Social Traffic
Launching a Nightclub On Facebook
This post is an event launch marketing campaign published in my new book as one case study. My book is called “Social Traffic” - Event Marketing In a New Media Scape and launches on October 21st. Enjoy!
This case study is based around the execution of a successful night club launch for a client. We used nothing but social media.
Step 1:
So, the first step is to create a virtual group on Facebook of a cool user group who has great parties every now and then. You don’t have to mention the venues or details of the parties these people attend; in fact you can build a culture within the group where doing so is considered a taboo. Focus on group member’s party experiences & stories after a weekend, build excitement, promote their pictures — and the fun they all have each weekend! You want new viewers of the group to think two things:
1- these people are cool.
2- The parties they go to rock.
Step 2:
You want to keep updating this group page with new activities, party ideas, themes,
photos and all of the things that would attract your targeted audience as much as possible.
Remember its taboo to mention a party venue, date or time. Promote the story pertaining to the event:
1- Get people to start following the group in anticipation.
2- Get them to share it with their friends.
3- Get them to add stories and photos of their own nights out, in the lead up to your
event.
Remember the emphasis is always on non-disclosure of your venue or the date of your
launch, though you would want to indicate a month. You may also want to promote personalities within the group as being the kind of people you want at your event. (Always create that feeling of scarcity wherever possible).
Step 3:
Suggest an “anything goes” policy (within the law), release parcels of information over
weeks not days. Remember you are getting the crowd excited, by telling them the story where they can become the stars (if lucky). The story must reflect the perfect night out for these people.
The key is to engage them into a conversation by having them participate in it. Get them to
answer survey questions online (use http://www.SurveyMonkey.com) about the entertainment or dress regulations, even crowd selection, make the groups feel like they are organizing the biggest night out since the Beatles. The thought leaders, people who can move other people will rise to the top of this group through natural selection.
Step 4:
You can set up Flickr, Youtube, Friendfeed accounts on the side. You can then feed the
photo gallery, the Youtube channel and your Twitter account into the Friendfeed room and
Facebook profile. Each day, you can favorite fantastic photos and videos of amazing club nights so that people in the group can see them. You can also bring in content from blogs in the form of ‘notes’ and tag people to the notes. If you don’t have a blog, you can setup Google Reader to pull in great articles and stories from all over the web of good club promotions and launches and bring them in as ‘notes’. Tagging people to notes entices them to read the note and add comments. You can also associate yourself and your campaign to the best club launches on the internet by twittering about it a few times a day. You can contact and interview some of the promoters of the events and record the podcasts of these interviews to share with the group.
Without having to create any content on your own, you can use the above methods to build
traction and buzz on your group.
Step 5:
As each thought leader puts their hand up you can leak a little more information to these
people only, give them more detail regarding plans than you do for the rest of the group.
Remember don’t let them or the group know when the event will be held or where it will be, but you can leak details like the capacity, ticketing & how the selection process will play out. Give these people some ownership, give them something that sets them apart from the pack, it’s what they live for and you are going to need their support. Get your target audience excited about the concept of your launch party and begin syndicating this story through micro blogging, use link baiting, photo tagging and other strategies to drive traffic to the group while the buzz builds momentum. Keep building the suspense until you have the group publicly asking how they can get tickets.
Step 6:
When you have the numbers you want buzzing around the launch, outline your plans.
Give the group a location but not the venue (address) and give them the date. Send out electronic invitations along with the party ticket capacity ensuring the number is well below the number of active members you have attracted to your Face book group (say 600 people). Be prepared to partition walls if you have to, ensure the venue size matches whatever crowd capacity you end up with. You are telling the story that everyone has bought into for this big night out, at the end of the night what you said will and must go down at all costs. You need to put your reputation on it and come out the other side.
Inform the hungry crowd that only people who RSVP as interested are eligible to attend. Make it clear that people are not to RSVP as confirmed, you don’t want to build walls around your story that you can’t tear down if you need to. You want the group knowing that everyone wants to come without them knowing who will be there. Anyone who RSVP’s as confirmed is instantly deemed not-eligible for entry.
Step 7:
If you have done everything well to this point you will have at least twice as many people
that have indicated an interest in attending the launch than the number of people you have
declared to be your capacity. Communicate the situation of scarcity to the group with concern for those who look like missing out. Do not allow yourself to become the door bitch whatever happens. Ask the group to decide on a door policy, have them fill out a quick survey about how to deal with the problem.
Now this is a multiple choice survey, so whoever writes it will want to make sure the group gets an option to vote for the lead personalities in the group to hand-pick a certain number of guests each from the list of people marked as interested. Most people in the group will know one of these leaders directly or indirectly which gives everyone a better chance of getting a ticket than your promotions team implementing a door-policy, it’s the choice I would pick.
Let everyone know that the leadership group will decide who receives tickets and these lucky people will receive text messages on the night of the launch event. Messages will go out between 9.00pm and 10.00pm and it will include the venue, directions & instructions for the midnight launch. Included within the text message will be a pin number that can be used to open a locked doorway.
For the best effect the venue could have a back alley (preferably) entrance that leads them into a chamber where security will greet them.
Timing is everything in this game. Pick your launch night when the groups interest peaks - if you delay the hype may begin to wane and the result may even be a flop. It’s a fine line between getting this right and getting it wrong. Time your launch well, hit the right emotional triggers at the right time and you will see the results.
Your event launch will not only be full, patrons will have paid top dollar to get in. The marketing will have cost less than the security pin pad at the front door and all the people who couldn’t get in will spend the following week telling everyone about your club. More importantly you have already established a second tier of early adopters who all feel like they own the club, ensuring long term success. You can do it without cost and you don’t even need to visit the club. You can use this technique and drive the final surge to buy tickets on your http://www.EventsListed.com page on behalf of a club owner and take your cut of the door.
Of course all of this is virtual instigated hype - some may consider it manipulative even. But
again, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything against their will. If you want high impact
launches without investing in promotions or losing out on ticket values or sales revenue because of freebies or discounts - this is the way to go. I’ve been involved in massively huge club launches based on this tactic alone.
If you already have a market presence, creating online traction won’t require any virtual or artificial hype. A good example of that is how Techcrunch.com markets its conferences.
Tags: nightclub promotion, facebook, social networking, event marketing, launching a nightclub
“Social Traffic” - Why this book topic:
“Social Traffic” - Event Marketing in a New Media Scape
Why this topic:
In 1958 Licklider saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution, which many years later resulted in the creation of the web. Till 2000, all we needed was a website to be considered ‘on the web’. The definition and usage of the internet has changed so drastically since then, that it’s imperative to think about it in terms of your “complete” web presence - which includes your profiles, followings, social networks, life streaming, blogs and much more. People, who aren’t part of this new social media landscape, are in essence, not really considered ‘online’ at all.
According to a research, as of today; it’s a fact that approximately 73% of online users read blogs. It’s a fact that 57% internet users are on social networking sites. It’s a fact that Facebook just recently hit their 100 million user landmark within months. It’s a fact that people are tuning in to Youtube more than mainstream TV with approximately 83% internet users having viewed online videos. Almost 40% of all the people on the internet subscribe to RSS feeds. On an average 16,500 tweets (twitter) are sent each hour. Most astoundingly, there is a massive shift in company brands when 36% of internet users claim to think more positively about companies with blogs. Should these stats matter to us as business owners, event managers or marketers? I just want to achieve one goal today - make you understand that being ‘present online’ and building a powerful business network isn’t as difficult as it seems. In fact, the principle ideology for online success in today’s world is much closer to your offline mind set than most exponents of online networking can see.
If I can convince any of you to take the leap, to take what you do naturally offline, online…then everything that I’ve done so far in my career would become worth it.
With its huge potential, Web 2.0 has opened up gateways for businesses. There are more than 400,000 entrepreneurs and developers on the Facebook platform - And this is just a SINGLE social networking site. Imagine if you tap into several, how big and profitable it can be for you. The key is to channel the intelligence and savvy of the collected group and make your space a user-friendly place for people to meet, connect and share. Online event marketing also has a huge potential now, more so than ever before, thanks to Web 2.0 techniques. People are no longer an audience who are “just a witness to the event taking place on stage” but are actually a part of planning and promoting it. Your audiences, customers or markets have the most influence in making your events or launches a huge success. Social media has taken things to the next level and the division between “you” and “them” has blurred and “we” has emerged. This book is about channelizing this force to your advantage.
Welcome to Social Traffic - Event anchored Marketing in the New Media Scape.
Book launches Wednesday November 5th. You Can Sign Up Here.
I hope you enjoy the book, as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Google Friend Connect – A game changer
The way internet usage has evolved, we have been introduced to some interesting products recently. Google’s Friend Connect is one of them that is still in test mode but will be launched any week, in fact the Microsoft funded Facebook took everyone by surprise last week launching their new Facebook Connect widget. It seems Microsoft are fighting back, taking Google head on in a Social Media turf war that has just been stepped up a notch. Both widgets serve as plausible tools that are using the power of social media effectively.
With Facebook and Microsoft testing similar social connect technologies these days, it seems to be a new direction for the industry to focus on. We’ll find out more about this open-social based power play in the weeks to come, but for now, suffice it to say that these little innovations will go a long way for small and large website owners and social networking tragic’s alike.
When website owners add the widgets onto a site or blog, it will allow the website to act as it’s own social networking destination for users of Google or Facebook to join and invite their friends from any other social network to come and join them. From a website owner’s perspective, the good news is that you can customize the widget according to your interests, generate the code from Google or Facebook and insert it into your website without any hassle of programming. Furthermore, for analysis purposes you can generate “reports” and check the growth of your social network that has joined your site through these widgets.
When I say social network I mean a mini network of people who are all interested in the content your site offers, who have joined through either the Facebook or Google widgets placed on your website or blog pages that are directly connected to your members Facebook or Google Friend connect accounts. All this happens in only a few clicks and barely a few minutes.
Now as a user, you can sign up for any website with these widgets using your Gmail ID or Facebook ID. Interestingly enough, all the accounts that you have on social sites that you have ever joined, whether (Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo, Facebook or any other), will appear within the widget and you can source friends from those accounts asking them to join you at whichever website across the net you have joined.
Additionally, you can also publish activities that you perform on that website into your social networking profiles. This may help in the big boys aggregating together people with similar interests. You can keep a track of your friends who have joined the site and also keep others updated on your actions on that particular website through feeds & bookmarking.
If you publish content on your social network through a Friend Connect widget, friends sharing similar interests would be more inclined to check out the site. In this way a solid contact base can be aggregated into the social website. Also, you can initiate topics, share media, add photos, have polls or any sort of discussion on the website to interact with people who have similar interests as you.
The new “Open Social” developers code has been written into most big social networking sites, including our site Events Listed . Now, I am not a techie person, but from what I understand having been involved in the development of my application that has this functionality, is that this code slaps AA tags on text fields where there is communication between different members of any site. This text is stored in the Google word database with our names tagged against it. Now, privacy isn’t an issue because if we want to continue to have access to these multi-million dollar applications for FREE , we do it on their terms.
What this means is that this database knows who has commented on my wall and notes and what words they used. This is enough information to be able to know who I am, who my friends are and what I am interested in by the time I sign up through my Friend Connect widget on any website.
In this way, every blog or site can form a community around it. Communities where people of similar ideas and interests can interact, collaborate and socialize. Some people may think that this is what they do already. Nope, this is more like you visiting my blog about event marketing , you can join my community through either the Google Friend Connect widget or the Facebook Connect widget (we have integrated both and will be one of the first websites to have done so), once in your widget account (a pop up window whilst still at our blog) you can invite friends to join you from plaxo, Orkut, Gtalk if using the Google Friend Connect and if join through the Facebook widget all your Facebook friends. You can send them a message like, “hey come and join Events Listed its got some great event marketing strategies.” Your friends accept so are now a part of the Events listed Friend Connect community that is connected by not only the Events Listed community, but their common membership through the widget, gmail accounts, gtalk and the RSS feed from our blogs is automatically fed into their Google Feed reader. This means that if our blog represents great value it’s members can continuously invite more friends from other networks to join, the cycle of interacting and learning would continue to grow amongst like-minded people who are already connected in the bigger social networking communities - giving birth to a much easier form of interacting with people who share your interests.
Now, if we stopped providing great quality content, our community would start talking about leaving, amongst themselves through the chat function on the widget, in Facebook or through gtalk and quicker than we can say WAIT, our social audience has gone off. Marketing websites in the future will all be through word of mouth, we need to attract people who have contacts that listen to them so when they invite them to join a site, they will come through a common interest and trust factor.
To put it short, it adds the facility of having everything in one place with the comfort of being linked to everyone in multiple mini networks scattered across the internet. Considering we are all members of such social networking websites, it’s about time we integrate it effectively to attract people to our blogs and websites.
It also gives you the opportunity of increasing your social circle in the niches that count for you, you can anchor your general social network to Facebook whilst spending more time in the niche networks amongst consumers and friends who all have the same interests. Finally, for newbies who haven’t ever gotten their heads around RSS feeds and feed readers, don’t worry. You won’t need to any more because if you sign onto a blog social network through Google Friend Connect, you automatically receive that blogs feeds into your Google Reader that comes with your Google Friend Connect account.
For 130 pages of cutting edge information about object orientated, Event Marketing through Social Media, put your name down for my new book “Social Traffic”. There is no such thing as a FREE lunch but for those people who act early, the cost of the book will rhyme with hero.
Tribalism - Speaking the lingo
This is another excerpt from my book due out November 5th - “Social Traffic”
Always remember that the people you are marketing to are your online community. They are a community of people supporting your services, attending your events and communicating directly with you. If you want more people to contact you for services, manage their events or to buy your products, then it is important to build initial trust and credibility first.
Secondly, you need to be an active part of the community itself. Participate with the audience, ask them questions, discuss ideas, share thoughts, request feedback. This communication helps people in opening themselves up to you and become more inclined to use your services or attend your parties later on. Also, it is the best way to get a feel for audience expectations and early feedbacks of your events. Credibility comes from sharing insight, discussing thoughts and adding value to conversations. When people start to respect your opinion as a good one, they will become more inclined to becoming your customers.
The escalating online trends in social media, the increase in fancy new gadgets - all of these factors have paved ways for you to communicate with your market on more direct levels. This direct interaction brings you to downright human levels and potentially breaks all gaps between you and your customers. You can talk to them. You can listen to them. You can communicate with them. You can build loyalty. You can build relationships of trust. You can do so much, just by leveraging different tools to form a bridge between you and your customers.
Some people believe that if you want to be ‘accepted ‘ or ‘liked’ by a group of people online - you have to be like them. Shel Israel calls puts it this way: “Humans are tribal by nature. It is in our DNA. It has to do with why we are passionate about sports teams and rock bands. It has to do with why most people want to marry people of their own race or religion and it has to do with the unfortunate human tendency to mistrust or downright dislike people of apparently different tribes.” (Shel Israel http://redcouch.typepad.com)
From my perspective, however, I have seen how the boundary of the concept of tribes strips down and evolves into something much bigger and tolerant online. The subtle anonymity or behind-the-curtains-feel of being online has changed our criteria of tribalism. Instead of race or ethnicity, tribes are formed based on authority, thought leadership and recognition. For instance, experts of a certain niche group are more revered than newbies.
Understanding the dynamics and cultures of a network or group is vital for surviving in it, and the only way to show them that you are one of them is by speaking their lingo.
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Object Orientated Social Map
This is an excerpt from my book due out November 5th - “Social Traffic”
There has been a lot of discussion to understand the social ecosystem that has been built around a person’s online existence. Because of my interest in anthropology and sociology, I spend a significant amount of my time studying online trends. What’s most interesting is that when you start plotting your social network on a graph it comes up with such an intertwined complex network consisting of different platforms and nodes - all relevant to your online existence in some way or another.
A lot of people have used complicated ways to illustrate our online social maps. In theory its actually quite simple. If you think about the different websites or applications that you use, you’ll notice that there is an actual thing (or object) that forms the basic cohesive power.
When I go to Wikipedia, the object is information. When I go to eBay, the object is the product. When I go to Flickr, the objects are the pictures. The objects are the underlying value that the site offers and differentiates itself with. Websites that forget to focus on an object, lose the social media game. The reason why we call them objects is because we want you to feel like they are actual entities that form the heart of the application. Building your own applications may be difficult in this fast-paced cut-throat business, but associating yourself with existing social networks is easy. Instead of spending 5 to 20 thousand dollars to build a site which will have zero traffic initially, you can build a presence on different social networks at no cost and create hundreds of thousands of dollars of opportunities through it. The purpose of this book is to help you figure out how to do that on your own.
The image above is my view of the social map. It contains two key elements: collaboration and sharing. A few categories of sites emerge from these (marked in grey boxes), like “information”. These basic categories are sub-divided into different types of online applications (marked in red boxes). Everything outside the dotted box is based on an object of value offered. For example, when sharing information on your personal blog, the object of value is your “thoughts”.
In practice, when I starting plotting those graphs I realized that Milgram’s Six Degrees of
Separation theory isn’t that far from reality.
The way the internet has evolved - specifically web 2.0 technologies - we can effectively reach out to people we could never have previously dreamed of. The important thing for us to learn is how to make the most of these online networks without giving away or risking too much. Having said that, I’m going to dedicate the next section of this book (section 2.2) to walk you through the uses and benefits of different applications.
Put your name down for a copy of “Social Traffic” here.
MySpace
FaceBook 
BeBo
Linked In
Pownce
Twitter
Friendfeed
Tumblr
Second Brain 
Wink
Live Journal
Simpy
Get Boo
Net Vouz
Yahoo
Disqus
HelloTxt
Google Sharing
Flickr
YouTube
del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Furl
Reddit