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.

A Pop Life Bluesfest Story

If you’ve keeping your ear to the ground recently, you may have heard about an interesting partnership between the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest and the National Gallery of Canada. I know this may seem like an unlikely pairing but read on … it actually makes sense and we were in the thick of it.

The National Gallery of Canada is launching a very exciting and  controversial new exhibit entitled Pop Life. It focuses on artists like Andy Warhol and Andy Koons that embraced pop culture and leveraged it to great success. The exhibit also includes some pretty risky 18+ content (watch the video at the end of this post and you’ll see what I mean).

Pop life may be one of the most controversial and interesting exhibits to date at the National Gallery and targets a more mainstream market. Reaching bluesfest fans made a lot of sense, especially since plans were under way to launch some music shows in the ByWard market (York Street), just a stone’s throw from the National Gallery. The byward stage was renamed Pop Life Stage on York St. as part of the whole promotion.  

Our role at FaveQuest was to integrate bios, videos and images of the Pop Life artists into the lineup function (Viewtube Social Video Calendar). We added a special tab in the lineup for Pop Life Exhibit and another for the Pop Life Stage on York St. to allow people to explore the exhibit artists as well as the free music on the York St. stage sponsored by Pop Life. The events will be automatically included in the iPhone app we’re launching imminently (developed in collaboration with Select Start Studios) and are also included in the bluesfest calendar widgets embedded in the websites of many Ottawa radio stations (ex: http://www.chez106.com/bluesfest/  ) as well as the Ottawa Citizen.

I promised you the video. This is a walk through of the Pop Life exhibit at the Tate London (be forwarded, there are some explicit images).

Fans come first in the new Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest website

We are Bluesfest fans too

We built Viewtube to serve YOU. We really did … we are fans too and are trying to bend over backwards to help other fans have a great experience at the festival. We hope it will help you connect with more music and friends than ever before.

If you have ANY questions, concerns, ideas, bug reports … anything at all … please shoot an email to info@favequest.com or leave a comment on this post.

If you’re into marketing, social media and so on, we hope there are some ideas for you here. They are all yours to build on, tweak or whatever.

There’s more to our new festival platform than meets the eye, and more cool stuff on the way so read on.

Video Everywhere

People don’t like to read that much on the web, especially when it comes to live music so we put video everywhere. The home page slideshow, the lineup listing and the performer pages. Wherever there is thumbnail, there’s probably video. Our goal is to serve over 1 Million videos this year so go crazy.

My Calendar

Add your favourite performers to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss anything. To make sure your calendar doesn’t get lost, we recommend that you login … we made as easy as possible allowing you to simply login using your facebook id, twitter id, google account , or yahoo account. If you log in, you’ll get reminders as the festival approaches and you can even share you calendar with others to let them know what great taste you have.

Viewtube: on your terms (this is a big deal)

Rather than expect you to come to the bluesfest website, we exported the core lineup widget with video to other sites you might be hanging out at:

• Facebook: you can share your calendar with friends and see who is going to see specific shows (more on the way)
  • check it out and share it with friends
• Partner Websites: some radio stations and newspaper sites (announcements coming soon)
• Mobile: Mobile version of site and iPhone app coming soon

For the social media marketing types … this is critical and high value for everyone: fans get the data they need on their terms, the partner websites get something engaging and viral (more traffic), bluesfest gets more people exploring their shows … and finally, bands get more attention and hopefully more people at their shows. This is the future and the type of feature we build into our platform to hopefully make everyone happy.

ROI on our SXSW campaign – interesting numbers

Some Metrics from SXSW Social Media ROI panel campaign

When I was asked to join a SXSW panel entitled “Prove it: Exploring Social Media ROI for business“, I thought “why don’t we eat our own dog food?”.

I proposed to the moderator, Keith Burtis, and the team ( Amber Naslund,  Sue Murphy, Jay Berkowitz, CEO of 10 Golden Rules 10 Golden Rules Blog and Justin Levy) that we loosely collaborate on  a mini social campaign to get some votes. We all initially tweeted the links to the SXSW panel picker but I also proposed we create some content (blog, video, slideshare …). The team chimed in with some great ideas and we proceeded to write some blog posts on the SM ROI subject and then promoted them through our networks on facebook, twitter, linkedin and so on.

Where did my traffic come from and how many people clicked on the panel picker outgoing link?

This is a very small experiment with a clear goal: get votes.

To learn from this, I also wanted know:

-which of my social networks drives the most traffic to my site for specific campaigns

-how does this compare to non social media traffic drivers

Keep in mind that the sample number is small (under a thousand visits in a couple of days) and this example is very specific to a particular situation.  Before sharing the results, here are my personal reach numbers:

-Facebook: 258 connections (I try to keep this small)

-LinkedIn:516 connections (I mostly connect with people I know)

-Twitter: 1386 followers (prefer high quality followers)

An now, here are my sources of traffic from google analytics (approx %) on the days I posted and promoted my SM ROI blog post:

-direct (i.e. people go directly to favequest.com). 50%

-twitter: 17%

-other blogs: 14% (mostly other people on panel + my other blogs)

-google: 6%

-delicious.com: 4%

-facebook: 3% (exclusively from me promoting through my status update)

LinkedIn (simple stats update) barely registered. @allain thought stumbleupon was going to win (didn’t even show up).

Ultimately, about 5% of the visitors voted.

DO NOT READ TOO MUCH INTO THESE NUMBERS and keep in mind that the sample size is small and very specific to my experiment. Nevertheless, I think the following observations are worth making:

-surprising small number via google (lots of possible reasons for that and worth investigating, focus on selecting keywords, better tags, better SEO … )

-our traffic spiked dramatically when the post was published

-communities you are active in will provide substantially more traffic (duh … I know) but it goes to show that being active in social networks can drive traffic to your site in an honest manner

-having the support of the community is absolutely HUGE (I attribute much of the traffic from twitter to retweets from my panel members and others, rather than just my direct followers)

-creating content that has value for that community pays off …. instant spike in traffic

-can sometimes be easy to correlate a social media action to a result … write a great post + support of key people and just watch your site traffic spike upl

-5% conversion (people clicking on SXSW panel picker link) was much lower than I expected but the reasons can vary significantly (didn’t put link in the right place etc … worth investigating)

-I can’t explain why such a large percentage is direct traffic. There was clearly a very sharp spike in our traffic when I launched the post and I didn’t promote it anywhere in the media?

The ultimate point of this post is to demonstrate a simple example where there is a clear goal (drive people to our SXSW panel picker to get votes), put together a specific campaign, launch and track what happens carefully. You may be able to determine what worked and what did not which will help you make better decisions in the future.

I’m also hoping you’ll share some of your own experiences and even data. I’m convinced social media is driving an increasing amount of high quality traffic but I want to PROVE IT!

Don’t forget to vote for our panel here: Prove it: Exploring Social Media ROI for business“. I’m watching you

Cheers,

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest

Two ways to generate and measure Social Media ROI

Social Media Return on Investment (ROI)?

Yes indeed!  It exists! Whoohoo!

ROI is tricky to prove without in any situation but there is hope. The first trick is to determine what you are trying to achieve. What is the return you are after? What is the objective? Who are you trying to reach? If you’re doing this on behalf of a customer, it is crucial to understand their end goal but also the interim things that drive their business towards their goal (web traffic, time on site, loyalty …).

Some context: Ottawa Bluesfest

FaveQuest was tapped to expand the Ottawa Bluesfest web property in 2009 by including social media integration (youtube, flickr, facebook …).  The festival people are incredibly sharp … they know what drives their business and we worked hard towards very specific goals. Based on that experience, here are my two ways to generate and measure Social Media ROI.

# 1: Social Media drives Loyalty, Loyalty drives Business

Bluesfest organizers drive a significant number of sales through their Insider’s program. They know this because the initial marketing campaign is focused on this insider group and they can measure the direct impact on sales, with members of this group buying tickets months before the actual event.

One of our goals was therefore to grow the insider list with quality people by providing music fans with real value and incentive to register … no tricks. By registering,  they could access their personal calendar from anywhere, share it with friends, get schedule updates, invite friends and much more.

Many thousands of people registered … far more than expected … and this will drive increased business next year. Because they joined as fans, rather than things like “join to win an ipod”, they are true very highly qualified leads.  Onto #2.

#2: Virality: Social media allows fans to carry your flag

A powerful alternative to traditional advertising is to have your existing fans carry your message for you. Give them the proper fun, interactive tools that benefit THEM and they will spread your message to their friends. They become fans and tell their friends and so on. Friends are the most trusted sources of recommendations by the way. Not advertisers, not journalists. Friends!

Upon launch of the Bluesfest site in April (festival is in July), tens of thousands of people hit the site within hours. On top of this, tens of thousands loyal fans could be reached via email through the insider program and other programs. This represented and huge army of fans that could spread the Bluesfest message. And they did.

I’ll share with you some of the details of the solution we implemented in the next post. Suffice it to say that nearly all interactions were measurable. We know how many people watched band videos and clicked +AddToMyCalendar.  We know exactly how many events showed up in Facebook newsfeeds and how many people likely saw them. We know how many people were invited to attend events through the +InviteFriends button. This may not be PROOF but it is certainly much more measurable than an add in traditional media and it can be substantially more cost effective.

Social Media ROI, the hard questions

The question ultimately is not “does social media have benefits?”.  The question is “do I get more bang for the buck?”. If I divert $20k from traditional media to social media, will I get the equivalent of $40k worth of results relative to traditional media for reaching on-line audiences? Or perhaps “can I drop my $100k traditional advertising budget to $20k with a strong social media component and not impact my business in a negative way?”.

I can’t share the exact numbers (yet) but in many cases I analyzed, including our own, the answer is a resounding YES. You can get way more bang for the buck if you do social media right. For the mere cost of the social utilities and some legwork, tens of thousands of fans involved their friends and it was all measurable, highly successful and loyalty was built along they way which pays off for years to come.

I’m very grateful to be included in a SXSW panel proposal on this very topic.  The panel is moderated by Keith Burtis and I’m joined by a stunning group comprising of Amber Naslund of Radian6 ; Sue Murphy of Jester Creative; Jay Berkowitz, CEO of 10 Golden Rules 10 Golden Rules Blog and Justin Levy New Marketing Labs. Be sure to check their upcoming posts on this very topic … you’re guaranteed to learn something valuable.

This panel is going to rock but of course, it will only actually happen if you vote by clicking here panel picker .

Cheers,

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest

Thank YOU!!!!!

It seems that FaveQuest is capturing the imagination of the media. We’ve been covered and interviewed by radio (CBC, CFRA, Live 88.5), newspapers (Metro, Ottawa Business Journal) and t.v. (A-channel, CTV). Not bad for a two person operation. Thank YOU!

Except that it isn’t a two person operation, even if the full-time core consists of just myself (Allan Isfan) and my co-founder Bill Love.

There’s an army of people, some of which I’ve mentioned in the various interviews but that never seems to make it in the final edits and only my name pops up. This disturbs me because there’s a whole pile of people behind us and they deserve recognition. For you start-ups out there, this is the type of support you might need and should seek (except for my wife .. can’t have her .

Yvonne Craig is my wife of 19 years (we’ve been going out since I was big haired 13 year old punk at Quebec High School).  She supported my decision to leave Nortel to join the ultimately hyper-successful but initially super tiny Catena Networks (acquired for $476M in 2004 by Ciena:) and then supported me again when it was time to resign from a lucrative senior role and launch Isfan Solutions Inc with her and then ultimately FaveQuest. Not only that but she does all of our graphics … for nothing. She’s an accomplished artist and designer with clients that actually pay her (12 to 18 months baby … to the top).

Bill Love is my business partner and co-founder. He is amazing to work with and I’m incredibly fortunate. Super smart, easy going and when we put our heads together 1+1=3. You can’t have him either.

Allain Lalonde jumped in to help us when we got the bluesfest deal. Met for lunch, didn’t talk money “let’s just get this done”.  Are you kidding me? He works full time elsewhere and has been pitching in evenings and weekends. Quite amazing. Don’t even think about it.

Roble Ali connected with me on twitter. Volunteered to help us with the bluesfest viewtube facebook app … for no pay … just experience!

Ragaeeb Haq and Martin Cayouette are two students that helped us through the winter to build a video vetting tool (thanks to Carleton University and OCRI for sponsoring their pay!!). Ragaeeb was able to stay on with us part-time this summer and helped us build the bluesfest jukebox … again with support from Carleton.

Dave Rooney is an amazing developer and Agile Software trainer. He busted his hump for a very long time to build the initial version of our platform. We were very close to launch but got delayed (bit media company… sigh … hopefully will launch this fall). David decided to back to training and is launching his own Agile S/W training company with partners. You should ping him if you manage S/W developers. Seen him work first hand. Awesome.

Our other co-founders, who have now moved into advisory roles are Spencer Campbell and Stanley Berneche. I cannot tell you how much I learned, and continue to learn from those guys. So incredibly lucky to have met them.

Ian Hembery and Bruno Leps, two of our most involved advisers. They were co-founders of AOL Canada among many others things. Helped me grow up and got me black and blue a few times (especially Bruno … no holding back). If your advisers don’t slap you around once in while, you have to get ones that do. Also on our board of advisers are Dr. Michael Geist and Dr. Daniel Lemire and both have provided invaluable advice. Dr. Geist confirmed that there were things we could do without copyright issues and gave us some great ideas early on. Dr. Lemire, a recommendation algorithm expert among other things, strongly advised us on algorithm issues and especially to ensure we realize that reliance on such smart is tricky.

Scott Simpson, CEO of Bitheads believed in us and provided us a developer and some office space (back when we thought we need desks). Their help allowed us to build our first prototype and get the attention of a major media company. We are forever (hopefully not actually forever) indebted to them.

LaBarge Weinstein law firm took us on as clients very early on and have continued to support us for three years.  They still believe in us and put in substantial amount of support. James Smith even helped me get a consulting gig to keep the lights on. Seriously!

InMedia PR (Francis Moran et al) have been helping us with media contacts and training which is in large part why we are getting the media attention we are getting. I’ve also received great advice from Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of dna11 (http://www.dna11.com), the dna art company (ultra super cool). We skyped while he was in California. Trust me, media is not lining up at my door.  I’m pushing hard.

Huge appreciation for Leo Lax, CEO of Skypoint Capital, and all the staff there. They took me on as an  Entrepreneur In Residence, taught me the ropes, connected me and gave me credibility. Invaluable!

Christine at RBC, for dealing with us and providing with support and credit so we could get some working capital that eventually help us secure an IRAP grant (that is now official!). Llynne Plante, Daniel Saikaley and Janice Singer from NRC/IRAP for believing in us and working on holiday and weekends to get us our grant in time!

Rolly and Yvette Renaud for constant support on many fronts, including filtering videos for Bluesfest. Susan Murphy for constant support and video she is producing for us as I post this. Mark Saunders for introducing me to Mark Monahan at the Virgin Radio launch party. Estephe Loridan, my cousin in Paris who built our favequest.com site on WordPress (kid is a genius). My kids for their patience.

Last but not least Ottawa Bluesfest, and especially Mark Monahan and AJ Sauve for giving us a shot when we were unproven but full of ideas and passion. We are forever indebted to you. I don’t think we could possibly love a customer more!

The list of people behind us goes on and on and on. I apologize if your name is missing. I’m running on no sleep, way too much caffeine and adrenaline. I know I have forgotten someone … and I have a pit in my stomach just thinking about it.

Thank YOU all from the bottom of my heart. When you see my name in the media, know that there’s an army standing together by my side. I will not forget and don’t mess with us.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest

@isfan

More Live Music Innovation

We are Fans of the Ottawa Bluesfest

It makes a big difference when you’re a huge fan of the customer you’re doing work for. The people at FaveQuest have always loved the Ottawa Bluesfest and have countless positive memories. We’ve done our best to build tools for fans just like us and I must say, it is going very well.

We have received some very nice emails including one from a nearly blind woman,who was able to explore the bluesfest performers by using our viewtube application because of all the multimedia we included and the simple navigation.  That feels good!

Facebook app 2.0 and more!

But we’re not stopping there. Since launch we’ve added some new features like allowing people to publish their calendar so their friends can easily see what others are attending. We’re also in the process of developing version 2.0 of the Facebook application that will make it even more engaging and social.

There is more. In the next few weeks, we’ll be launching some more tools for fans to explore even more musical acts and stay up to date with daily events at the bluesfest. I can’t tell you more unfortunately but keep your ear to the ground and this blog.

It has been exciting and it is about to get even better!

Cheers,

Allan Isfan

CEO