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.

Social Media for Musicians – Part 1

Before I get going, I would like to refer you to the new shiny email registration function just to the right. I’ll wait right here while you go over there and register so we can connect better. waiting …. waiting … waiting …

OK, done? Perfect. Let’s go.

Chick peas straight out the can

I’m not big on eating chick peas straight out of a can or cuddling with many pounds of electronics in a van all night.

I’m referring to a story told to me recently by a live music venue owner who has connected with thousands of bands, most of them undiscovered but absolutely fantastic … bands that came in with low expectations and blew people’s minds with what they did on stage. This is how one amazing band lived … eating chick peas straight out of the can, and living in their van from town to town, sleeping with all their gear, partly out of financial necessity and partially to protect their gear. I think we as a social media community can help great musicians find their audience and we’ll all be better for it.

Social Media ROI for musicians

The difference between musicians and many larger businesses is that for these guys, it is not about whether to spend $100k on traditional media or $100k on social media. They have no money beyond a bare subsistence and maybe enough to record a CD, get some t-shirts printed and travel by car and van from venue to venue. I think social media can make the difference between continuing in this mode of operation and making it big. This kind of Social Media ROI is very exciting because it can be the only marketing tool these guys have, and most of it is free.

A Real Life Example: Silver Creek

Let me introduce you to Silver Creek, a local Ottawa supergroup. These guys are the real deal … all professional musicians … and any of the guys could lead their own band (in fact, a few of them are in multiple bands). They self released an LP and recently an EP entitled follow the sun (look for it in iTunes). They played on the big stage at the Ottawa Bluesfest just before Blue Rodeo and got rave reviews from the crowd and media. They play all over Ottawa and have done some mini tours, including a 30 day, 30 gig stretch in western Canada last fall. They’re about to go another tour late November around Winnipeg.

First Tip: Create outposts and bring everything together in one place

Silver Creek has a myspace page and a facebook page and some videos on youtube but they are not well set up to have their web presence drive business … more gigs, merchandise sales and so on. I have offered to help them build out their complete web presence and hopefully grow their fan community. The high level strategy is to clean up their existing outposts (MySpace & Facebook), extend more effectively into Youtube, add Flickr, Twitter, Animoto, DEQQ and iLike to the tool box and pull it all together with a blog based website. Much of the focus will be on fan interaction and getting their growing legion of fans to help them break through to the next level.

In my next series of posts, I’ll be sharing the more detailed strategy and then doing deep dives into each major social media outpost (youtube, flickr, twitter, animoto, DEQQ, iLike and so on). I would love to hear what tools you have found to be particularly useful and I’ll add these to the blog series if it makes sense. Feel free to provide links to other blogs and sites which include great resources for musicians.

And finally, here are some videos of the band Silver Creek.

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

Happy Customer = Good, More Social Media ROI thoughts

Holy huge crowd batman

“Have you noticed how happy people are here”?

My business partner said this to me several times as we would stroll through huge crowds at the Ottawa Bluesfest this year. He was so right … people were there, many with their friends or families, really soaking it all in with a smile on their face. They looked genuinely happy.

It is easy to get lost in web tools, numbers and ROI equations and miss the real point. Live events are ultimately about bringing small and large communities together around a common joy, in our case live music. The pleasure comes just as much from being with friends and family in a lively and exciting atmosphere as it does from the music itself.

Happy Customer = Good

Happy customers come back and they bring their friends. You don’t need metrics  to know it is true. There are many ways to make people happy and social media could be part of the mix.

When we began talking about new elements to the Ottawa Bluesfest site, the predominant focus was to build something that would help people enjoy the festival even more (300 bands, hundreds of thousands of people … doing ok … but still). The idea was to add elements that would allow people to make better decision so they wouldn’t miss great acts, especially ones that they had not heard of. Answer the “who the heck is that” question, a well known problem.  In addition, music festivals are social events … people go together and part of the joy is to share a beautiful experience with people you like.

Not Just About Selling More Tickets

The “Buy Tickets” button is present but was never a priority and we didn’t even get measured against “Buy Tickets” clicks (though we counted them of course . This really surprised me and I was reminded of a valuable lesson:

“It is not about YOU! (the company/brand)”

There a few exceptions to this (musicians, charities …) but not many. Connect them with music they like, connect them with their friends, give them a voice, let them contribute … let them be part of something bigger and feel special. By all means, make sure the buy tickets button is easy to find but don’t let it get in the way.

Since we’re huge live music fans already, we did a bunch of things we thought would make fans happy:

• aggregated bios and videos of all the acts so even a child could check out a band they had never heard of
• helped people invite their friends by providing them an “invite friends” function
• provided ability to create a personal calendar and share that calendar with friends (email, post on Facebook …)
• allowed fans to see which performers their friends were going to (Facebook app function only)
• allowed them to contribute by sending videos and pictures that included on the site for all to see (people love to see their stuff highlighted)
• interview fans and post the written or video interviews
• live tweet and post pics of behind the scenes stuff (backstage, while the KISS stage was being assembled …). Lots of people felt like insiders. I got suspended from Twitter for a couple of hours likely for overtweeting
• interview performers somewhat on the fly and post the interviews as much as possible
• when we realized it was very time consuming to go through each of the nearly 300 acts one by one, we built the Bluesfest Jukebox so you could just listen for hours and pluck out bands of interest
• let people do as much as possible without creating an account but provided them extra value for registering only if it made sense

Many of these ideas came straight from Mark Monahan, the bluesfest executive director (the guy at the top) btw. The guy making the decisions and approving the cheques (checks for you American folks).

I’m really sharing the thought process with you to make a few key points:

• the customer comes first. Love them and seek to provide them value  first and foremost
• be sure to monitor and listen to make sure fans actually love what you are doing
• Social media tools, like the ones we used and built, can be a substantial, cost effective way to make your customers happy
• Clean bathrooms are important (not everything is about social media)

Love Your Customer!

By all means measure and tie whatever you can count to business imperatives… we do that all the time … but don’t forget the key imperative is to make your customers happy. Everything comes after that.

What are you doing in social media to make customers happy? What has worked and what hasn’t. You have the stand, please share …. I’m sure you have some great thoughts on this and experiences to share.

Please don’t forget to vote for our Social Media ROI panel at SXSW here panel picker . 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 posts on this very topic … you’re guaranteed to learn something valuable.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest