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Thursday, March 20, 2014

What DoStuff's Doing: Launches, Lenses, LearnStuff, and...LARPing

Posted by Anonymous at 11:22 AM Labels:
Weeks 2/27-3/20
Ok, so we haven't been LARPing. But we have been slaying platform bugs, conquering SX, and expanding our empire into the far corners of North America. And now that Spring is upon us, we have even MORE exciting news peeking its head out like a newly blooming flower (sorry Chicago, Toronto, and any other cities still stuck in the tundra). Read on for all the DoStuff nitty gritty.

New Features

Unveiling the new lense feature concurrently with SX chaos meant new features had to be turned out fast and fixes had to be implemented on the fly. But thanks to some speedy development work, our SX lense allowed users to easily print their schedules, view listings by specific times of the day, or view all the events happening across several days. What more could you ask for when planning your SX extravaganza?

A whole passel of other product improvements got pushed in the last few weeks, including:
  • 1. Artist pages now feature videos! Check. it. out.
Appropriate for all audiences. Emetophilia footage omitted.
  • 2. Hometown is now a clickable tag on artist pages so that users can see all artists from the same hometown.
  • 3. HTML customization was built into artist pages. This was done in part so Do416 could more easily lead the charge to bring on artists as Tastemakers and link their pages. 
  • 4. Repeating event cards no longer have the "See all DAY" tag in the right corner. Instead the "Every DAY" tag in the top left corner links to all repeating events for a given day.
  • 5. The event creation form on the frontend now includes an end time field.
  • 6. The event creation form now also links to a VENUE creation form similar to artist creation.
  • 7. The event Activity Feed has more rhyme and reason to its organization: user action, 2 videos, 2 comments, playlistlist, user action, etc....
  • 8. When logged in, any link to a current/logged in user page will redirect to your page.
  • 9. Users can add venues when creating an event through a venue creation page.
  • 10. On your Latest page, you can now click anywhere in the post field to link to the post, not just the title.
  • 11. You photo pages now include a flickr link next to photographer attribution.
  • 12. All emails sent from your subdomain (RSVP confirmations, Welcome!, etc.) now display your proper name as the sender. Ex. Do512 instead of do512.
  • 13. We are in the middle of A/B testing social sharing events!
Bugs and issues that shouldn't pester you any longer:
  • 1. We put in some additional cache busts to keep your content timely: addition of user images + edits to Featured Event ads.
  • 2. Giveaways and user registration now have better blocks against spammers.
  • 3. The SASS editor will no longer confuse metros by seeming to error out and will more easily allow preview/publication of changes.
  • 4. The "Follow User" button now works across the site.
  • 5. Users are no longer visible on all pages regardless of preference. Either their full pages or as followed by users on other sites.
  • 6. Sidebar ad strangeness was fixed.
  • 7. "Category" is now a required field on user added events.
  • 8. Artist search has been drastically improved and all bands were set with a minimum popularity to ensure they show in results!
  • 9. "Key not defined" text no longer displays on the sidebar of Tastemaker pages.
  • 10. RSVP email confirmations for new users include appended text from the "Email text (old)" field.

LearnStuff

We're working hard and fast to complete LearnStuff by the end of the episode so that all the metros have a comprehensive resource to easily find support. Think of it as a HelpDesk 2.0, only with twice the visual appeal, 10x the content, and a bazillion times easier to use and find the info you want. Here's a teaser for the highly requested promo user guidance section:

Festivals

So many festivals! Center of the Universe, Sun Fest, Forecastle, Fall for Greenville, Jazz Fest, Big Ears Fest, Counterpoint are all having their lineups crafted on our platform. Plus, the network-wide Bonnaroo giveaway is in full swing. The next big important fest to tackle is NewCo., the business conference formerly known as OpenCo.

Programs

The Lolla Fest Flyaway is underway. Goose continues with metros reporting success. Pabst planning is progressing for 6 of our cities with special attention on Do206's launch party! SX was obviously a big opportunity to ideate new programs with new potential partners. Additionally, proposals are in process for Live Nation, Sasquatch, and ABI.

Network News

There's launch buzz on all lines of longitude. On the west, Do206 is gearing up for their launch party tomorrow. In the middle, Do214 will be going live tomorrow, so point all of your Dallas friends to their site. Finally, Do416 is holding down the east with their plans to launch officially next Thursday, March 27th. In the meantime, check out their nifty logo teaser site. 

There's been a bonanza of ECPs that have jumped on board! Special props to HazDF for signing on Sopitas as well as three new ones just this past week! And to Do416 for setting a new record of ECPs at launch with (at least) six in the bag!

Do312 is hosting the Chicago Nightlife Awards contest on their site, so if you have a favorite Chicago doorman, it's your solemn duty to go vote. Stay tuned for more creative contests Do312 has in the works. Want to setup your own contest with ShortStack? Let us know and we'll set you up on our network account!

SXSWinning

We had a bocce tournament! Doers from all over came and tossed round objects at other round objects in an excuse to hang out and drink. A few notable pics:




A HUGE thanks to Mary for organizing the party, and check out her album for all of the party pics.

Do512 did their usual thing of throwing crazy fun parties and just generally running around doing a million things at once. A couple choice pictures from their Interactive and The Big One parties:



Thanks to everybody who came into town for SX, and massive kudos to Do512 and their heroic efforts to make SX magical for everybody in Austin.

Facebook Editorial Update

One final note is that Facebook is slowly making changes that can affect how many people see the content you post on your page. Read all about it in this post on our blog.

That's it for these weeks! Have a happy vernal equinox!

Read More

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

The Decline of Facebook Organic Reach

Posted by Anonymous at 8:03 AM Labels: ,
The free promotion associated with posting things to your own Facebook page has always been a valuable aspect of maintaining a strong Facebook following. But according to a recent post in Ogilvy's social blog, this organic promotion could be a quickly diminishing benefit.

For the past several years, Facebook has been throttling down the organic reach of content posted to brands' owned pages. According to a survey of more than 100 brand pages, reach has been consistently on the decline since 2012. This trend has been even more drastic since October of 2013, as seen in the graph below:

Average organic reach of posts published to Facebook brand pages for all pages and large pages with more than 500,000 likes.


What You Can Do:
More and more, you'll want to drive reach by creating engaging content that users want to interact with and share on their pages. While organic reach of content posted on owned brand pages is down, branded content that users themselves share is unaffected. This necessitates a switch from the "always on" approach that you're probably using now, posting content continually regardless of if it's going to be a huge hit or a dud with your users. Going forward, Facebook strategy should favor resonance with your fans over frequency and should ideally align with the following strategies:


Know who your "true" fans are 
Do312 has 22,191 Facebook page likes, but only 1,607 people actively engaged. The trick to boost reach is to keep tabs on who is repeatedly liking, sharing, commenting, and otherwise interacting with your contact. The more fans that you can encourage to engage with your content means the more organic reach you'll receive, which means even more people engaging, and so on and so forth. This is also a good reason to check in with your Tastemakers/All Stars/Influencers and make sure they're doing their part to help share your content via their social media presence.

Encourage people to become active fans of your content
A combination of diligent responding and leveraging your other media channels will go a long way towards turning people into true fans. If users that comment on your posts or message you on Facebook receive timely, helpful, and appropriately funny feedback from you, they'll be more likely to engage in the future. Applying this same strategy to people that tweet, email, comment on blog posts, etc. will help your user base become active proponents of your metro's brand, rather than just users that occasionally see a Facebook post or tweet.

Reaching new advocates
Provided you've done a good job of identifying your site's existing advocates and reaching out to them across all channels, there's still the problem of trying to reach the people that aren't already fans or actively engaged. Now might be the time to experiment with using a few targeted paid posts to increase the reach of posts to users that would be interested in your content, but aren't already likely to see it on their own accord. This could be especially useful if you have a partner that has content that might not get a ton of engagement without paid support. You could build this into a proposal if it's important to a partner so as not to incur additional costs for impressions that used to be free.

For the time being, if you're still getting decent reach on your posts, it probably makes sense to keep posting content as frequently as possible that has a chance of resonating with your users. But if you notice organic reach trending down, now might be a good time to start adjusting course to maximize engagement. Meanwhile, we'll continue to keep tabs on this trend and advise with best practices that we collect from the various metros.

If you have any questions about the ramifications of this development, or you just want to send over your comments and thoughts, feel free to drop us a note at support@dostuffmedia.com.
Read More

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

DoStuff SX Bocce Party Prep

Posted by Anonymous at 2:12 PM Labels:
We had an hour team session this morning getting ready for the throw down. Our bocce court is looking fantastic:


Our grounds are looking festive:


And our reigning champion is ready to lead the Bocce Game of Thrones:


Read More

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

A/B Testing Social Share Buttons

Posted by Anonymous at 2:48 PM Labels:
Many of you have voiced your desire to input social share buttons on the new platform and hearted the Asana task in the DSD queue. Well happy day! We are currently testing whether these buttons will successfully influence your users to share your events via Facebook and Twitter.

On Do512, Do312, and doNYC event pages, 50% of visitors now see Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the normal call-to-action buttons (RSVP/WIN, BUY, ADD). When they click these buttons, a modal will open prompting them to post "Check out this event" with a corresponding link. 



We will update you with the results of this test and whether we will be implementing the buttons across the platform.

Feel free to share with us your thoughts!
Read More
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Thursday, March 20, 2014

What DoStuff's Doing: Launches, Lenses, LearnStuff, and...LARPing

Weeks 2/27-3/20
Ok, so we haven't been LARPing. But we have been slaying platform bugs, conquering SX, and expanding our empire into the far corners of North America. And now that Spring is upon us, we have even MORE exciting news peeking its head out like a newly blooming flower (sorry Chicago, Toronto, and any other cities still stuck in the tundra). Read on for all the DoStuff nitty gritty.

New Features

Unveiling the new lense feature concurrently with SX chaos meant new features had to be turned out fast and fixes had to be implemented on the fly. But thanks to some speedy development work, our SX lense allowed users to easily print their schedules, view listings by specific times of the day, or view all the events happening across several days. What more could you ask for when planning your SX extravaganza?

A whole passel of other product improvements got pushed in the last few weeks, including:
  • 1. Artist pages now feature videos! Check. it. out.
Appropriate for all audiences. Emetophilia footage omitted.
  • 2. Hometown is now a clickable tag on artist pages so that users can see all artists from the same hometown.
  • 3. HTML customization was built into artist pages. This was done in part so Do416 could more easily lead the charge to bring on artists as Tastemakers and link their pages. 
  • 4. Repeating event cards no longer have the "See all DAY" tag in the right corner. Instead the "Every DAY" tag in the top left corner links to all repeating events for a given day.
  • 5. The event creation form on the frontend now includes an end time field.
  • 6. The event creation form now also links to a VENUE creation form similar to artist creation.
  • 7. The event Activity Feed has more rhyme and reason to its organization: user action, 2 videos, 2 comments, playlistlist, user action, etc....
  • 8. When logged in, any link to a current/logged in user page will redirect to your page.
  • 9. Users can add venues when creating an event through a venue creation page.
  • 10. On your Latest page, you can now click anywhere in the post field to link to the post, not just the title.
  • 11. You photo pages now include a flickr link next to photographer attribution.
  • 12. All emails sent from your subdomain (RSVP confirmations, Welcome!, etc.) now display your proper name as the sender. Ex. Do512 instead of do512.
  • 13. We are in the middle of A/B testing social sharing events!
Bugs and issues that shouldn't pester you any longer:
  • 1. We put in some additional cache busts to keep your content timely: addition of user images + edits to Featured Event ads.
  • 2. Giveaways and user registration now have better blocks against spammers.
  • 3. The SASS editor will no longer confuse metros by seeming to error out and will more easily allow preview/publication of changes.
  • 4. The "Follow User" button now works across the site.
  • 5. Users are no longer visible on all pages regardless of preference. Either their full pages or as followed by users on other sites.
  • 6. Sidebar ad strangeness was fixed.
  • 7. "Category" is now a required field on user added events.
  • 8. Artist search has been drastically improved and all bands were set with a minimum popularity to ensure they show in results!
  • 9. "Key not defined" text no longer displays on the sidebar of Tastemaker pages.
  • 10. RSVP email confirmations for new users include appended text from the "Email text (old)" field.

LearnStuff

We're working hard and fast to complete LearnStuff by the end of the episode so that all the metros have a comprehensive resource to easily find support. Think of it as a HelpDesk 2.0, only with twice the visual appeal, 10x the content, and a bazillion times easier to use and find the info you want. Here's a teaser for the highly requested promo user guidance section:

Festivals

So many festivals! Center of the Universe, Sun Fest, Forecastle, Fall for Greenville, Jazz Fest, Big Ears Fest, Counterpoint are all having their lineups crafted on our platform. Plus, the network-wide Bonnaroo giveaway is in full swing. The next big important fest to tackle is NewCo., the business conference formerly known as OpenCo.

Programs

The Lolla Fest Flyaway is underway. Goose continues with metros reporting success. Pabst planning is progressing for 6 of our cities with special attention on Do206's launch party! SX was obviously a big opportunity to ideate new programs with new potential partners. Additionally, proposals are in process for Live Nation, Sasquatch, and ABI.

Network News

There's launch buzz on all lines of longitude. On the west, Do206 is gearing up for their launch party tomorrow. In the middle, Do214 will be going live tomorrow, so point all of your Dallas friends to their site. Finally, Do416 is holding down the east with their plans to launch officially next Thursday, March 27th. In the meantime, check out their nifty logo teaser site. 

There's been a bonanza of ECPs that have jumped on board! Special props to HazDF for signing on Sopitas as well as three new ones just this past week! And to Do416 for setting a new record of ECPs at launch with (at least) six in the bag!

Do312 is hosting the Chicago Nightlife Awards contest on their site, so if you have a favorite Chicago doorman, it's your solemn duty to go vote. Stay tuned for more creative contests Do312 has in the works. Want to setup your own contest with ShortStack? Let us know and we'll set you up on our network account!

SXSWinning

We had a bocce tournament! Doers from all over came and tossed round objects at other round objects in an excuse to hang out and drink. A few notable pics:




A HUGE thanks to Mary for organizing the party, and check out her album for all of the party pics.

Do512 did their usual thing of throwing crazy fun parties and just generally running around doing a million things at once. A couple choice pictures from their Interactive and The Big One parties:



Thanks to everybody who came into town for SX, and massive kudos to Do512 and their heroic efforts to make SX magical for everybody in Austin.

Facebook Editorial Update

One final note is that Facebook is slowly making changes that can affect how many people see the content you post on your page. Read all about it in this post on our blog.

That's it for these weeks! Have a happy vernal equinox!

Posted by at
Labels:

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

The Decline of Facebook Organic Reach

The free promotion associated with posting things to your own Facebook page has always been a valuable aspect of maintaining a strong Facebook following. But according to a recent post in Ogilvy's social blog, this organic promotion could be a quickly diminishing benefit.

For the past several years, Facebook has been throttling down the organic reach of content posted to brands' owned pages. According to a survey of more than 100 brand pages, reach has been consistently on the decline since 2012. This trend has been even more drastic since October of 2013, as seen in the graph below:

Average organic reach of posts published to Facebook brand pages for all pages and large pages with more than 500,000 likes.


What You Can Do:
More and more, you'll want to drive reach by creating engaging content that users want to interact with and share on their pages. While organic reach of content posted on owned brand pages is down, branded content that users themselves share is unaffected. This necessitates a switch from the "always on" approach that you're probably using now, posting content continually regardless of if it's going to be a huge hit or a dud with your users. Going forward, Facebook strategy should favor resonance with your fans over frequency and should ideally align with the following strategies:


Know who your "true" fans are 
Do312 has 22,191 Facebook page likes, but only 1,607 people actively engaged. The trick to boost reach is to keep tabs on who is repeatedly liking, sharing, commenting, and otherwise interacting with your contact. The more fans that you can encourage to engage with your content means the more organic reach you'll receive, which means even more people engaging, and so on and so forth. This is also a good reason to check in with your Tastemakers/All Stars/Influencers and make sure they're doing their part to help share your content via their social media presence.

Encourage people to become active fans of your content
A combination of diligent responding and leveraging your other media channels will go a long way towards turning people into true fans. If users that comment on your posts or message you on Facebook receive timely, helpful, and appropriately funny feedback from you, they'll be more likely to engage in the future. Applying this same strategy to people that tweet, email, comment on blog posts, etc. will help your user base become active proponents of your metro's brand, rather than just users that occasionally see a Facebook post or tweet.

Reaching new advocates
Provided you've done a good job of identifying your site's existing advocates and reaching out to them across all channels, there's still the problem of trying to reach the people that aren't already fans or actively engaged. Now might be the time to experiment with using a few targeted paid posts to increase the reach of posts to users that would be interested in your content, but aren't already likely to see it on their own accord. This could be especially useful if you have a partner that has content that might not get a ton of engagement without paid support. You could build this into a proposal if it's important to a partner so as not to incur additional costs for impressions that used to be free.

For the time being, if you're still getting decent reach on your posts, it probably makes sense to keep posting content as frequently as possible that has a chance of resonating with your users. But if you notice organic reach trending down, now might be a good time to start adjusting course to maximize engagement. Meanwhile, we'll continue to keep tabs on this trend and advise with best practices that we collect from the various metros.

If you have any questions about the ramifications of this development, or you just want to send over your comments and thoughts, feel free to drop us a note at support@dostuffmedia.com.
Posted by at
Labels: ,

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

DoStuff SX Bocce Party Prep

We had an hour team session this morning getting ready for the throw down. Our bocce court is looking fantastic:


Our grounds are looking festive:


And our reigning champion is ready to lead the Bocce Game of Thrones:


Posted by at
Labels:

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

A/B Testing Social Share Buttons

Many of you have voiced your desire to input social share buttons on the new platform and hearted the Asana task in the DSD queue. Well happy day! We are currently testing whether these buttons will successfully influence your users to share your events via Facebook and Twitter.

On Do512, Do312, and doNYC event pages, 50% of visitors now see Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the normal call-to-action buttons (RSVP/WIN, BUY, ADD). When they click these buttons, a modal will open prompting them to post "Check out this event" with a corresponding link. 



We will update you with the results of this test and whether we will be implementing the buttons across the platform.

Feel free to share with us your thoughts!
Posted by at
Labels:
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