Social Mobile Apps

Mobile apps have become an absolute requirement for festivals. At FaveQuest, we've take that even further.

Our apps include advanced features like:

• create you own calendar
• video associated with most events
• Facebook login
• see what shows friends are attending
• posting events to facebook and twitter
• Facebook "like" button: we're the first in the world to do this!!!
  
• event and location check-in which can optionally be posted to Facebook

For more on our mobile solution, please click here.

FaveQuest <3 Bluesfest

There we said it. We <3 Bluesfest. We actually loved Bluesfest before they became a customer. Mark Monahan, Executive director of the Ottawa Bluesfest and Allan Isfan, CEO of FaveQuest met accidentally at the launch of Virgin Radio in Ottawa with Sir Richard Branson in the crowd.

Elevator Pitch

A quick elevator pitch followed by a meeting a couple of weeks later and some late night phone calls and a deal was done. FaveQuest launched a beta version of the Social Video Calendar in 2009 as a drop in widget in the existing site. Tens of thousands of music fans used the advanced tools to watch over 226,000 videos and build and share their calendar with friends. We knew we were onto something.

Success Breeds Success

Bluesfest brought on FaveQuest on to design and rebuild their entire website, a Facebook app and an iPhone app. Traffic on the site grew by 30%, time on site went from a minute to over five minutes and with that also came a new sponsorship from the National Gallery of Canada (yes, a website can be a revenue generator instead of a cost center).

The Relationship Continues

We have also developed some very specialized tools for Bluesfest to help them manage their operations. For example, the FAB (FaveQuest Artist Booking) tool. With a multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of artists, tracking offers, contract details, contract status, riders, budget and so on can be very tricky to do with a spreadsheet. Ottawa Bluesfest now uses our FAB product to perform all artist bookings.

Another big nightmare for festival organizers is trying to track, keep up to date and allow necessary staff to access key contacts for all bands. Some bands have 8 or more people that need to be reached for various types of reasons. We built a specialized tool call FACT (FaveQuest Artist Contact Tracker) to solve this problem.

FUN FUN FUN!

During the festival, the two co-founders of FaveQuest, Allan Isfan & Bill Love, in addition to several others, become roving reporters interviewing fans, staff and even musicians. It comes with an access pass! A dream come true.

We truly <3 Bluesfest and will be forever grateful to Mark, Mike, AJ, Sarah, Tammy, Nathalie, Allison and the whole team for believing in us and giving us a shot that changed the entire course of our company.

Facebook Apps

FaveQuest actually started out building Facebook apps for media companies so we know our way around Facebook. We have built several standalone festival apps but for 2011, we're changing direction somewhat . Our new apps will be integrated into our customers' Facebook pages. It will lead to more Facebook "likes" of their page and deeper engagement with visitors. We're excited about this evolution.

The integration goes ever further:

• Fans can log in to our Social Video Calendar and Mobile apps with their Facebook credentials
• We embed many of the popular Facebook plugins like commenting and "like" buttons
• Our content management system can automatically create Facebook events through the Facebook API. This is absolutely HUGE for large festivals that simply can't manage the manual process
• We're working on some other very exciting Facebook elements but must keep them under wraps until we launch them for Just for Laughs this spring.

For more on our Facebook apps and integration, please click here.

Social Video Calendar

The FaveQuest social video calendar is the heart of our product line and totally rocks!

Fans: Fans get to explore all your events, watch video, create a personal calendar they can share with friends on Facebook and twitter. This tool has been used by over 500,000 fans to explore festival events. We're pretty proud of that.

Embedabble: The coolest part?: we can optionally make available a simple code that anyone … from bloggers to major newspapers … can use to drop in your complete calendar into their site. More eyeballs for you at no extra cost.

Content Management System: Ok, we lied. The coolest part may actually be the pieces that fans don't see. We developed a custom Content Management System that alloys any of your staff to add events, videos, photos, bios and more with very little training. We're in the process of adding advanced analytics so you can see what's getting interested on your site way ahead of time.

API & Synch with mobile: All the event info and fan schedules are made available through a private API which we use to update our mobile apps on the fly. That allows the mobile apps to always be up to date and allows fans to access calendar they created in the social video calendar on your site. Very cool.

For more, click here.

Happy Thanksgiving … now grow a mo

Giving thanks should not be a once-a-year activity but it's good to be reminded how lucky we are. Not everyone is so lucky … 4,400 men die of prostate cancer in Canada each year and one in six men will be diagnosed during his lifetime. That's just crazy!

Grow a Mo for Movember and change the face of men's health …

What is Mo you ask?

"The Mo, slang for moustache, and November come together each year for Movember. Movember challenges men to change their appearance and the face of men’s health by growing a moustache. The rules are simple, start Movember 1st clean-shaven and then grow a moustache for the entire month.  The moustache becomes the ribbon for men’s health, the means by which awareness and funds are raised for prostate cancer.  Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the men of Movember commit to growing a moustache for 30 days." 

Movember takes place across the world and has raised over $100 Million dollars so far and Canada was in third place overall in 2009 with $7.8M. Our goal for 200 is $10M and we need your help.

How can I help?

Glad you asked. Two simple ways you can help :

1) Join my MovemberYOW team and grow a mo

You'll be part of an amazing community with tons of events throughout the month of November such as the big Nov 1 shave off, the end of November Stache Bash and many more. Note that we've also challenged the team from Austin, Texas whose butt we're going to kick. It seems that Jacksonville, Florida has challenged us as well … we'll take them both on.

The more people I can get on board, the more lives we can impact. I am asking you to join my team and either grow a moustache as a Mo Bro, or join as a Mo Sista to help recruit other gentlemen.

To join my Movember team go to http://ca.movember.com/register/75362 and follow the steps.
Once registered you'll be sent all the information you need to raise funds and start growing as part of my Movember team.

Note: we are working very closely with the MovemberOttawa team and will be participating in all of their events. Our own focus will be to leverage the web as a way to complement what they are doing off-line.

2) Donate to prostate cancer

Go to http://ca.movember.com/mospace/515608/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account
or write a cheque payable to Prostate Cancer Canada, referencing my name or Registration Number 515608 and mailing it to:

Prostate Cancer Canada,
Suite 306 145 Front Street East
Toronto, ON
M5A 1E3, Canada. 

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan
Team Captain, MovemberYOW
twitter: @movemberYOW
email: movemberyow@gmail.com

Some stats from Ottawa Bluesfest – part 1

As some of you may know, FaveQuest developed the brand new Ottawa Bluesfest site for 2010. Many of you have expressed interest in the numbers we have been seeing on the site …. many of them are stunning. This post is part 1 … I'll share more if you're interested. I'd suggest registering to the blog if you're interested in this type of stuff.

If you are a festival organizer, this should leave little doubt regarding the importance fans place on your website. People use your website to make important purchasing decisions, and if designed properly, share that with their friends.

A Bit of Context

The Ottawa Bluesfest ran from July 6 to July 18 2010 and included over 250 shows. Total attendance was in the hundreds of thousands making this festival one of the biggest in North America. Some of the headliners for 2010 were Iron Maiden, The Flaming Lips, Arcade Fire, Roger Hodgson, Rush, Santana, Weezer, Drake and many more. It is a big deal.

I'm not at liberty to share exact numbers but will give you the rough scale of some of the typical numbers people look at. Not all these numbers are a measure of the success of the site but they will give you a sense for the scale of traffic.

Some Numbers (all approximate)

Launch Day April 21:

We launched in the middle of the night and the site started getting visits right away. People are rabid at this time of year waiting for the band announcements. It is actually kind of crazy. Here are some launch day numbers:

• Visits: 100k
• Uniques: 75k
• Pageviews: 600k
• Videos/bios viewed: 30k
• Avg. Time on site: over 6 minutes

The majority of people were spending time checking out the Lineup and watching videos and even starting to build their own calendars. Much of the traffic came between 10am and 1pm so it was very spiky. Even though we did tons of load testing ahead of time, we didn't anticipate how spiky the traffic would be.

Luckily we had decided to host the site on Amazon cloud (AWS) and used a separate Content Distribution Network to serve up graphics.  The site got slow around 10am and we found ourselves having to quickly bump up the memory associated with the database, bumped up the size of the server and even added a second large front end server. The site quickly stabilized and we were off to the races. Now we know exactly what is needed for next year.

Overall (April 21 – July 18)

• Visits: over 1 million
• Uniques: over 500k
• Pageviews: over 6M
• Videos/bios viewed: over 300k
• Number of total events added to "my calendar": over 250k
• Avg. Time on site: ~ 5 minutes

The scale of overall numbers from site launch to the end of the festival are pretty stunning. This really demonstrates how heavily people use the web to explore festivals.

I'm happy to share more data within reason so please let me know what else you want to know … lots more important stats. For example, we have a share button that allows people to share events on Facebook, twitter or by email. Are you curious to know what the breakdown is between them? Wondering about mobile browser breakdown? Happy to share that too.

Also, we give people the opportunity to log in to the site using an existing account such as Facebook, Google, Twitter or Yahoo or create an account directly on the site. Interested in the breakdown? Results might surprise you.

Tips and Tricks for the new Ottawa Bluesfest Website

The 2010 Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest festival has kicked off and there is even more going on than before. With over 250 musical performances, new comedy and performances in the ByWard market, we thought you could use some tools to help you find great shows and connect with your friends. Here is a brief summary of the tools.

Social Video Calendar: view the complete list of performances by day, by performer, by stage or by performance type. Click on the performer name or the thumbnail to read the bio or watch videos. Click on "Printer Friendly View" for a simplified view you can print.

My Calendar: when browsing the calendar, click on the "addtomycalendar" button to add the show to your own personal list of faves. We recommend you log in to the site to make sure your calendar doesn’t get lost. Logging in also allows you to share your calendar with friends!

Flexible Log In: You can create an account or simply log in using existing web accounts like Google, Yahoo, twitter or Facebook. We recommend using Facebook if you have an iPhone since you can log in to the iPhone app using your Facebook account and retrieve your calendar.

iPhone App: Version 2 of the iPhone app is out and it is super cool. Not only can you access the entire schedule, watch videos and read bios but you can also build you personal calendar or retrieve your existing calendar (if you created one on the main website after signing on using your Facebook id). The app also includes a map and very cool "Facebook Friend Finder". You can check in to many locations on site and your Facebook friends can see where you are checked in (see the blue bubbles on the map). We hope it will help you and your friends find each other more easily.

The link for the iPhone app is -> http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/cisco-ottawa-bluesfest/id373439991?mt=8 but you can simply go to the app store and search for "bluesfest".

For non iPhone users, you can use the mobile version of the site: http://m.ottawabluesfest.com

Daily News: The daily news page includes contributions from the "Ottawa Tonite Street Team". They will be sharing their experience, capture fan stories and the occasional artist interview. Look for them and tell them your story. Also look for the daily "on-deck" section that helps ensure you don’t miss any of the major events going on that day. Finally we have lots of video and photos to capture the mood, show you what’s going on backstage, artist interviews, fan interviews and more.

Wi-Fi On-site: Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest has partnered with Storm Wireless and Cisco to blanket the entire site with Wi-Fi. It is entirely free. It will allow you to easily access the website, retrieve your personal schedules while also helping tell the world how much fun you’re having.