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!
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
09 Mar 10 The viral formula. Yes there is one!
So it’s no secret that we’re crazy about data here at MyGuestlist.
Ahhh…not stealing it that is, but rather creating models, metrics and generating some useful information from that data to use as leverage for critical decision making in our development and a sales sectors.
So it should come as no surprise then, that many of the world’s tech companies (including us) are utilising what is known as the viral coefficient to deduce whether a certain action/application/entity is technically considered viral or not.
Up to now, this information has not been really interpreted for all us other bar, restaurant and club folk, but let us do that for you.
So, how do you find out if your latest video is going viral? How do you know whether that last competition you just created in MyGuestlist is working its magic? Is your Facebook promotion actually making some sort of impact? Is word of mouth spreading online? We finally have a way of measuring it all.
Let’s explore a little.
So the idea behind the concept of something being viral, is that new members or new activity is introduced to the parent (or original) concept in a perpetuating fashion. So instead of you finding members for your mailing list, they find you. Instead of you finding patrons to enter competitions, they find your competition and spread the word on to their friends. Those friends to friends of their own and so on. This is all well and good but there are two questions that need to be answered.
How do I create viral content?
How do I measure viral activity?
This post is focusing on the latter.
There is a variable in our formula called the viral coefficient. What this is, is a measure of the number of additional members, each new member brings with them.
So based on this information, if the viral coefficient is 1 (i.e each new member brings only one other new member in), the activity/content/distribution will grow, but only at a linear rate and eventually topping out.
So the scenario may be as follows:
10 people become members
10 invites sent per person
10% of those people convert to new members
End Point: 10 new member to the site
So therefore, 10 new members / 10 original = 1 (which is our viral coefficient)
Above 1 however, it achieves our desired and classic hockey stick on the graph scenario of exponential growth.
10 people become members
15 invites per person
10% of those people convert to new members
End point: 15 new members to the site
15 new members / 10 original = 1.5 viral coefficient
The following table is created by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist in San Fransisco’s Silicon Valley. Study it carefully as it illustrates the difference between a tiny increase in the viral coefficient of 0.6, 0.9 and 1.2. In the example, Liew starts with a base of only 10 members and a viral coefficient of 0.6 and defined time as the period it takes for a member to invite others, which he estimated could be anywhere from 2-8 weeks for this specific experiment.
Viral Coefficient Stats
So the idea was that starting with a base of 10 members and a viral coefficient of 0.6, you flatten out at 25 people, a gain of 15 members. At 0.9, you end up with 75 new members and growth slows dramatically.
With a viral coefficient of 1.2 however, those same 10 members, yield an amazing 1,271 additional members.
We come up with the following formula:
Viral Coefficient = Invitations x Conversion x Infection
where Invitations = average number of users invited by each active user
Conversion = proportion of invited users who activate
Infection = proportion of new active users who invite additional new users
For some more info on how to calculate growth and population forecasting, read this blog entry by Robert Zubek.
So, what to do about increasing this viral coefficient?
Identified, are 5 solid ways to increase the viral coefficient. To first understand these 5, we need to understand what we are trying to do. This is:
- Trying to get our members to send more invites or share our content more to other non-members.
- Try to get our members to return more often to our site/content/venue/party so that they are able to invite more often.
- Find more channels and mediums for the recipient to receive the invites.
With the above in mind, we can now explore the techniques for increasing our viral coefficient so that this can be achieved.
1) Invitations/Sharing integrated as a part of the core
To increase the average number of members that each of your active members invites, you must ensure that new member invitations are a core process in your marketing, action or content.
Examples:
- Hotmail has a small invitation at the bottom of every email which helped with early adoption.
- PayPal allows members to send money to non-members and provides a referral bonus if they join.
2) Immediate utility or usage without external needs
In order to achieve traction with initial members, you must provide some immediate action/task/utility for them to look at, play around with even when none of the member’s personal contacts have joined.
Examples:
- Twitter allows you to micro blog, before you’ve started following or getting followers
- Linked in allows you to setup resumes and connections prior to any invites going out
This step is quite important as most users will not invite other friends until they’re familiar with what is being presented to them. If you don’t provide them with something to do before they’re ready to invite others, you will probably lose them before they reach that stage.
3) Persistence. Keep pulling people back into your world over and over.
There are heaps of examples of this. From Facebook pulling you back in to update your status, to Facebook apps like Mob Wars reminding users of new features that are unlocked. You should always remain in touch and keep sending useful communication that will encourage people to come back to your event, or website.
In addition, once you do one of these pull-ins, remind these active members that they can invite more people and what the benefits are of doing so. Just be careful to not fall into the trap of becoming a spam machine and sending reminders or newsletters all the time without a good reason.
4) No Artificial barriers
According to the CyWorld Behavioural Distribution from “Do friends influence purchases in a social network?”, Raghuram Iyengar, Sangman Han and Sunil Gupta, there is a following approximate distribution:
47% of people are not well connected, have limited interaction with others and are unaffected by social pressure.
43% of people are moderately connected and “Keep up with the Joneses”
10% of people are highly connected and can also be negatively influenced by others
So the fact of the matter is:
- Most people will not invite anybody
- A few people will want to invite lots of people
- Ask yourself how you will make it easy for those few to invite as many as they want: 5, 10, 20, 40 people at a time
5) Influencer targeting
It isn’t important that your content or word of mouth is just spreading, but it is equally as important to make sure they are spreading from the right person. The connectors.
You should select those people to receive viral content based on the number of friends they have, the size of their network (online and off) as well as the probability of instigating action.
If you have anything to add which you may think increases the viral coefficient of your promotions and content in the hospitality industry, please share it in the comments.
29 Oct 09 45 ways to use Twitter to your advantage in the hospitality industry?
So you’ve probably opened an account and not known how to make Twitter work its magic as you’ve heard it has for some others.
The varying ways in which you can use it alter based on whether you will be tweeting as an individual or a company and there is a ridiculous amount of help and assistance on what the best way to utilise Twitter and social media in general, but most of it might not be applicable to the way which you do business.
For example, many large companies such as Starbucks, CNN and Ford utilise Twitter to listen to their customers and respond to any problems, rectify any public mistakes or speak up when there is negative chatter about their brands in general.
This sounds good in theory, but as somebody involved with a club/bar/restaurant/venue, this doesn’t hold much strength for you.
Let’s have a look at what you should be tweeting about as somebody within the hospitality game if you want to provide direct value to your followers:
1. Announcement of specials and discounts on drinks, food or tickets
2. Welcome a new staff member and explain their upcoming role
3. Promote a new product in your bar, a new dish in your menu or a new act which will be playing
4. Run competitions and giveaways to gain participation from your followers. Do NOT make prize a gimmick or unworthy of participation (this is a double benefit because you will also be able to grow your database)
5. Recruit new staff by listing job vacancies
6. Post media releases on your venue or night, as well as any other media articles related to your business.
7. Promote happy hours
8. Retweet messages from friends within the industry
9. Thank everybody for coming to your night, event, the weekend
10. Promote your next event with a direct link for your patron to book/enquire
11. Get customer feedback (if you don’t have a large following this can be tough, but keep it in mind for when your follower base grows)
12. Comment on current affairs in relation to the hospitality industry
13. Share useful websites for your business and the industry
14. Link to your new blog posts (yes it’s time to get a blog as well if you don’t have one)
15. Broadcast updates made to your website
16. Promote your other social media networks eg. Facebook, LinkedIn
17. Conduct customer surveys
18. Notify customers to changes in upcoming events or nights.
19. Showcase your new radio or print ads
20. Tell your customers about great service you have received from another business within the industry
21. Get feedback on any new systems, software or equipment you plan to purchase
22. Search for new suppliers
23. Promote associations and organisations your venue/business belongs to
24. Booking/Enquiry/Guestlist availabilities caused by last minute cancellations
25. Give tips and free advice on drinks, meals, coffee etc. (e.g Mention a cocktail that one of your bar staff has created and list the ingredients. You can offer to give a free one to all who come this friday night
26. Broadcast news in relation to the hospitality industry.
27. Highlight your Twitter/Facebook milestones, eg. 1,000 Followers / Fans
28. Profile your staff members with some cool fun facts.
29. Post changes to schedules, timetables or opening hours
30. Discounts for mentioning your Twitter posts
31. Any appearances you are making, eg. trade shows, workshops, seminars
32. Seasonal greeting to customers, eg. Merry Christmas, Happy International Left Handlers Day
33. New address and phone numbers if you have moved
34. Any unfortunate outages or delays that will affect a day or night of trade
35. Highlight any community involvement or charity associations
36. Send reminders to your customers, eg. Melbourne Cup Weekend coming, NYE etc.
37. Give your venue/business a personality – share a joke or two
38. Link to photos from your latest event or night.
39. Promote a business award nomination or achievement
40. Link to forums you regularly participate in (yes, you should be doing that as well as Twitter updates)
41. Share cost savings for buying a “birthday” or “hens night” package from your venue
42. Use Twitter as a customer service/help desk for your business (will probably only work if you have many followers.)
43. Celebrate venue milestones, eg. 25 years in service
44. Encourage people to follow some of your favourite Twitters
45. Promote birthday packages
29 Oct 09 Viral videos: How to make one that actually does go viral!
Viral videos are one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Every “marketing expert” is pitching them as the best way to expose your brand/business without actually advertising.
But how do you know what’s right and wrong? How do you know what will be the next numa numa, star wars kid or chk chk boom girl?
Short and truthful answer is, you can’t. And you probably won’t be able to. There will never be a formula for what makes a successful viral video. However, we can look at one company that has taken somewhat of a structured approach.
Blendtec is a company in the U.S. that makes blenders, has made a series of videos where a scientist-looking figure attempts to blend the wackiest of things, from marbles to coke cans to crowbars, using one of their blenders. The videos are all on YouTube, but you can see one of them below:
These videos have all of the ingredients of perfect social media marketing:
- Interesting and different
- Easy and free to access medium (youtube)
- Fun to watch
- Markets the product’s strengths, while not focusing on them specifically
- Consistency with the brand – showing of other products and logo prominently in videos
In fact, this marketing has done so amazingly well that Blendtec’s sales have gone up by 700%! Each video has over 1 million views each – and to be honest, I even felt a slight urge to go buy one of those blenders after watching!
So what lesson can we learn as nightlife & hospitality troopers?
Well have a think about how you can incorporate those 5 points above into certain elements of your venue. Here are just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- Funny cooking class videos from your chef with interesting and non-conventional cooking ingredients
- A competition between two patrons in your venue in some funny game. Award prizes.
- All you can eat/drink competition
- A musical in your venue. No jokes! Check out this and this. These are incredibly viral & shareable amongst friends on Facebook.
- Exhibit the skills of one of your staff into a cool and impressive video. This could be cocktail mixing, musical performance or anything else they may be good at.
- Do a spoof of a popular trend, music video, film or show. Done the right way, these can be explosive.
- Do a funny false “media statement” where you announce new events, nights, meals, drinks, offers, musical acts.
- Do a coke vs pepsi styled taste test between one of your signature cocktails and another similar beverage
There are so many more that you can add to this list, that it can almost be the basis of another blog post.
Be creative, make a video that is engaging, shareable amongst your friends and friends of your friends, with the ultimate goal of sparking more interest in your venue or event.
16 Sep 08 Facebook Application
The MGL team have finished and are now currently testing a facebook application that will be used to capture details of facebook users (your patrons) and store them right in your database. The facebook API is limited to allow us only certain types of functionality, but we are clever little code monkeys and have found ways to do what has been needed for a while.
The first version of the application will include a big shiny “Create a guestlist at <venue name>” button on the venue or promoter’s facebook page. This means that your patrons can now create their guestlist from the wonderful big world of facebook (which lets face it, everybody checks more times than they check their cheque account.That was a pretty bad joke. Please don’t hold me against it.
And off course the beauty of it all is that with each guestlist created, that patron’s details (and any of their friends if you choose) are stored directly in your database.
Facebook is one of the busiest social portals on the net at the moment, and why miss out on all the benefits it can provide to you?
Should have been done by now.
Tsk tsk competition…
