This morning, Mashable is reporting the launch of Ticketmaster‘s latest layer of Facebook integration, a move that allows users to see exactly where their Facebook friends will be sitting at various different events and gigs across the globe.
Live on over 9000 events across the Ticketmaster website, the new interactive map enables seat tagging, which will post to your Facebook wall requesting (or nudging) your friends to do the same.
Got that? No? Try watching this 80 second explanation -
Social ticketing is something we’ve talked about before here at the ‘heads, but that was more around using social media to reward regular attendees with loyalty points and bonuses. What Ticketmaster have done here – really quite well – is taken the Facebook social graph API and applied it to their own site.
In a similar way that Trip Advisor change the structure of what you’re looking at depending on your friends’ purchasing decisions after their experiences, Ticketmaster has taken a step forward by showing the purchasing decision before the experience. Enabling friends to buy tickets whenever they want instead of waiting and waiting until they’re able to get their tickets at the same time.
“How much are we seeing of social brought into commerce rather commerce being brought into social?”
Setting up shop in a Facebook tab is [relatively] easy by comparison, so why not consider changing your customers’ web experience based upon their Facebook preferences as they travel around your website?
To top it off, Ticketmaster’s research suggests that every time a ticket purchase is shared through social, that converts to an extra five dollars in additional ticket sales. Social media integration moving the sales needle? Perfection. Definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.
Irrespective of your feelings around the Ticketmaster brand, this new feature is smart, useful and ultimately beneficial to the end customer. Well done.
Earlier this week, James wrote about Klout, sparking debate as to whether hotels and airlines that are using the influence-rating site to reward high-scoring customers demonstrate that social media is still being used to benefit the same old privileged few.
However, if we look at the other end of the scale, the travel world also gives us one of the most powerful examples of social media as truly mainstream: the mighty TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor is social media for people who don’t do social media. Those who would never dream of blogging or tweeting use TripAdvisor unquestioningly. The site has 41.6 million users a month, featuring 40m reviews of hotels and restaurants worldwide; research from BDRC shows that 28% business travellers referred to sites such as TripAdvisor before booking a hotel and of those, 41% changed hotel choice after reading reviews.
And from the in-room literature I spotted at a tiny inn in Wales, to this poster Whatley found plastered in the lift of a Helsinki hotel, brands are well aware of its power.
So can anything threaten TripAdvisor’s hegemony over travel word of mouth?
There has been plenty of well-publicised backlash. This unsurprisingly tends to focus on a lack of transparency, both from businesses (posting fake reviews of their own services or lambasting competitors) and customers (hiding behind anonymity to post unreasonable rants).
Duncan Bannatyne is considering a law suit over a ”despicable and cowardly” review of one of his hotels. The self-exaplantory Hotels Against TripAdvisor website encourages businesses that have been burned to lobby their MPs. The Good Hotel Guide has accused TripAdvisor of being “brazen and shameless” in printing malicious reviews without checking their authenticity, and reputation management company Kwikchex has been naming and shaming users suspected of fraudulent and defamatory posts.
But do travellers really care? Judging by the site’s continued rude health, most of us obviously feel that we’re pretty good at sniffing out a suspicious post and still prefer peer opinion to slick marketing blurb.
And companies are continuing to ally themselves with the community. Eurostar have just signed up to including TripAdvisor reviews and ratings in their customer comms, and this week the site has hired John Dila in the new position of Director of Customer Care, presumably to help turn those divisive complaints into constructive change.
All in all, the debate around TripAdvisor seems to represent a familiar social media phenomenon: the media whip up scandal, while the public happily continue to use it regardless, because it works for them.
What do you think?
(Incidentally, I stayed at St.Michael’s Hotel and Spa in Falmouth this week; I got awesome Suchard hot chocolate in my room and the super-helpful receptionist Emily was a joy.)
I’m an ardent supporter of all things Foursquare-related; be that through either [on a consumer level] meaningless badges acquired through a specific number of check ins or [on the brand side] a fairly robust off-the-shelf loyalty card system – I think the possibilities with the platform, should it hit critical mass, are endless. But that’s just me.
Something that is yet to measure Foursquare’s impact in social media [but yet shares a similar 'is it any good or not' debate] is KLOUT
The self-proclaimed ‘Standard for Influence’ uses over 35 different variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure ‘True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score’. Influence, according to Klout, is the ability to drive people to action.
Since September last year the Palms Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas has been building out what it refers to as ‘The Klout Club’ – whereupon checking into the hotel in question (actual checking in, not foursquare checking in), you may well be asked ‘What’s your Twitter name?’ so that your Klout score can be measured there and then.
The Palms believe that this will allow high-ranking influencers to experience their ‘impressive set of amenities’ in hopes that these ‘influencers’ will want to communicate their positive experience to their followers.
Earlier than that, in June last year, Virgin America was using Klout to pick and choose which influencers to reward with their free flights to Toronto program. OK it was a tie-up to a new route launch but, as adding a social media element to your PR goes, I’ve certainly seen worse.
Key takeaways?
As we move into a more open world and social media becomes much more widely accepted, these industry early adopters are laying the ground for other, larger influence campaigns in the future and yet, while folk will often try and game the system, it seem that building your online reputation may well be having some long term benefits.
I’m fairly sure that with all the good will aside, KLM definitely picked the more influential of their passengers to bestow their gifts upon [and don't even get me started on which online voices the Old Spice guy started tweeting to], all of which begs the question:
Which is more important; the amount of people you make happy, or the amount of people that know you did it?
We’ve been talking about running different themes here at the ‘heads of late and one that continually pops up over and over is that of Travel and Tourism; who’s engendering positive word of mouth and who isn’t.
Not one to focus on the negatives, I thought I’d kick this session off with a focus on my favourite social-airline; KLM.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (to it its full name) has been playing around in social for a few months now and their activities to date really are quite interesting. Rewind back to December last year and you’ll find this delightful ‘social (media) experiment’ around putting smiles back on the faces of KLM’s travellers.
I’ve talked about ‘Surprise and Delight‘ before and how brands (big and small) can reap success in this area; believe it or not, creating smiles and happiness is a fantastic way to build both customer loyalty and positive conversation.
The great thing about KLM is, they didn’t stop there. After testing the water with the above marketing campaign, they then added social to the care side of the business – with their ‘Extended Service on Social Media‘ initiative.
To quote:
“Want to get that seat by the window, rebook your ticket, or find out how to bring your surf board? Tell us on Facebook, or send us a ‘tweet’!
Ask your question on any day of the week, between 8:00 and 23:00 hours, and we will reply within the hour.
Requests such as rebooking your flight, we try to arrange for you within 24 hours. By using “instant messages” or private messages, your personal data remain protected.”
Good job guys.
Finally, to top it off, last week they launched this neat little viral video to demonstrate the new space available in their business class section.
Being charming, funny, informative and coming in at 1min 40s precisely, the video hits the sweet spot just right. So that’s Marketing, Care and now Comms; all covered off with smart use of social media.
And why? To create positive word of mouth, brand loyalty and of course, ultimately – an uplift in sales.
Three and a half years ago, I joined as a ‘copywriter’. It was a bit of a misnomer, as back then every ‘head did pretty much everything – research, engagement, client services, reports. But although I have now moved into the more strategic realms of our social business consultancy, I have always remained a logophile at heart.
Talking about copy is slightly unfashionable in social media; it has intimations of that awkwardly formal, bizarrely enthusiastic, one-way unpersonalised PR-speak most of us have experienced via letter, email, or tweet.
But great copy is still just as essential nowadays, perhaps even more so. Our conversational world demands a sophisticated brand voice that combines the personal and professional, the emotive and the direct, the casual and the respectful. Most of us find it easy to strike that balance when talking to people face-to-face, but social media, particularly for brands, is a bizarre mixture of publication and conversation, requiring a balance between the natural and the self-aware.
Competitions such as the recent London Long Copy Challenge run by CBS Outdoor have attempted to prove that long copy is still an effective word of mouth trigger – judge the results for yourself – and The Chip Shop Awards always demonstrate some great examples of WOM-worthy words.
But conversational copy is no longer the preserve of the ad man. It infiltrates most consumer touchpoints, from the Twitter feed to that email approaching a prospective advocate.
I was reminded of this last year when I stayed in the Felin Fach Griffin Inn in Brecon, on my way to talk WOM with Arts Council Wales. With gorgeous food, warm service and meticulously designed rooms, the inn drove my advocacy simply with the quality of its product, not to mention some basic word of mouth tactics:
However, the detail that really got me was the in-room pamphlet:
Any regular traveller is used to these ordinarily dry and functional documents informing you of WiFi passwords and breakfast times, but this was a very different compilation of quirky, witty copy, written by the owners of the inn themselves and really articulating the warm, witty and personalised ethos of the inn – as well as specifically encouraging word of mouth online and offline.
What are the best and most subtle examples of conversational copy you’ve seen?
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