9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing
Social networking has finally become something valuable for brick-and-mortar businesses. Smartphones and location-based social networks allow users to interact, share, meet up, and recommend places based on their physical coordinates. This real-world connection to social media can mean more foot traffic and profits for business owners.
So-called “lo-so” networks like Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla enable any business with a physical location to not only communicate with customers online, but actually get more of them to walk in the door — and that’s exciting.
The question any brick-and-mortar business owner should be asking him or herself is no longer “Should I use lo-so networks?” It’s “How do I do it?” The following tips are essential to getting started.
1. Learn the Platforms
First of all, you need to understand how the technology works. Generally, people use lo-so apps on their phones to “check in” whenever they go places. Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) locate the users and determine what “venue” they might be at, giving them options to select a location or create a new listing. These “check ins” allow their friends to know where they are now, or where they frequently go. Some services allow users to leave location-based tips for friends to discover later, and several involve social competitions, or the ability to unlock digital badges, stickers, and prizes. Businesses can announce specials or promotions through these apps, so when users “check in,” they receive notifications of nearby deals.
Item one on your to-do list should be to become familiar with the prevailing platforms. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude are the most talked about in general, though others exist, and popularity varies by geography (e.g. Foursquare reigns supreme in New York City, and Loopt has a lot of clout in Silicon Valley). Other platforms to be aware of include Yelp and Facebook, which are just now dabbling in lo-so. Sign up for all of these, and download the apps to your phone if you can, so you can become familiar with how someone would use each one. Most of the networks have iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps, and all of them allow you to “check in” via desktop and mobile web browsers.
2. Determine Your Goals
Before you can optimize your business for lo-social networking, you need to step back and determine what you want to accomplish.
Are you hoping to increase foot traffic to your store?
Do you want to sell more of a particular item?
Do you want more patrons at certain times of day?
Do you want to promote a specific product?
Are you looking for new customer acquisition?
Repeat customers?
You may say, “I want all of those,” but to be effective, you need to set specific objectives. These will determine your approach to the entire process. Luckily, if you need to change things around to fit new objectives in the future, the cost of doing so is very small.
One goal that should be on every business’s list is to be easily findable on every network, which brings us to number three:
3. Establish Your Presence
Make sure that your business is listed on each network. Then make sure the address, phone, and details are correct and current. Don’t assume that users have added everything correctly. On some networks, once a venue is there, it’s stuck. Others let you edit. Don’t be afraid to contact the network itself to ask them for help if you can’t fix your venue listing. Gowalla’s Jonathan Carroll says, “We receive dozens of e-mails a day from businesses around the world asking for additions or tweaks to their Gowalla locations, and we’re happy to help out with them.”
It’s also a good idea to put up notices or stickers (on the door, order counter, or table centerpieces, for example) announcing “We’re on Foursquare” or “Find us on Yelp.” This will remind people to “check in” and spread the word about you.
4. Customize
Different networks have different options for customization, but it’s important that you do as much as you can to build out your listing. Add your website. Integrate with your other social networking accounts, like Twitter. Features are constantly being added to each network, but great customizations you can try right now include the following:
On Foursquare: Create to-do lists for users to explore around your area. And if possible, work with Foursquare to create a custom badge for your venue or event.
On Gowalla: Ask for a custom icon for your location, rather than the generic one for your category. Examples: Shake Shack, NYC, Austin Java, and Coop Ale Works.
5. Implement Compelling Promotions
Lo-social networks allow you to run promos to increase engagement and get people into your store. Foursquare’s Tristan Walker says, “Any type of in-store promotion you can conceive we want to make it so Foursquare can run it.” Many businesses offer specials like “check in 10 times and get a free appetizer” on all the major lo-so networks. Establish well-conceived promotions based on your goals, then evaluate the results. The biggest mistake you can make is to do this sloppily or half-heartedly.
Carroll cites Lift Cafe as a good example. “They offer 10% off every purchase when you check in on Gowalla, which they include in their description and also as a reminder in the success screen after check-in.”
“[What] we’ve seen across all channels again and again is that what works is a good local offer,” says Loopt CEO Sam Altman. Businesses with offers that cater to people “making that gametime decision” when they’re out and about do the best. “Offer value to the customer so it doesn’t feel like an ad,” he advises.
Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology for the Brooklyn Museum, talks about how the institution uses Foursquare to create a multi-faceted campaign and experience for museum goers.
“We knew that many people coming here wanted to know more about the local neighborhood, which is something Foursquare does well. We asked our staff for their opinion of the best stuff in the neighborhood … and left tips at all these venues for Foursquare users to find. Second, we added a promo for our mayor to reward the people who are consistently identifying themselves with us. Third, Foursquare has given us a badge which unlocks after three visits, and this helps reward our community for coming in the doors.
“All of these things together help create a total presence on the platform that works well for the Foursquare community, the Brooklyn Museum visitor, and the local merchants in our neighborhood.””
Common promotions across various networks include the following:
Raffles (e.g. “Every person who checks in gets a chance to win an iPod.”)
Specials for the user who checks in most often. This is a staple of Foursquare promos for a lot of venues (e.g. “Top user/mayor gets the first drink free every time he/she comes in.”)
First check in specials (e.g. “Get 30% off your order when you check in for the first time.”)
Digital punch cards (e.g. “Check in 5 times, get a free coffee.”)
Tips for developing effective promotions:
Advertise particular incentives, rather than your business in general (“20% off between 2 and 4pm;” “Buy one burger, get one free;” etc.).
On platforms that allow you create your own banner ads (such as Loopt), include your address and opening hours in the ad itself, when possible.
Be creative. For example, Incase, the bag and protective case maker, recently ran a promo with Gowalla to put virtual versions of its products into the app to be collected and traded. Carroll remarks, “The result has been phenomenal: Thousands upon thousands of their virtual items have been distributed in Gowalla to an audience who could benefit from their products, but many of whom had not previously heard of Incase.”
6. Engage With Your Customers
It would be a mistake to use Twitter as a one-way corporate megaphone, never interacting with your audience. That’s a quick route to an audience of zero. One of the most effective uses of social media is personal engagement and relationship building with your audience. The same goes for lo-so networks.
7. Track Everything
Foursquare just released a slick analytics dashboard for venues to track their stats. Other networks have metrics you can view as well, and they’ll certainly be releasing better and better tools. From data you can study online to qualitative observations at your own store, it’s important to keep track of everything so you can learn what promotions work with your audience. Be aware, though, that your ROI may not be directly measurable, and aside from increased sales, you’re working for brand exposure and increased awareness of your business.
8. Be Prepared to Adapt
Location-based social network technology may be the newest and grooviest incarnation of social media, but it certainly won’t be the last. And in a year it won’t look exactly like it does today. Be prepared to adapt your methods when features change, as new tools emerge, and as you review your own promotional results. Again, keep your objectives in mind, and be ready to keep up with new technology.
9. Avoid Common Pitfalls
In talking with representatives from the major lo-so networks, several common mistakes came up. Here are a few things you should try to avoid:
Don’t leave fake reviews or tips. They’re easy to spot, and you’ll lose all on- and off-line credibility immediately when people catch on.
Don’t throw up poorly designed ads. “A badly designed banner ad performs so much worse than … a good one,” Altman says. “It’s an insane difference.”
Don’t forget to monitor activity. Carroll points out, “Chances are if someone has a gripe or praise with their check-in, it’s a real-time thing: The patron is probably still there … so the business has a chance to make the experience even better.”
We’d love to hear about your own lo-so experiences. Let us know how location-based services have benefited your business in the comments!
More location-based resources from Mashable:
- 10 Foursquare Apps You Can Use Right Now
- 6 Foursquare Apps We’d Love to See
- 6 Tips for Getting the Most out of Foursquare
- Foursquare vs. Gowalla: Location-Based Throwdown
- Location, Location, Location: 5 Big Predictions for 2010
Tags: brightkite, business, facebook, foursquare, google latitude, gowalla, List, location, location-based, loopt, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, small business, social media, social networks, twitter
Sony opens idyllic new retail store in Nagoya, Japan
We heard back in January that Sony was looking to reface itself somewhat by introducing a minty fresh retail look that takes a note or two from the Apple and Microsoft shops already in existence, and for those lucky enough to find themselves in Nagoya this weekend, you can check it out in person. March 13th marked the opening of the all new Sony Store Nagoya, and with an ample of amount of glass, white demo stands and black overhead signs, it’s certainly one of the more seductive retail shops that we’ve seen. We’d bother knocking Sony for following instead of leading, but considering just how far the brand has fallen over the past couple of years, we’re just stoked to see it putting forth an effort to turn things around.
Sony opens idyllic new retail store in Nagoya, Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
4 Ways to Effectively Use Social Media as a Catalyst
Chris Allison is a social media strategist at NeboWeb, where he helps clients make the most of the social web. You can follow him on Twitter as the voice behind @Neboweb.
As social media marketing becomes more widely practiced, the questions of the day are less frequently focused on the benefits of social media and more often focused on its implementation. Justifying social media to superiors is no longer the marketer’s biggest challenge.
Instead, marketers are being challenged not on the potential benefits, of which there is ample evidence, but rather on how to get those benefits. Where to start?
Social Media as a Catalyst
With this challenge in mind, it’s vital to understand that social media is neither the end nor the beginning of any marketing effort. Rather, social media is a catalyst that works most effectively when it is finely woven into the fabric of a brand’s other activity.
When putting together a puzzle, it helps to take a look at the big picture on the front of the box. Likewise, when putting together a social media strategy it’s necessary to zoom out a little and examine how social media will fit into the context of your other business activities. Below are four pieces of the puzzle that brands can mesh with social media to maximize results.
1. Cause Marketing
The socialization of the web has made it evident that brands that want to succeed online must feel and act like humans, not like desperate, distant corporations. Accordingly, some social media marketers have taken on the role of teaching brands how to be human: don’t say stupid things, don’t feed the trolls, and don’t dominate the conversation – pretty fundamental stuff that somehow got lost during the incorporation process.
However, guidelines for not screwing up aren’t enough for brands to really benefit from social media. Until you bring something interesting to the table — something that inspires passion, laughter, or curiosity — nobody will care if you have a Twitter account.
One of the most effective, simple ways to get people to care about what you’re doing is to do something worth caring about: get behind a cause. Brands have been benefiting from cause marketing for a long time, but the catalytic nature of social media has brought three additional benefits to the cause marketing table:
Access to increased publicity
The ability to be a vocal activist instead of a silent philanthropist by joining conversations
The ability to bring customers into the support process
Pepsi is one of the best examples of a brand that has recently seized the opportunity to leverage a mix of social media and cause marketing. Their Refresh Everything project incorporates votes from users to decide where Pepsi will donate their funds as well as a variety of other simple social media features: single sign-on, a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog.
By involving users with a voting process, Pepsi has effectively done three things. First, instead of just doing good themselves, they’ve helped their customers do good, which helps establish a very positive brand association. They have also created a situation that will compel users to share with their friends (in order to accrue votes for the cause of their choice). Finally, they have built a feedback mechanism that will ensure the causes they support are also the most popular among their customers (which is great PR).
Brands can benefit greatly from integrating social media with cause marketing, and they can learn a lot about how to get started from the tactics that Pepsi has used.
Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.
2. The Offline World
Isolating the impact of social media to the web is an easy mistake to make. It seems natural enough to meet online goals with online activity, but the tangible world of physical objects, locations, and events can often provide a compelling medium to drive fans to engage with you online, or vice versa, you can use your social media efforts to drive activity to guerrilla marketing events like Red Bull’s stash, or simply to brick and mortar stores.
Integrating your social media efforts with real products, store locations, or activities is an important way to acknowledge that you care about the complete customer experience, and that you’re not just in the social media space because it’s popular.
Some of the most successful campaigns, such as Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, have been focused on driving the purchase of offline products. Similarly, customer support profiles like Comcast Cares would be much less successful if they didn’t have the power to influence real offline change by working with customer support representatives that can help customers on location.
On the surface, social media may look like a simple set of social networks that people use to communicate, but when marketers look deeper they find that it presents a whole new venue for empowering all of their existing services, online as well as off.
3. Media Coverage
Though citizen journalism and user generated content have proven to be extremely powerful (Iran’s election crisis, Barack Obama’s massive online get out the vote efforts, etc.), it is important to remember that brands can still benefit enormously from traditional media coverage.
When it comes to social media, or any marketing for that matter, brands must find ways to leverage all of their assets in the same direction. Just like the offline world can easily be used for online gain, so too can traditional media be leveraged in the new media space.
Amit Gupta, founder of several wonderful startups like Photojojo and Jelly, sheds some light on how his businesses have benefited from traditional coverage:
Mainstream press is harder to get, but still drives significant awareness, especially among ‘everyday’ people who aren’t spending all day on the internet. And the names of old media carry
significant cache, enough to drive double-digit increases in conversion rates simple because of the credibility their names lend.
I exchanged e-mails with Amit and he was kind of enough to lend some extended insight on what to expect from traditional media. TV, web, and radio are all able to generate fast, measurable results. With these mediums, people are either interested, or they aren’t. There are comparatively few lagging responses. Newspapers and magazines on the other hand, while carrying significant credibility, produce results that are harder to measure because their content is often read over days, weeks, or even months.
The ultimate success of a social media strategy depends on your ability to recognize problems and seize opportunities to solve them. When considering the needs of your campaign, whether it’s brand equity or an immediate spike in interest, consider traditional media as another tool in your toolbox that could meet those needs. However, remember that part of your strategy should involve doing, saying, or making something interesting and worth talking about. If you don’t do that, no amount of good press can save you.
4. Technology
Lastly, your social media strategy is inherently paired with technology. Without technology, social media cannot exist. However, technology’s role in creating a social media strategy often goes understated.
At SoCon10, a social media conference in Atlanta, Carol Kruse (head of interactive marketing at Coke) described the pain her team went through creating a Facebook application, only to find two months later that changes in Facebook’s design would require Coke to restructure the application – a maintenance cost that hadn’t been anticipated. Having a plan in place for making technological changes on the fly is an important ingredient in the fast-paced social media world.
But technology is more than just a potential cost that bloats social media campaigns; it’s also the life that fuels them. Applications like the recently launched MySpace Fan Video are powered by collaboration between experienced creatives and programmers, not just one or the other. Thus, perhaps the most important synergy to be formed by any company delving into social media is one between their technology team, internal or external, and their marketing team driving the strategy.
Conclusion
Synergy is the name of the social media game. Whether you’re coming from a small company or a well-known brand, starting as far back as possible, zooming out and staring at the big picture, is crucial to creating a strategy that makes sense.
These are four of the most important pieces to the social media puzzle. If you can think of more or have something to add to these listed, please leave a note in the comments.
More business resources from Mashable:
- 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
- 4 Elements of a Successful Business Web Presence
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL
Reviews: Facebook, Iran , Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto
Tags: cause marketing, List, Lists, mainstream media, MARKETING, PUBLIC RELATIONS, social media, technology
Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer Rewards
Foursquare means business. The 1-year-old startup now has a huge brand — Starbucks — using its platform to test out an experimental customer rewards program.
Starting today, frequent Starbucks visitors who check in at retail locations using Foursquare will earn customer rewards. Although there’s no financial incentive or free coffee to begin with, customers can unlock the “Barista badge” after five checkins.
Of course that’s just the beginning; the coffee behemoth plans to use Foursquare as a testing ground for alternative reward strategies and to unlock “the pulse of the experience” for each store.
If you think this is a straight-up play to offer location-based mobile coupons, think again. The New York Times Bits Blog writes that the company is “hoping to use Foursquare to provide even more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”
As Starbucks figures out how best to leverage the checkin, we have to step back and appreciate the magnitude of this decision. With Starbucks on board, there’s no question that Foursquare has all the tools necessary to appeal to — and reach — a mainstream audience. Plus, now that a second company (the first was Tasti D-Lite) is tapping into Foursquare as a loyalty program platform, the additional proof of concept will pave the way for other businesses to follow suit.
[img credit: Bits blog]
Reviews: Foursquare
Tags: foursquare, MARKETING, starbucks
How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter [INTERVIEW]
With over 26,000 followers, West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre is the most popular club on Twitter. Just short of half a decade earlier, however, the fortunes of the historic venue and many of its neighbors on LA’s infamous Sunset Strip were waning and in need of serious attitude adjustment.
We had a chance to talk with Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy and the man behind the club’s transformation from “castle on the hill” to social media juggernaut, about how Twitter and other tools helped not only reverse the fortunes of businesses on the Strip, but build up a stronger, more vibrant local community.
If you’re a small business wondering how social media can be relevant to you, someone in public relations looking for creative ideas, or an organization looking to take your first steps into the waters of social media, you’ll want to read on for a resounding success story and a number of practical tips. If you’re a music fan, don’t touch that dial or miss a slice of history.
The Roxy’s Social Media Transformation
The Roxy Theatre has been graced by numerous musical legends in its 37-year history, from Motley Crue to Nirvana to Bob Marley to a venerable pantheon of who’s who in rock history. The Rocky Horror Show and Pee-Wee Herman were launched there, and the upstairs bar was a regular hangout for folks like John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and John Belushi.
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s though, and the grunge scene had come and gone, displacing a good chunk of what was once perceived as an unstoppable draw to the Strip — one that had easily brought in locals and tourists alike. “The Strip has always been busy and always had relevance, but in the last 10 years we hadn’t had our best 10 years,” says owner Nic Adler, son of one of the club’s founders (Lou Adler, legendary manager and producer of artists including The Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and Sam Cooke).
Part of the problem? The “velvet rope” mentality. “We on the Sunset Strip just thought we were on this golden hilltop, that we don’t have to listen. And we just created these walls around the venues, almost like these castles on the hill, and stopped talking with each other, and didn’t really participate with each other.”
What ended up turning the fortunes of not only The Roxy but a good chunk of other businesses on the Strip? A creative and unique social media campaign that began to build offline community using online tools. “We switched over to a blog format about three and a half years ago, and started to understand that there was this conversation going on. And that we could participate,” says Adler of their first steps into social media.
Local Business: Cooperation or Coopetition?
Early on, the club faced the question of how to approach their nearby neighbors and ostensible competitors for the time and dollars of Sunset Strip clientele. “We got on Twitter pretty early, May 2007, and we got up to about 10,000 followers. The Viper Room had just gone through some new ownership and they popped up and started tweeting. We had this conversation in the office, wondering ’should we retweet them?’ We have these 10,000 followers who would probably be into the Viper Room — do we do this ‘coopetition’ thing?”
Deciding to retweet them ended up being the best choice, because shortly afterward, a new bond was formed and other clubs on the Strip began to take notice. The Comedy Store down the street got on Twitter and joined the conversation, and “from there it just went from one business to the next, and it just grew. And because we had started this new relationship — a clean slate — it didn’t have anything to do with the bookers, or who had more people at their show, or anything. It was a whole new relationship that was created online with the clubs.”
Beyond revitalizing an audience of patrons (which we’ll talk more about in a bit), the Sunset Strip’s embracing of social media led to a regrouping of business owners who are taking a fresh approach to their local community. From creative adoption of Twitter and other tools, The Roxy and its neighbors discovered “we can revive ourselves and take a fresh look at what’s happening out there and not only get the actual customers back, but even affect the government — I know that sounds crazy, but literally, we go down to the city council meeting together and there’s 40 business there. And we’re all talking together and we’ve become a really strong voice within our city to get things done.”
Getting Creative With Twitter
From rewarding loyal club fans to transforming customer service, Adler relayed some creative and unique initiatives that The Roxy and other businesses on the Strip have employed to great effect. A “Tweet Crawl” event was first held in July 2009, where several businesses partnered up to invite the Twitter community for an all-night mosey down Sunset Boulevard with free access to clubs, food and drink specials, and hidden prizes and giveaways handed out via clues on Twitter. Now in its third incarnation, the most recent Tweet Crawl grew the participating crowd from 40-50 up to around 100 crawlers. “Something I miss from my youth is seeing people walk on the Strip and go from business to business. So not only are we doing this community thing online, but we’re actually getting these people to go to these places.”
Another initiative, Club Rox, sold 100 “all-you-can-eat” annual passes to the club for $100 each. Buyers get as many shows per year as they want to attend, front-of-the-line access, a special custom drink menu, and half price deals on everything at the bar. The passes, only advertised on Twitter, sold out in three days and had a far more positive effect than Adler and his team expected. “It created this group of 100 people who are so passionate about The Roxy, and there are people who have come to over 20 shows already this year. We thought we were getting something maybe financially, but we ended up getting this voice of this group of people who are super positive about The Roxy and love music.”
The group avidly uses the Twitter hashtag #ontherox to represent themselves. “They’re one of our greatest assets. They talk about the shows all the time, they always tweet when they’re here,” says Adler.
Also just launched is the Sunset Strip VIP Pass program, which gives any customer staying at participating Strip hotels free front-of-the-line access to participating clubs. The initiative runs for the next six months through the summer, and encourages tourists on the Strip to stay in the area instead of hopping in the car to drive over to Hollywood or Universal City. “Personally I’ve done it a million times and it’s one of my favorite things to go see three or four bands in a night and hang out on the Strip,” says Adler of the VIP program.
The Real Sunset Strip is a weekly weekend Ustream show that aggregates the news and events of the week from around the various venues on the Strip. Photographers send in photos from the week’s events, celebrities come down for interviews, and Adler et al grab passersby on the street for short segments. Sometimes they’ll broadcast right from within the venue. “The club is going on but there’s a TV show happening right in the middle of it. That’s been a great way to tie the different businesses together.”
Adler had a robust Wi-Fi system put into The Roxy specifically to encourage patrons to livestream during shows, share photos from the club, and generally get content out surrounding what’s going on at the venue. Licensing issues prevent the club from doing the official livestream events it has long been interested in. Lots of companies are also interested in partnering on livestreams, but “you can’t get any bands to do it because they don’t have the right to give away their own music when they show up here, and who’s going to get a lawyer to go through contracts with all these bands?” So instead, the in-house Wi-Fi provides a platform for the audience to do their own livestreaming, and The Roxy will retweet the links. Adler says, “I’ll go down during the soundcheck and do 10 minutes of Ustream on the phone and people love it. They eat it up.”
And of course, giveaways are also a popular and frequent method of both bringing in repeat business and giving something back to loyal customers. Offers like “the next 5 people to hit us up get two pairs of tickets and VIP passes,” or “the next person to hit us up gets a month of Roxy shows,” often do well. The people who win are the ones who actually show up. They’re happy about the experience, and they tell their friends. “It’s a positive cycle that’s starting to happen not just at The Roxy but all over the Strip,” said Adler.
Other Social Media Tools
While Adler doesn’t see more traditional methods of marketing going away any time soon — “We still have a publicist, we still have a street team that comes and picks up their fliers on Tuesday to distribute them. I don’t think you can totally write it off,” — he sees social media as essentially a no-brainer for businesses to get into. “It’s a [much] better way to do business. Be honest and keep that conversation going.” Nevertheless, it might not be any singular tool that will do the trick, and it behooves companies to investigate what methods their audience uses to find them and make sure they have a presence there. “People find you in many different ways, and you have to find out how people do that — it’s constantly changing.”
Tools like Foursquare are becoming more relevant especially to local business, although Adler still sees that as something “on the horizon. I would love that Foursquare were stronger.” Nevertheless, depending on the nature of your business, diving into emerging tools might help you reach the right audience. “With LA, it’s a different kind of market than Main Street America. If you have that person who’s on Foursquare, it’s usually someone that’s a first-adopter — someone that other people are listening to and watching to find out the next thing.”
Facebook is another staple these days, and Adler had great things to say about the social network’s ad platform and its ability to finely target a desired audience. “I discovered how amazing the ads are on Facebook. If I can get that target number down to 5,000 people, that’s who I want to be advertising to. I don’t think it really helps to go to 100,000 people; I think your ad gets lost. Getting very specific works.”
Still, Twitter remains a primary tool for The Roxy and other clubs on the Strip for a number of reasons, one of which is immediacy. A patron’s tweet about a weak gin and tonic earned her a visit from Adler and a complementary drink refresh. “It was kind of an awkward moment because she’s like, ‘Oh, are you stalking me?’ [laughs] But it turned into a good thing because she ended up being happy. It’s actually brought [customer service] at The Roxy to an amazing level … Having that relationship will really bring people back.”
Having a large number of followers and clout on Twitter also becomes a draw for the bands that play at The Roxy. “Our social media is starting to be a reason for bands to play here because they want that Twitter contest, or whatever influence we might have out there on Twitter — they want a piece of that. That part makes Twitter important.” Twitter is used to knit together the entire experience of a show as well. These days, many bands and their individual members are on Twitter, in addition to the audience. “We do maybe two or three actual tweets [per] day, maximum, and then the rest of them are really using other tweets to tell our message — whether it’s a fan that’s talking about the band, or the band talking about their experience, or connecting up the people who are thinking of coming to a show. It’s a little easier and faster to connect on Twitter than on Facebook.”
Mobility is also key, and access to Twitter from almost any phone, whether smartphone or not, simply makes it more accessible in that regard. “Facebook to me is someone at home, whereas Twitter I feel is someone on the go. They’re either coming to the venue or figuring out where to go — it’s more mobile.”
Advice for Local Businesses and How to Get Started
What if you’re a small business just trying to get started with social media? Adler had some good advice on how to dive in, and primary among the concepts is to start slowly. “It almost sounds old school now, but just starting with a blog was a huge step into everything. It’s like Twitter in slow-motion. For someone that is just coming into this, it teaches you about content.” It’s also a great introduction to bi-directional conversation for brands. “…the comments on the blog — it was my first time listening to what people had to say about what I was putting out there. It’s an awesome moment.”
Adler also speaks to defining your business’s personality as a key component in developing a voice online. “The personality — whether it is on your blog or Facebook or Twitter — make sure that the personality of your business is apparent. That’s a huge step for a lot of businesses because a lot of them don’t even know their personality … What if your business was a person? How would it act and interact with people? Most businesses probably couldn’t give you that answer. But I think defining that and learning what that is was a huge part of our growth here.”
Using Twitter to gather information is also a powerful way to bring the huge amount of new data that’s out there to bear on your business knowledge. “Being able to track the bands in the weeks coming up to the show is great. You can learn a lot about a band and their fans: What kind of drink specials should we have? Is this a Dewar’s crowd or a Bud Light crowd? There’s a lot of data out there we collect. Also when people leave, we want to hear that exit comment. And we’re the first to do something about it — if it wasn’t a positive experience, we want to fix it.”
Building an audience online also helps solve one of the problems that’s often referred to as a business’s number one fear about embracing social media: What happens if and when people are making negative comments? Building up a supportive community can help crowdsource a way of dealing with that. “If someone tweets something like ‘The Roxy is old,’ I can’t wait to retweet them and say, ‘anyone want to tackle this one?’ because literally 40-50 people will tweet back with supportive messages. So you have this awesome community that starts to back you once you define yourself.”
Overall, for businesses just getting started with social media, the key point is to start slowly. “Starting small was key for us. We went from a calendar-style website that was one page and hadn’t been updated in 2 years, to a blog and all of this.” At first, “I thought it was advertising — that doing the blog was an advertising tool. It turned out to not be that. It turned out to be more of a roadmap of what we should be doing and who we are.”
Nic Adler joins The Comedy Store’s Alf LaMont and The Viper Room’s Nathan Levinson at SXSW 2010 for a panel entitled “A Social Media Case Study of L.A.’s Sunset Strip” on Thursday, March 18 at 3:30pm.
Connect with The Roxy:
[Image Credit: Totallylikeduh!]
Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Netalab on Twitter, Twitter, ustream
Tags: blogging, BLOGS, business, interview, live music, MARKETING, music, roxy, small business, social media, twitter
HP ropes in Dr. Dre for ‘Lets Do Amazing’ personality makeover
When you think about HP, do you think about printers or maybe IT outsourcing? How about HP smartphones, ever think of them? You do know that HP still sells iPAQs right? That’s ok, we have to remind ourselves too, occasionally, and therein lies the problem: most consumers don’t have any idea what HP’s 300,000 employees are up to… or even care. (Ever encounter a rabid HP fanboy before?) While the enthusiast community is certainly anticipating the release of HP’s Slate or next Voodoo device, you’d be hard pressed to find any “normal people” who have even heard of them. So what’s HP to do?
Starting this weekend, HP will be blitzing the airwaves with its first advertising campaign in more than five years. The $40 million, eight-week “Lets Do Amazing” campaign features a number of celebs like “zany” comedian Rhys Darby and photographer Annie Leibovitz in pitches meant to give the very serious company a lighthearted makeover while explaining what it does. Hell, even HP fave Dr. Dre was convinced to shill, though knowing HP they’ll probably use his given name of Andre Romelle Young.
HP ropes in Dr. Dre for ‘Lets Do Amazing’ personality makeover originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
YouTube Deploys Ads on Mobile Site
YouTube will now display banner ads on the mobile version of its website. Google made the announcement in a blog post today, enticing would-be advertisers to sign up by saying that users of its mobile video website are tech-savvy early adopters with cash to spend — the ideal ad demographic.
Google’s all about the mobile ads nowadays; it acquired mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million last November, and AdWords (those contextual sponsored links in search results and the like) went live on iPhone and Android a year ago.
YouTube has experimented with mobile ads in the past, running exclusive campaigns with select advertisers and deploying ads to some users in the United States and Japan. Sony advertised the DVD release of recent Oscar-nominee District 9 on YouTube mobile, for example.
The company’s leaders and engineers are wise to try and stay on top of this. The search giant is a prominent force in desktop ads, but as more people adopt smartphones it’s not hard to imagine that mobile will eventually be an even more powerful influence in the advertising sphere.
Tags: ads, advertising, business, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, youtube
