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.

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.

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!