Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so most of you are probably working hard to get you site in order for the holiday or getting your turkeys ready to put in the oven tomorrow morning.

While you’re getting your last-minute preparations in order, check out the latest from the Product team!

As most content managers have noticed by now, the Duplicates Queue got a bit of facelift to help you move through Events even faster.

When we built Radmin, we wanted to make sure we created a dupes queue that was easier to understand than the jumbled mess in the old Admin. 

Instead of a long, continuous list of Events, we added color coding in Radmin to help you identify what was an original and what was a duplicate. The decision to add one match per page, though, slowed down work and made it difficult to gauge how many dupes you were dealing with.

Now, your Duplicates Queue shows 20 matches per page -- clearly marked and color coded -- to bring more speed to your morning workflow.

In old Admin, there was an option to add a “+1” to an RSVP, but when we moved over to Radmin this was not added. To add frustration, you could still get the “+1?” box to show up on the front-end through Admin -- but it didn’t actually work.

After hearing that this broken feature was causing confusion among your teams and with your partners, we set about rebuilding +1’s for the new system.

Now live in Radmin, you can check the “RSVP +1?” box to let users record +1’s when they RSVP through the front-end. This is a great option to offer to RSVP partners that have limited capacity and want to get clear estimates on head-count.

When you send the Guestlist to a partner that used the RSVP +1 option, there will be “+1” next to the name of anyone that checked the box.

Before you run out to the store to grab the last can of cranberry sauce, here are the other important updates that went live this week:

• Targeted Ads Are Live: The Lens-specific ad targeting feature previewed in last week's update is now live!
• Pending Queue Edits: We tweaked the look of the Pending Queue when you're editing Event titles. Now a small modal pops up when you're editing titles to reduce jumpiness and improve the overall UI of the Queue.
• New ECP Co-Reg Reporting Bug Fixed: Some of your newer ECPs weren't showing up in the co-reg reports in Radmin. This bug is fixed so your co-reg reports are now accurate.
• Reordered Front-end Search Results: We re-ordered the search results tabs on the front-end to match other parts of the site. The tabs are now ordered: "All, Events, Venues, Artists, Influencers/Lists, Articles".

Now that we've had a week to recover, we're feeling really inspired to be working on this big experiment with so many smart, talented, and good looking people. Here's to a big and exciting 2015 for DoStuff!

A while back, the Do214 team created a Red Bull Sound Select list to keep track of shows in Dallas that feature Sound Select artists. We thought this was a pretty awesome idea, especially as the Sound Select program grows, so we turned this list into a national user for the entire Network to take advantage of.

Now, every single metro has a Red Bull Sound Select list on their site featuring some fancy custom CSS. Just go to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselect and take a look!

You can also view a list of artists by going to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselct/artists.

There's no promotional plan with this user or anything. We just thought it would be a cool put together since Sound Select is doing such great work in many of your metros and our interests are often aligned. 

We'll leave it up to your discretion how to promote this user on your site, newsletter, and social -- if at all!

Here's a quick rundown of other big happenings around the Network.

• New ECP Pitch Deck: After our last update, a lot of you asked to get your hands on Do512's awesome new ECP pitch deck. With help from Liz at Do512, we put together this Google Docs template for you to fill in with your info and supercharge your ECP sales.
• Do317 Turns 3: As one of the elder statesmen of the Network, we're proud to see Do317 reach the ripe-old age of 3 this weekend! Do317 launched on Nov. 23, 2011 as "Indy's Premier Events Calendar".
• Do502 and Houndmouth Rocked Louisville: Do502 had a launch party for the books, featuring alt-country darlings (and Louisville natives) Houndmouth. Pressure is on for the next metro's launch!
• Vancouver Is In: Speaking of next... We're happy to announce Vancouver as the 16th metro in the DoStuff Network! Do604/Do250 marks the second Canadian metro, the second in the Pacific NW, and the third outside the U.S.

From now on when you create an ad in Radmin, you will see a big blue Targeting box at the bottom of the setup page. This is now your command center for where an ad will appear at any given time.

By default, the box for every property (main site and Lenses) will be checked for a new ad. You have the option to manually deselect any property you don’t want the ad to appear on. If you only want the ad to appear on certain lenses and not the main metro page, that’s an option too.



If you need to edit an existing ad's targeting options at any time, just go to that ad’s details page (the “magnifying glass” icon). You’ll see a section below the ad preview that says “Properties Attached To”. This is a list of all the places the ad is currently set to run on.

If you want to add or remove a property from the list, click “Edit” and select/deselect the appropriate check boxes.

It’s that simple.

Why Is This Such a Big Deal?

We probably don't need to tell you this, but these new targeting features will open up a ton of opportunities for ad sales.

If you have a potential ECP partner that's uneasy about showing Featured Event ads that don't match their audience, you can assure them that if an ad comes up that they REALLY don't want on their site you can easily take it down.

Or, if you're thinking of building a Metro Lens focused on a niche audience -- like Do312's Rainbow Lens or Do206's Geek Lens -- you can now sell brand ads that only appear on that property. That can be a big deal for local brands looking to target a specific scene.

How to Weigh Brand Ads

While Featured Event ads are easy enough -- you just check the box for the properties they should appear on and move on -- brand ads are a bit trickier. With these new targeting features, managing the weights for each brand ad space is a little more complex. But fear not.

The primary rule of thumb is to just weigh everything the way you want them to appear on your main site.

If you choose not to run an ad on a certain Lens, the remaining ads will adjust proportionally -- nothing else required from you. If it's an ad that will only run on a Lens and not the main metro site, just deselect that main metro property and set the weight to how often you want it to run on the Lens(es).


There is one BIG caveat here -- if you set a brand ad's weight to 100 it will pause all other ads on your metro, even ads only running on a single Lens. The best way to avoid this is to NEVER set an ad weight to 0 or 100.

For example, if you're creating a brand ad for a single Lens and it will be the only ad on that Lens, just pick any number between 1 and 99. If there are no other ads attached to that Lens, it will run 100% of the time.

SEO Improvements: New Metadata Formats

As Do206 MP Scott Porad pointed out during his Summit presentation, improving the way we appear in Google search results can have a big impact on our user growth over the coming years.

Well, we've already gotten started on some of those SEO improvements by changing the way the metadata on your sites is formatted. Metadata is the HTML that Google reads to figure out what words to display in its search results.


While we clearly have the best event listings in every metro, our metadata wasn't making it obvious to Google's bots what we're all about. Now when someone searches "New Year's Eve in Indianapolis", "The Black Keys Seattle", or "Comedy tonight in Nashville", Google will start ranking the DoStuff Network higher and higher.

There's one issue with the new metadata that could cause problems if your metro spans more than one city or borough (I'm looking at you, Do314, Do415, DoLA, doNYC, Do617, Do415, Do502, and Vancouver!). If the city/borough in the Venue's address is incorrect on your site, the metadata is going to display it incorrectly on Google and it's going to hurt your page rankings (see Do415 example below).


Over the next week or so, take a look at your Venues across the river/bay/I-35 split and make sure they're listed in the right city. As the Google search bots start recognizing our new metadata formatting over the next few weeks, we want to make sure they pull in the right info.

The Other Bits

This Product Update is already big enough, but there are a few more important fixes to note this week:

• Past Events Search Fixed: Since the launch of Radmin, we've been having trouble getting all past Events to show up in search. We're confident that we've finally cleaned out the last of the bugs and Event search should be working as expected. Success!
• More RSVP Times: We added a LOT more options for when to send RSVP lists from the dropdown menu in Radmin. Pretty much anytime within 24 hours is now available.
• Fixed Ongoing Events Bug: Now when you remove the end date from an ongoing event, the "Ongoing?" box will be automatically deselected. This prevents a previous issue with linked ads.

Hope everybody is rejuvenated/recovered from last week's Summit! 

After a few weeks off, we're resuming our Winners of the Week series. That said, we'll be gradually transitioning over the next several weeks to have slightly fewer Winners of the Week entries in favor of focusing on generally more in-depth analysis of best practices and metro wins. 

Our goal is to make everything in these emails as actionable as possible, so we'll be honing in on novel ways to improve your metro's business, rather than just the latest big giveaway from DoXYZ. Also, feel free to continue to give us feedback on what information is the most helpful to your day-to-day.