25 Jun 10 Our biggest social update yet!
As the Facebook platform grows and grows, so does its dependancy and use for marketers, promoters and sales teams. It has gone from being a place friends keep in touch and reconnect, to become a complete business portal for many individuals and companies.
At MyGuestlist, we are quite heavily oriented around social trends and social media as you can see. Especially when it comes to how it is used to enhance the leverage you have on your database of patrons/contacts and the effectiveness of your marketing.
So let us bring you up to speed with what we’ve been working on and how it is a collection of some of our biggest social media advances yet. We’re absolutely sure you will rub your hands in glee once you see what’s currently under the hood and what’s just around the corner.
Take a look.
Automatic Facebook Friends Birthday Updates
Up to now, we’ve given MyGuestlist users the ability to track upcoming birthdays of their database contacts and send an email/sms to only that particular segment.
Cater for all Facebook birthdays automatically
Considering it has performed exceptionally well, we decided to move that same feature in to the Facebook world so that you can leverage that same power over your friends and contacts.
Find out all upcoming birthdays, write on your friends’ walls or chat to people individually and let them know about what you can offer at your venue/business for their happy day.
Best part is, you can link an unlimited amount of Facebook accounts in MyGuestlist to do this. From other staff members, owners, managers, marketing crew etc. So you aren’t just restricted to your own Facebook friends, but can open up your promotions to thousands of other people (with the messages being from the person with the linked up account).
This not only gains you access to expose your efforts to more people than you originally had access to, but it does it in a non-spammy, personal way as the message is coming from the person who is on a 1-to-1 basis with the recipient.
Bloody awesome hey?
Link multiple Facebook & Twitter accounts for bulk status updates
The same status. The same promotion. Everywhere & all at once
We found that as teams were growing and companies and people were spread out in different states, staff weren’t in the office or were busy shaking off the hangovers from the previous night, that the message (think email/sms campaigns, flyers, or facebook updates) simply was being dilluted and spread thin when trying to get news and updates out there.
So what you can do now, is update the statuses of all your staff, marketing crew, friends, siblings, neighbours,neighbours’ tennis partners, neighbours’ tennis partners’ dogs…well you get the idea…from the one place! This includes writing on group’s walls, friend’s walls and the walls of pages. So effectively, with the one post, you can update and post on multiple pages, groups, profiles and walls with the one click!
How great is that hey?
An excellent benefit for all those who have multiple divisions/entities around the city or country, have their Facebook presence spread out amongst various groups, pages and profiles, or simply those working with individuals or teams which work from home or another office.
Display pics of guestlist/booking creators or member signups
We’ve always wondered haven’t we. Even as a group of people who were once in a hospitality venue of our own, we would wonder how to get a better grasp of what kind of person a particular patron that had called up or put through an enquiry would be.
Who, what and where are your patrons & customers?
Using Facebook’s Open Graph platform, we can now provide you the ability to see the patron which has just subscribed to your mailing list, become a member or put through a booking.
You will have the ability to automatically see their Facebook display pic as well as a link to their profile should you want to add them as friend or suggest for them to become a fan. This data can then be synced to the iPad app for live use.
Oh and pssst…in the very near future, this whole process will be automated. So anybody joining your database or putting through a guestlist/function/booking enquiry will also receive an automatic Friend Request / Page Suggestion on Facebook.
So it’s not just about growing your database, but about growing your social presence as well. Wink!
Create, collate & manage Facebook events within MyGuestlist (Coming soon)
It’s no secret that we’re not really fans of one of Facebook’s features.
- Bring together all those messy Facebook events in to one
Yes, the one that most of you probably use on a weekly/monthly basis. Events!
There are a few reasons as to why we aren’t fans (pun sorta intended) of Facebook Events mostly consisting of the fact that there is no real way of collating the information from any given event.
Example: Say you have a upcoming Friday night event. You create an event and invite a whole bunch of friends. Problem is, Sarah is having her birthday there on the same night, has created an event and invited a whole bunch of her friends over too. She may or may not have let you know about it. Then you have a promoter who has created their own event to accomodate for their friends and you find yourself in a situation where:
- You have multiple events created for the same night/event
- You have no way of collating this information so you know who is/isn’t coming
- You have no way of measuring an estimate of the amount of people that will be there on the day/night.
- You are losing out on communicating and/or offering incentives, gifts, freebies or other goodies to those who will be coming.
- Most importantly, you’re not in control of the information, spread, walls posts and other content that begins to get associated with the event
Now bearing this in mind, let’s see, how many of these issues do you think we can rectify?
For all you playing at home, the correct answer is: ALL of them.
Not only that, but even the people who don’t use Facebook (and use your website instead) to put through bookings and guestlists, can now invite their Facebook friends (which you can have access to see so that then you can convert to be your own friend/fan/patron in your database) to be on their list.
Stay tuned on this one. From a management point of view, it will become very very useful.
Data completion (coming soon)
Ah, last but most certainly not least. The two words you probably have never thought about much, but something that will grow the power you have over your database many times over.
Data completion.
What this means is this. If you have say a “John Smith” in your database with only his email address, you are severely limiting your knowledge on this person and know nothing more about him other than the fact that he has a name and an email.
- Find out all missing pieces of info and have it auto-completed at all times
What MyGuestlist will do to remedy this, is scan the social web (Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, everywhere else with social profiles) and fill in the rest of the data for you. This can range from anything such as DOB to occupation, gender, likes, interests and in some cases even more. Their display pic will even be downloaded and stored against their name in your database.
Naturally this will only be applicable to those patrons that are already opted-in to your database. Everything remains legal and relevant.
It is a huge benefit, for you to be able to segment and categorise the contacts in your database as much as possible since you can then fine tune your marketing efforts based on very specific criteria.
Imagine being able to find out which people in your database are 28, love jazz music, jet-skying and are born in November.
This kind of information is not too far away.
Stay sharply tuned!
07 Jun 10 The iPad app has landed. Register now for a beta invite!
So it’s finally here guys. Albeit still in beta mode. You can register your interest at www.myguestlist.com.au/ipad
You can finally ditch those papers, sheets and clipboards and move in to the digital age with the MyGuestlist iPad app!
Some of you may ask “what’s the point of just marking off guests/patrons as they arrive on an iPad when we already do that on paper?”
To that we say, here is a glimpse of what benefits you can get from switching over:
- Track how many patrons come throughout the night
- Know the male/female ratio both in real time and at the end of the night
- Accommodate for VIPs, Free lists and special requirements
- Receive last minute changes, requests and updates
- Track time of arrival of all groups/guests
- Track walk-ins that aren’t on a list
- Integrate with Facebook to pull photos of guestlist creator and eliminate false submissions
- Keep track of patron attendance throughout the week and allow them to unlock performance “check-in” badges. (e.g if patron John Smith has been to the venue 5 weeks in a row he unlocks the “Party Animal” badge. If he does 10 weeks he gets the “Rockstar” badge. And you can choose to reward him.
- Track the performance of your promotional team or staff (e.g if promoter John Smith claims that they will bring 30 people to the venue this week, you can now track whether those 30 people arrived, when they arrived and how many were male/female.
- Generate stats of night and compare against previous nights, events or weeks.
- More to come in future updates, easily handled by the updating process in the app store
31 Mar 10 Interview with Bodie Czeladka from Secret Society
We were recently given the pleasure of capturing a few minutes of time from Bodie Czeladka, director of one of Melbourne’s most prestigious promotional companies, Secret Society.
Here is what he had to say:
Q: Secret Society is a well-developed brand with much success under its belt in the Melbourne scene. Can you summarise what few points you think helped you achieve the success in exposing your brand?
BC: We injected a lot of cash and time into the branding early with a lot of support and loyalty from our venues. We still do to this day, to show gratitude by showing a lot of loyalty to them for that initial support and faith in our business. We also realise the value in building brand strength and using strong branding on all appropriate mediums.
Q: What do you think is the most effective way that bars, clubs and restaurants can communicate and involve their target market?
BC: I think it’s a triangle of interaction. If you lose one corner your branding and business will suffer. We find that it is a combination of:
1) Supplying your patrons with a good product when they come to the venue (and value for money).
2) Create and maintain a good online following, somewhere that patrons can easily source content, enter competition and be eligible for giveaways.
3) The most important is old school marketing techniques, not just online. Human interaction and word of mouth creates the best branding for any business.
Q:What is the one or two most important pieces of advice you would give to anybody thinking of running a venue or promoting it?
BC:Don’t try to do too much. I have seen so many promoters over the years build up a great following and then blow it all by watering down their product and trying to put their fingers in too many pies. Try not to be a jack of all trades master of none. Constantly try to reinvent your self and your branding, and keeping things fresh, is the best way to stay on top.
Q:What is one “No-No” of the hospitality industry that always cringes you and you wish could be fixed or not done any more?
BC: Bulk text messages and spamming with no valuable content to the consumer and no opt outs in emails and texts.
Q:Naturally everybody promotes on well known public holidays and days in the year, but is there a secret little part of the year that you think works wonders and perhaps one that venues or promotional crew don’t particular take too much notice of?
BC: Unfortunately no I don’t, but if I did this wouldn’t be the forum I would be sharing it in as then it wouldn’t be a secret 
Q: Do you think Online Social Media is a must for all hospitality venues and what do you think is the best way to use it?
BC: Definitely but it has to be complimented with a solid product. You can have the best marketing campaign in the world but if your product is rubbish it won’t give you a client base. It is dependant on the particular product, for us it has always been as a portal to direct people back to our website.
We think of social media like we do dating or a night club it is a place to meet new people and after interacting with them for a bit you invite them back to you place (Website). THAT is where true relationships, trust and loyalty is built and a product can be sold.
Q:Do you feel like Facebook may be getting a little overrun by promoters and venues all pushing their brand out to people. How can this be combated?
BC:It can’t be, all we can do as a promotions company is lead by example and upcoming promoters follow suit. Our rule is in regards to events or club nights if you don’t have anything to say, a point to make or something to give patrons don’t say anything at all.
Q:Have you used MyGuestlist and if so, what kind of positive help (if any) has it contributed to your marketing campaigns or admin procedures?
BC: Our main goal over the past 3 years has been to focus on building a strong database, and since joining Myguestlist we have never felt in more control our our database. We have gained knowledge about what our subscribers like and don’t like through the use of myguestlist back end statistics and gained new concepts and ideas for extra ways to increase our subscribe rate and reduce our opt out. We never would have been able to if not for this fantastic product.
Not to mention the 7 days a week 24 hr support we receive from this ever so helpful team.
Q:How do you see the relationship between the Internet, patrons and the hospitality industry evolving over the next decade or so?
We can only speak in the short term as a decade from now, anything could be possible. But..
I believe newspapers and a lot of other forms of non-targeted advertising and marketing will become null and void. There are a number of high traffic bloggers that will be probably be identified and recognized for doing better research with better reporting and less bias than the traditional media. So blogging will increase and be a place where reviews and opinions on venue’s and nightclubs will really hold weight so it isn’t just about advertising online, it’s about maintaining credibility and helping promote the goodwill of your product/brand/venue.
Whilst Facebook and it’s successor will grow and no doubt surpass google, unless google join the race with a solid product.. and dependence on services like google ad words and analytics will increase and become an integral part of ALL businesses, rather than primarily web focussed businesses like it is currently.
I believe Facebook and other social mediums will find away to counter the overuse and spamming problem and true business with true content will survive and continue to grow whilst time wasting content will hopefully fade into the background.
Q:Any regrets? Do anything different?
BC: No regrets, but obviously there will always be things we could or can do better but the key is not to dwell, just keep your eye on the prize and keep moving forward.
Q:What’s upcoming in the world of Secret Society?
BC:A lot more fun and a continual improvement in our product and service. We hope we to get into a lot more one off events this year which will give us a chance to branch out of not only our comfort zones but our venues.
Our business is people so we will be making it our number one goal to find not necessarily a large number of people , but the RIGHT people to join the team, working for Secret Society has a lot of perks but we are also very selective with our team, people who work for Secret Society don’t see it as a job, but as a lifestyle.
What are you waiting for http://secretsociety.tv
13 Feb 09 Bushfire Appeal
In reflection of the terrible bushfire tragedy of last week, the MGL team are donating all proceeds from this and next month’s startup fees to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal.
You can also donate and help all the victims and survivors online here at the Red Cross Website.
20 Jan 09 Step Back Think
Haven’t really done two posts on the same day before, but there is something different.
Today I noticed an article in the Herald Sun relating to the the proposition for a booking system to be implemented for busy nightclubs so that young people can book online to gain entry to busy city nightclubs.
The proposal comes from Anti Violence group Step Back Think who are comprised of friends of bashing victim James Macready-Bryan, a young man who suffered permanent brain injury after a city assault.
The article is a good read (for both patrons of nightclubs, and nightclub owners themselves) to keep in mind how dangerous and ruthless the streets can be at times.
The SBT group seem to be organised and passionate in their goals, and we at MyGuestList would urge anyone to visit their site and check out their Did You Know facts, as well as joing their Facebook group where you can interact socially with other members of the group.
