.

The problem is, that short of posting content on walls, and throwing up a flyer or video, most people don’t really know how to accurately leverage their Facebook friends/fans in a targeted or behavioural kind of way. Sure they have been instructed on the etiquette on how to be retweeted, gain more followers, have conversations with people, solve problems, provide a friendly voice to the brand and so on. But there has been no “app/program/environment” which can support this.

But behold, a first in online social media marketing has arrived in MyGuestlist and we’ve packed it all under the new “Social” tab that you may have seen in your accounts.

It contains the following:

1) Social database

2) Send Campaigns

3) Multiple cross platform status updates

4) Custom Facebook app (this is an older feature, revamped to support more customisation)

Social Database

The concept here is simple.

You can connect as many Facebook profiles as you wish from people who are associated or affiliated with your business, venue or brand. There is no limit to how many profiles you can connect, however each person must give permission to use their profile for this particular feature. We recommend aiming for staff or partners who have a demographic of friends which is on par with whatever your brand stands for. So this means that if you’re selling tickets to an outdoor summer festival, you probably wouldn’t want to connect your gran’s profile up since she would hardly fit the bill. Or would she?

So, once we have this set up, what we can now do, is filter through either one person’s friends, or all the friends in total.

I could search for all females who have a birthday within the next 30 days and who are between the ages of 18-21 because for whatever reason, this is the criteria that is suitable to me.

The algorithm has found 51 of my friends’ friends that fit my criteria. I can now select those who I am interest in and write something direct to all their walls.

You can include mail merge hash tags to include a person’s first name in there so writing “Hey #patronName#, how are things? What are your plans for your birthday?” is a great way to create a conversation that can continue on in the comments of that post.

If you feel like it needs that extra touch of personalisation, you can always use this feature as a means of generating that list for you so that you can then go off and contact these people on your own.

How awesome is that?

And to add to all this, the available info we can play around with for the moment are name, age, DOB and gender.

Quite soon, you will also be able to filter by likes, interests, occupation, hobbies etc.

All very legal, and very very powerful.

Send Campaigns

Another interesting first with this feature.

A huge problem up to now has been that many brands and businesses have multiple existences on Facebook.

Groups, pages, profiles, more groups, separate interstate groups, separate promoter pages/groups and the list goes

For anyone that can relate to that above line, it really is a nightmare!

So, we decided that we would once and for all solve that problem. We now present to you, multiple posts across pages/groups/profiles at the one time.

What this means, is that once we connect all our Facebook profiles up for the first time, we have an option to select from a bunch of text boxes (see below) which groups, pages and profiles will receive our post all at the same time. The benefit with this, is that in one hit, you update all our Facebook existences at the same time.

If you get clever, what you can also do (as some of our users already have) is find a similar like minded product/service/company and get in touch to be able to cross promote via their group/page. Once you join their group and ask the administrators for their permission, you can now target thousands of people you never had access to for the first time! Very very exciting!

Before you ask, yes, there are precautions put in place so that you don’t become a widespread spammer. Both Facebook and MyGuestlist, will restrict how you use this particular tool to begin with and will only allow you to post to a larger number of groups/pages/profiles once you increase your reputation.

Suffice to say, if you are sensible and clean in what you post and don’t hijack groups/pages you shouldn’t be, you will not have a problem.

This feature and the “Social Database” has already been the cause of a few locally produced viral videos as it exposes your content to thousands of people all at once.

It’s up to you though, to create a video sticky enough to be shareable. But that’s another topic altogether.

Multiple Status updates

Many times, brands are spread out across the country or world. Sometimes, it can be hard to co-ordinate one message to all ambassadors/promoters/marketers/sales team at the same time.

You now have the option of being able to update unlimited multiple Facebook and Twitter statuses all at the same time, and with one click.

Cheers!

Custom Facebook Application

This is a rather old feature of ours. In the beginning, it was used as a means of capturing data from your page or profile but has now evolved to be able to support additional customisation.

Right from within the tab that sits on your page, you can have any of the following:

• A welcome page branded with your themes, colours, logos, fonts
• A guestlist/function enquiries page. Data of patron is captured and all guestlists are synced to the iPad app.
• Sign up/ Become a member / VIP page. Data is captured once again.
• Flyers, posters, videos all linked to your site or elsewhere
• Ability to sell tickets right from within the app
• Run viral competitions where your recipients are asked to nominate their friends for certain things,  in order to win prizes

This app however, is the only part of MyGuestlist that isn’t self serviced. Because of the heavy customisation and modification that can happen, you must submit an application request to us from within MyGuestlist to have this up and running for your profiles and pages.

Final thoughts

As Facebook keeps expanding and introducing new concepts (Facebook places anyone?), MyGuestlist will remain active to wrap around any of these new trends in a way which benefits users.

Rather than waiting to see if certain things “take off”, our innovation and culture is to provide users with the ability to leverage as much as they can from these features and decide on their own, whether something is working, or just a fad.

Stay tuned! This is not the end of our adventures with world firsts in Facebook integration and database marketing.

25 Aug 10 Display pics of people in your database

Hi guys

We’re testing out a little feature that may appear on some accounts where any function enquiry, guestlist, contact form, gallery etc, will not just automatically save the information of the patron in your database, but also present to you within the email their Facebook display pic.

This is useful for a number of reasons:

1) Decreases the chances of fake enquiries

2) You get to see the people filling in your enquiries and as a result can validate a little bit more accurately whether they are of valid age or not.

3) Provides you with a link to their Facebook profile should you want to befriend them or suggest they become fans of your page

Here’s a sample one in our inbox of Damian, one of our founders. Check it out and let us know what you think:

23 Aug 10 3 examples of awesome viral videos

We’ve talked before about how the spread of viral videos can be very effective for brand and event exposure.

It’s no secret that the more eyeballs a video gets, the greater the hits on your site and the greater the exposure of your offering. However, there are 2 key ingredients for what makes a video “take off” or not.

1) The content, structure and nature of the video itself.

2) The path it travels to get on to people’s screens.

Although MyGuestlist has some awesome features that allow you to push this content to your normal and social databases, we wanted to show you some examples of good, engaging videos that will make you want to share it with friends.

Number 1: The Tostidos Video

We’ve talked about this one before.

She’s a beauty and a real eye catcher. Although it doesn’t have any interaction with the viewer, the very fact that it is a fresh animation concept literally bursting out of the ordinary boundaries is big enough on its own to warrant a “wow” factor.

Have a look and see what you think. Cool hey?

Now imagine what you could do with that for your own brand.

Number 2: The Hero thank you movie

This is a great example of something you can do to thank your patrons/customers after they have had a certain interaction with you. Or it can also be used as a way to nominate one person from your database for something.

Package the video up within a competition with a prize. If all of the recipients place their most creative entries, you will have success in both the size of your database, as well as the exposure of your product/service/event.

We think it’s cool!

Give it a trial run and see what you think.

Number 3: The Movie with friends

Another fantastic one for running competitions!

Similar to the previous except with the ability to include more than one friend within the video.

Try it out with some of your own Facebook friends, and check it out. It’s an awesome way to incorporate something similar for your next launch or release and we’ve already seen some amazing results for brands which create their own flavours of these types of videos.

These are the kind of videos we encourage you get your video crews, animators and designers to assist you with when it comes to attempting to create a video that reaches the eyeballs of thousands of people.

Most important aspects being:

- Must be interesting, funny, scary or invoke some sort of deeper emotive or cognitive feeling in order to retain the interest of the viewer.

- Must be easily shareable.

- Viewer must want to share the video. Having videos like the ones above where people can interact with them and utilise their own social circles to make them even more interesting, create the viral point for people to want to share.

Fore more info on some the key aspects (including actual figures as well) of the viral effect of videos, check out one of our older articles here. It’s an excellent insight on how to achieve the viral formula!

We’d love to know other interesting videos that you may have seen around the web that are great examples of viral videos.

Let us know if you have spotted any cool ones in the comments below.

09 Aug 10 Using foursquare to measure patron loyalty

For anybody that doesn’t yet know about it, please go and visit Foursquare.

Ok, now that you’re back, let’s chat for a little.

There are many many articles that talk about why Foursquare is the perfect service for hospitality venues.  We won’t say anything more other than it is a perfect way to engross your patrons in a virtual check-in competition whilst rewarding their attendance (and frequency of it) with certain giveaways.

It is important to include your foursquare giveaways in your social, email or sms campaigns. Doing so, will allow your subscribers and VIP patrons to have an even deeper connection with their favourite venue and actually be rewarded for it in the long run.

What do I give away?

This part depends on you and ranges from a Free giveaway, to a points based system for certain other goodies.

Needless to say, the incentive must be something that is on par with what your venue / business / brand is known for, so that it doesn’t seem generic enough to be able to get anywhere else.

Perhaps a signature cocktail? Or one of your tasty new dishes? Or maybe a new product altogether?

Experiment, modify, split A/B test and do everything you need, in order to determine what is the right incentive for your business or company.

Expect to see a fair bit more on location based features and products and we will be right on top of it all, assisting in integrating it with your promotions and marketing.

Needless to say, we will be incorporating many more location based features in the near future with integration into both Facebook, your MyGuestlist account and the MyGuestlist iPad app

03 May 10 Video outside the box. Literally!

A number of months ago, there was a great video ad that popped up on the net showing just how creative you can be with online video and how you present it to your audience.

Since we regularly tell all our users to have more of a presence in the world of online video, this is a great one to give you some ideas on what you can do for our own venue, event or brand.

We’re not going to embed it within this blog post for a reason. You just have to check it out and trust us that you will be impressed.

Oh also, please ensure you aren’t going to attempt to watch it on a machine that is from the dinosaur age or on that browser. You may find some minor (read heaps) of inconvenience.

23 Apr 10 Open rate for SMS > 98%. Wow!

Yes yes, you read that correctly. The open rate for SMS messages is over 98% (Frost & Sullivan).

Of course this is because most people have their phones with them at all times and it makes ignoring a text message a little more difficult. And yes, as of late, there are a large number of people who don’t really believe in the SMS medium as a means of digital/direct marketing. Some common phrases of rebuttal are:

1) People hate spam and don’t want to be spammed
2) People just delete the message when they receive it
3) Everybody else sends out SMS and it doesn’t work
4) Everybody else sends out SMS and we don’t want to be just like everybody else

Now, there is a very small grain of truth behind a couple of those up there, but most of it is based on misconception or misuse of the medium. Here are the remedies to all the above and some things you never even may have realised:

1) You are assuming that the very campaign you are putting together, is spam. That is wrong in more ways than anybody could imagine and is your first problem. Instead of pushing out generic, boring, dull messages about your night or event, how about involve your members and patrons and reward their contribution. This could come in the form of competitions, trivia, quizzes, guess-this-to-win-that, reply-this-to-receive-that, happy birthday message with a reward etc. The list is enormous on how you can send out a “social SMS campaign” rather than a standard run of the mill boring one.

2) There is a little bit of truth with this for some people but here is the kicker that everybody forgets. When the recipient receives the message and reads it, they very well may click on delete or not really pay too much attention to it. They perhaps even already have plans for that weekend, and will most certainly not be attending  your special night. But what you must not forget, is that your brand and everything you have to offer, is now a part of their world and circulates their train of thought. So that when a particular saturday night does come along where the recipient doesn’t have plans, your invitation has now subliminally become a viable choice for them.

This isn’t too unlike car advertising. When Audi, BMW or Mercedes throw up expensive ads on TV and city billboards for their cars, they do it knowing very well that you may not be in the car market that very moment. You may not even be in the car market for another few months or a year. But they do it knowing that the day you are, their brand has entered your world, your thoughts and your way of thinking, so that their investment is now ready to be paid off.

So do people delete SMS messages sent to them? Sure.

Does this mean that your messages are meaningless? Absolutely not. After all, there is over an 98% open rate.

3) This is mostly a combination of 1) and 2). If you want SMS to work, first determine a way of measuring them by getting replies back, signs ups to a particular landing page site, calls for tickets etc. Don’t just send a stale generic message, cross your fingers and hope for the best. That is not the way to go about it.

4) This is sort of like the generic “Happy New Year” messages that pop up on your phone while you try to see the blurry phone screen in front of you and keep your balance straight as you trip over the steps and fall into the pool at the new years eve party.

It’s simple. You do not have to send out thousands of generic messages if you don’t want to. Therefore you don’t need to be just like everybody else. Here are some ideas:

• Wish somebody a happy birthday
• Thank somebody for coming
• Let somebody know that they have a choice between two different kinds of free drinks to receive on entry
• Give somebody a password for priority entry making them feel special about it all
• Give a code that is redeemable for something

The list can go on and on.

The SMS medium is not dead, nor will it be if it is used in conjunction with both a solid database of opt-in subscribers as well as a good, social and involving broadcast.

If you fail to meet either one of those, please don’t blame the SMS medium, but rather think about whether you can either make your message more creative or whether you can clean up your database.

Either way, we can help you with both!

14 Jan 10 9 New Email Templates to pretty up your promos

While you were all busy over the holiday period hosting your Christmas and end of year functions and parties, we decided to add in some hospitality specific HTML email templates into your accounts as a present from us.

These include:

3 x Nightclub templates

2 Casual Dining Restaurant templates

1 Fine Dining Restaurant template

1 Music Festival template

1 Pub Template

1 Birthday specific template

These will be topped up later in the year with Christmas, Easter, St Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Australia Day, Valentines Day, Asian themed, Spring Racing, Middle Eastern Themed, Classic, Retro, Cyberpunk, Noir, Comic, Electro/Futuristic flavours and probably more that we may think of until then.

Got any ideas? Let us know.

But in the meantime, check out what we have below:

Birthday Theme

Nightclub #1

You can easily modify these to represent your own brand.

Nightclub #2

You can use your patron's first name as a means of grabbing their attention right away.

Nightclub #3

Who's playing where?

Casual Restaurant #1

Nice way to show off that new dish or lunch menu

Casual Dining #2

New Menu? New Restaurant? Why note let people know about it.

Fine Dining

Simple, black, white and classy. Insert photo images and enjoy. Bon appetit!

Festival

Event? Big acts? Go big on your promotion.

Pub

A pot n parma never tasted better.

14 Jan 10 5 ways to make your E-Newsletters more effective

Having monitored the open rates and analysed the effectiveness of millions of emails, we now have some solid data and helpful hints to provide you with in the hope that you will eliminate all actions that assist in your e-newsletter and promotions ending in the recycle bin.

There are a number of DO NOT DOs, but that is a whole different article altogether.

Here are 5 methods you can employ to gauge your patrons’ interests and have them look forward to your emails rather than think of them as trash.

• HOW-TO

How-to Content is instructional, and teaches your patrons how to do something specific. This content will usually end up being your most read and your most linked-to posts or pages.

From cocktails, to recipes, to track mixing and mashups for those in the club scene. Use your creativity and come up with a a few topics on what advice and tips you could for free to your patrons.

Remember, Google doesn’t make a cent when you search for something, but they still make money from all their happy users by what is considered a free service. Granted this is from a whole different advertising model, but nonetheless, free is good.

Offer information for free, so that you can make money off your events, nights, cooking classes, cd launches, fashion shows etc.

• REVIEWS

Product reviews are the first thing that come to mind, but you can publish a review on practically anything: popular websites in your niche, new liqueurs, new recipes, new acts, news stories in the mainstream media channels, discussion forums, magazines, meet-ups – basically anything of interest to your readers that you can write an opinion about.

Writing these reviews and talking about how you are or plan to use these products or services in your venue is a great way of building anticipation in your patrons to some interesting things that they can sample in the near future.

• LISTS

Lists are very popular and make for very easy content. You can create a list and just write a short description in a sentence or two for each.

Lists are fun & easy to write.

Some examples that you could offer your patrons:

- Top 10 cocktails of all time
- 15 low fat but delicious meals you can enjoy at [venue name]
- 5 reasons why having your birthday at [venue name] will make it the best night of the year

Tip: Try adding the word “best” or “top” to your title as well as a number to indicate to the reader that it will be a dot point summary of information and thereby making it easier and more enjoyable to read

• INTERVIEWS

Interviews make for great easy web content. You can start with just 3-10 questions, and the person you interview basically creates the rest of the content for you. They’ll be willing to do this for the exposure to your readership, and for the relevant backlink to their website.

Interview someone that is relevant to your line of business and that your readers may know. If this is out of reach, then make the content of the interview something inspiring to your readers. They will love to know how someone created, designed or thought of something and will love reading about it if you can strike a proverbial chord with them.

• SUM UP WITH SPECIAL OFFER

This last chunk can be a call to action for your reader. If you tantalised their taste buds with some delicious food and drinks, or got them interested enough to know more about you, you can now ask them to have their next night outwith you and have a “click here” to book a table or “create a guestlist” link in the email. Better yet, you could  give them the option of doing it, right from within the email as indicated in the image below with the aid of the “One-Click-Guestlist” feature in MyGuestlist.

From our investigations, the above formula seems to be quite effective at keeping a loyal base of patrons which eventually turn into customers who have grown to love your brand and what you offer, enough to have their next birthday or function with you.

The only other piece of advice that goes hand-in-hand with all the above and probably the most important of them all is to make sure that you keep these informative and useful e-newsletters recurring. Whether it’s weekly, fortnightly or otherwise, do not fall off the radar and let laziness kill your online campaigns.

If you have trouble looking for any good email templates, check out our next blog post or let us know and we’ll lend a helping hand to give you some free templates for you to choose from and even customise one to your liking.

01 Dec 09 iPhone app & Mobile app released! Screenshots are here!

Well it has finally come.  An official (albeit beta) release for the mobile app that has been in the works for quite some time now.

It is accessible for FREE to all current myguestlist users and venues. You can access it from your mobile device at http://m.myguestlist.com.au

There is a lot of stuff that you can do from it (both already available and in the works) and we will continue to update it reflecting the changes that all of you request over the next few months.

But enough diddley-daddlying, let’s take a look at what’s under the hood:

View your dashboard

This is the first screen you see and will give you access to the main functionality of the app. Everything you need is just a tap away and can be accessed quite quickly once you are on a wireless network. 3G is also fine, but if your venue does have a wireless network, try jump on it as it will give you a quicker and smoother experience.

The Dashboard panel will give you a quick summary of your guestlists/bookings as well as your database size. As you can see here on the right, our test account has 0 guestlists and we filled it with some dummy data for the purpose of this rundown.

Just below that, you will see the 3 main features of the app, currently of which only 2 are available. My Database and My Guestlists. Tapping on each one of those will take you to their own respective menus. Bulk SMS will be available soon and the “coming soon” label will appropriately be removed.

Underneath that, you have a separate panel labelled Tonight’s Guestlists which is a quick shortcut to only display the guestlists/bookings/reservations for tonight. This is a quick way of checking on the status of your night as soon as  you have logged  in.

Manage your Database

On this screen, you can select whether you want to Add a member to your database or Browse the database.

This is the place you go to when you want to add someone to your database on the go or if you have somebody on a clipboard or at the cloakroom. You can completely replace the need of a paper based system in favour of the app so that it can be synced to your database immediately and not have to double up on work.

In some cases, adding to your database can be used as a VIP Membership function. For example if you are a nightclub, and it is say $20 entry fee at the door, you may propose that it can be $10 entry (and maybe a free drink?) should they become a member.  The staff member can at that point, enter the patron’s details into the app in a VIP Members category and know that they have accurately done so at the start of a night and not at some point in the middle where information gained amongst loud music and/or drunkenness often leads to inaccurate database entries.

Add Patrons to your Database on the go

Here is the screen that allows you to add a patron into your database. All these fields are highly customisable based on what fields you choose to capture. For example, if you capture “favourite drink” or “favourite meal” in your MyGuestlist account, those fields will also be reflected here so that the information can be neat, accurate and as detailed as you possibly like.

You can select your desired category (e.g Saturday nights) and use it as a way of adding information on the go even on that particular night. It is a great way of adding business card information or even just information laying around in the office on scrap paper and post-it notes.

There is complete syncronisation with your web MyGuestlist account so what you add in here will reflect in your database on the web also and will not require any doubling up of data entry. Remember that any information that you override for a patron here will be updated and seen as the newest and most relevant. So for example if you have a patron in your “Friday Night” category, but you use the mobile app to add them in the “Saturday Night” category and you also change their mobile number, this mobile number will then be changed for the patron and they will exist in both categories (but still only receive a campaign e-newsletter or SMS once when sending out)

Browse & change the details of patrons in your database

Here you can take a look at all the patrons in your database and have them displayed based on only the info that you like. Females, 21 year olds, only those which like a particular genre of music, your corporates etc.

You have the ability of opting somebody out from your marketing campaigns. This comes in handy when you may be dealing with somebody face to face and they politely ask you to do this.  Now you don’t need to do it from your computer or write a note to yourself to do it at some point in the future, you can do it right there and then.

Communicate with your patrons

If you have forgotten the contact details of one of your patrons, you can now call, email or send an SMS to them by clicking on the Advanced Features part of this screen.

This is particularly helpful if you do not have this patron as a personal contact in your phone but know that there is some connection with the venue so you can do a search in the app and contact them via this screen.

You can also take a look at how long they have been a member with your venue for, as well as any other personal information that you have acquired from them.

If you want to update their details (e.g new email address, new mobile number, add their date of birth) you can also do this from this screen. Think of it as a way to keep the information on your patrons up to date, as well as the ability to contact them should you find the need to do so.

Manage all your guestlists

As the title suggests, from this screen, you can view all upcoming guestlists, search for a particular one that you may known about or have in your head as well as create one for somebody you might be chatting to on the go, or someone that is simply enquiring about booking or reserving their function with you.

Just like in your web MyGuestlist account, in the “Search All Guestlists” section you can search by any criteria that you like effectively giving you the opportunity to use it as a tracking tool as well.

You can search by a given name from one of your promoters, to determine how many guestlists they have put through or how many birthdays you have had come through in the past 6 months etc.

Use the “Upcoming” option to see every guestlist from today onwards, or just do a search if you can’t remember the timing of one but can remember other details such as the creator’s name or the company name for a corporate function.

Create guestlists on the go or whilst you are chatting to one of your patrons

This is a nifty little feature that allows you to put a guestlist in for somebody that you are just chatting to or is even semi-interested in coming on a given night or day. They will immediately be sent an email from your venue informing them they are now on the guestlist for this weekend or that their function enquiry has been received and that you will get back to them shorty. This is great because the patron is added directly to your database, and your engagement with them is increased by being able to cut out the time needed to give them that special incentive to come to your night, event or restaurant.

View and update the details of your guestlists

If you now have some updated details on your bookings or guestlists, you can change them from your phone at any time.

Want to check on the attendees?

Left the venue and can’t remember some special requirements associated to the function?

Need to remind yourself on something about this particular booking?

You can now do so at any time and from anywhere.

View all your lists and mark patrons attendance

This is completely optional, however is a great feature of the mobile app which allows you to see the patrons on a private guestlist and mark off who has arrived and who hasn’t.

This information is then synced to your web MyGuestlist account and is added to your patron statistics to determine the amount of patrons you have had arriving on a guestlist on any given night.

It’s a neat little metric to have and is even right now used at the door of some clubs and bars. But it can effectively be used in any hospitality venue.

So as you can see, there are some awesome time saving and revenue generating features in the mobile app and we hope that you will enjoy using the benefits it provides.

Stay tuned for future posts outlining new features and additions.

Cheerio!