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)
  • 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.

Posted Apr 20, 2010 in Blog, Favequest, social media

View Comments
  • Justin

    wow. This is what you think people want? How about fixing the following issues?

    I can read faster lots of text in less time than you can show me an out of date video of a band. How about not streaming video automatically? Make it available, sure – but not the centrepoint of the artist page.

    Provide something that works through corporate firewalls. YouTube is frequently blocked for bandwidth/time wasting reasons behind corporate firewalls.

    It’s unreasonable for a website like this to come from 13 different webservers (9 of which don’t have names – just IP numbers). You make it very difficult for people to run a safe, secure, scriptless browser.

    Don’t require javascript for something that should be so simple.

    If it’s a simple enough site, you don’t have to provide a separate mobile site, the main one will work on peoples’ mobile devices.

    Provide it in a format that allows people to copy & paste the lineup for a night so we can share it with our friends on our blogs or via email rather than “share this” buttons for each show.

  • http://favequest.com Spence

    Bill, Allan

    It looks good. Congrats!

  • http://www.favequest.com allanisfan

    Justin,

    Not everyone wants the same thing. The videos get lots and lots of views and we’ve heard from many people directly that they enjoy them. If you don’t want to watch them then don’t. We’ve also added a print friendly view that is very simplified and more compact. That should allow you to copy and paste as you suggested. Just be careful since the schedule might still change a bit between now and July.

    When you click on the thumbnail in the listing, it launches the video as well as some additional info. Youtube has the same logic, you click on a thumbnail and it launches the video in the player and provides you with more information, sharing buttons, comments and so on. Why require everyone to click twice?

  • steve

    Related to the above.

    The Printer Friendly view does not give a description of the artist, just the time and place. Is there an easy and quick way to see all the artist information and their associated write ups? Right now, one has to click individually on each artist to get the information. When one clicks on an artist, a video of the artist often automatically starts up. This means of getting the artist information is both time and bandwidth consuming. It is asking a lot to have people click through ~250 artists and have their videos start up just to see a write up on the artist. I find this approach frustrating.

    In the past one could easily see all of the information at one time. Can a means be provided to do so again? I think many people would like to see the write up of the artists and then if they are interested, they will click through to video and other links. One ought not to have to click on each artist and have a video start up to get this basic information.

  • http://www.favequest.com allanisfan

    Steve,

    Excellent input. Several people have asked for something like this so you’re no alone. Just want to let you know that we’re listening. We’re looking into a few different ways to quickly provide you the artist details and without the video if you so choose without making it harder for those who want to see the videos (you wouldn’t believe how many videos we serve up … pretty crazy) while also minimizing scrolling.

    I’ll shoot you an email when we add this capability and hopefully it will serve your needs.

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