Real Time Data - Everyone Has A Voice
Moderator
Mike McGinley | SRO Consultants
Dan Benyamin | CitizenNet
Justin Shaffer | HotPotato
Joyce Szudzik | AEG Digital
Ashley Jex | Bill Silva Management
As social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have changed the way the industry markets to and builds fan bases, the use of real-time data techno-logy is being described as the next “big thing” that will change the way the world communicates and thinks.
Moderator Mike McGinley of SRO Consultants didn’t mince words.
“This real-time data phenomenon is going to change the way companies are managed, the way products are distributed, the way you market and sell your tickets – it’s going to change everything,” McGinley said. “If you don’t start embracing these new ideas and ways to do things, you will pro-bably get left in the dust.”
Dan Benyamin, founder of CitizenNet, said just switching one’s marketing strategy over to Facebook and other social media sites isn’t enough.
“It’s not a factor of ‘I’m just going to redirect my marketing from what was planet radio over to here.’ It doesn’t really work because these are not broadcast mechanisms,” Benyamin said.
“These are two-way mechanisms designed for people to talk to each other.
“How you market has to fund-amentally change from what it’s been for decades.”
To that effect, CitizenNet streams real-time data displays of social media activity specific to a product, topic or brand and gives companies analyses of who and where the customer base is as well as the ability to converse with customers not market.
Although Twitter is now regu-larly used by venue reps, promoters and other parties to monitor feedback during a concert, Citizen-Net goes further by giving compa-nies a targeted breakdown of all statistical information related to the fans logging in.
“The purpose this serves is as a guestbook. These people are not anonymous. You get to capture a little bit of who these people are and you give them a voice to start talking,” Benyamin said.
“It’s semantic analysis beyond key words.
Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer said his nearly nine years working to build the online arm of Major League Baseball led to the creation of Hot Potato, a Web service that offers a different way of tracking fan activity at events large and small.
“Throughout [the MLB] exper-ience, for many of the reasons Dan just outlined, I got really excited about how audiences form around events,” Shaffer said. “Putting it simply, it’s a business where get-ting people together is difficult, challenging and interesting and a concert is a perfect example.
“Facebook and Twitter are really user-centric. With Hot Potato, we’re trying to create a sort of ‘umbrella’ for an event – a place to organize everything about the event. The goal, from a business perspective, is to make it easier for you all to reach out and communicate with your audience and also … to bring fans together.”
Shaffer said Hot Potato makes it easier for people to find and join an event and once there, share photos, videos and messages in one place and help an event go viral.
“We also make it really easy for anybody to create an event.
An event organizer, promoter, or [someone] working with an artist can go in ahead of time, set up the event and distribute a link to it. Your fan base can then find that link and pop in,” Shaffer explained. “Everyone who is using the product is a potential distribution node. This is how games like ‘Farmville’ get successful so quickly.”
Ashley Jex of Bill Silva Enter-tainment reaffirmed the importance of these technologies.
“Using real-time data to analyze your audience and using companies like CitzenNet, you can tar-get users and figure out all the metrics of who you’re trying to reach,” Jex said. “Because you’re reaching a smaller, more focused demographic, you can send the message that you want. You’re reaching people that actually want the content you provide.
“It’s not so much manipulation of a large number of people as much as influencing the conver-sation between people to spread the message.”
An audience member then asked the panel just how much of an advertising budget should be put into these types of services.
AEG Digital’s Joyce Szudzik said it varies especially with how immediate and in demand communications are.
“Some of these really grass-roots things like Twitter and Facebook are free to get your messages out there and create a relationship with your audi-ences whether you’re a venue,
a band or promoter,” Szudzik explained. “That relationship doesn’t mean only telling them when tickets are going on sale, when a new album is coming out or ‘please buy my new T-shirt.’ But shifting the dollars over is getting easier.
“There is no one percentage that I would tell you that I am getting right now to spend on any one tour. It’s doing everything from more mobile for the younger audiences, doing Facebook for the middle-age and older audiences and just finding all the communication points in between.”
The panel wrapped making the point that no matter how many new technologies come along, one tried-and-true method always applies: it’s still important for venue staff, promoters and artists to do the research needed to know who the audience is, where it spends its time and be sure that no demographic gets left out.
|Tina Amendola|