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.

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.