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Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Product Update: New Show Email Alerts Fixed, Links to Google Maps, and more

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:30 PM
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Our Product team has been over here knocking. shit. out. Check out the latest below!


New Show Email Alerts Fixed

Some of you may have noticed that you’ve been receiving a lot more new show alerts in your Inbox over the past week.


Automatically alerting users when a band they follow adds a show has always been a feature, but it had been working sporadically -- if at all. The Product team recently revamped the script that powers this feature and fixed all the old bugs that were breaking it.

Now, the script runs every three hours to check if a show has been added, leading to near-instant email alerts.

Getting this right has been a priority as we’re getting close to launch Mandrill as our transactional email provider. Mandrill will give us the power to customize the layout and content of our automated emails, but we needed to make sure they were actually sending first.

Venue Icon Links to Google Maps

We rolled out a little add-on to Event cards this week. Clicking on the little icon to the left of the Venue name will now open up a Google Map in a new window pointing to the Venue address.

Clicking on the name will still send you to the Venue page where you can find the address, phone number, social profiles, etc., but this will be a quicker way for users to find directions to the show.


The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:

  • Free Filter Added - You can now filter out shows that have the “Free?” box checked in the Approved Events queue in Radmin. This is useful when looking for the best free Events to to add to your Free list.
  • Ability to Delete Event Photos in Radmin - If you add a cover photo or a poster image that you don’t want anymore, you can now remove it by clicking a handy little “x” in Radmin.
  • Artist Tags Are Gone From Radmin - You’ll remember that this fall we removed tags entirely from the front-end. We didn’t like how they looked and a lot of them were pretty useless. Well, we finally removed them from Radmin, too, so there’s no longer a field filled with random, pointless tags.
  • Media Search Update - The YouTube tab in the Media Search widget now shows you how old a video is so you can find the most relevant music videos for an Artist.
  • Show In Footer? Bug Fixed - The “Show In Footer?” box that shows up when adding/editing /p/ Pages had a bug that caused it to disappear at certain times. This has been fixed.
  • Renamed Ads in Radmin - We renamed the types of ads in Radmin to make it easier to figure out where you’re placing a new ad. Your options when creating a new ad now read:
    • Featured Event
    • Featured Venue/User
    • Top Right Brand Ad
    • Listings Middle Brand Ad
    • Leaderboard Brand Ad


Read More

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Product Update: Changes to “TODAY” Drop-down, Improved Artist Creation, and Sorting Pending Queue by Date

1 comment: Posted by Anonymous at 3:28 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are a wide range of changes and improvements across Radmin and the front-end this week, so listen up!

TODAY Drop-down Getting Some Changes


As with any change to the front-end functionality of your sites, we wanted to give you a heads up on this one before it goes live.

Sometime in the next week, we will be removing “WEEKEND”, “WEEK”, and “MONTH” from the TODAY drop-down on your front page. “TODAY” and “TOMORROW” will remain, as will the calendar widget.

The problem is that WEEKEND, WEEK, and MONTH display a very limited number of Events without a lot of explanation for how these Events are picked. To a new user, it could appear that these are the only Event options on the site for the entire weekend -- undercutting your brand as the most comprehensive Events guide in the entire city.

These display options may return in the future with a more intuitive UI, but for now your Top Picks and other editorialized pages should suffice as “best of” lists of Events.

Improved Artist Creation Across Front-end and Radmin

The Dev team has been working on a number of tickets over the past week to improve the process of adding new Artists.

Create Artists From Pending/Dupes Queues

Until recently, you could only add existing artists to an Event from the Pending and Dupes queue. If the show featured an Artist that wasn’t in our database, you would have to leave the queue to create the Artist and then come back to update the show.

Now you have the option to add a band that isn’t in the drop-down, and an Artist page will automatically be created for this new band. This is especially helpful when adding shows for small venues that host lots of local bands.

But be careful not to create duplicate pages for Artists that already exist!

Improved Front-end UI For Adding Artists

This one came to us from Courtney at Do512 via the DSD Queue. Do512 is organizing happy hours with local Austin bands to show them how to take advantage of their site, but wanted to make sure the front-end tools were as intuitive as possible.

We updated the New Artist form on the front-end (New Event > Add a New Artist) to hide fields for Flickr, Instagram, Myspace, and Tumblr, and add fields for the hometown, description, and Twitter handle.

This is more consistent with the info that gets displayed on the front-end, so bands know that what they enter here will have a direct effect on their Artist page.


Photo Bug Fixed For New Artists

There was a bug that wouldn’t save the attached photo for a new Artist. After pressing “Save” to create the new Artist page, you would inevitably find that the photo was missing and would have to be attached again. The same bug was affecting new Venue pages, as well.

Now when you attach a photo to a new Artist or Venue page the photo will save as expected -- across both Radmin and the front-end.

The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:
  • No more auto-voting for "Free" user: This shouldn't be new to anyone here, but we mention it since we removed the last remnant of Free user auto-voting from old Admin. Just to recap the new system, checking "Free?" on an Event in Radmin will add the "FREE" banner but you will still need to manually vote to add it to your Free list. This is so you have more editorial control over what Events show up in this list.
  • Fixed HTML for repeating Events: There was a bug where repeating Events with different start/end dates would look completely crazy on the front-end. This is because the date abbreviations (e.g. 12/10) were screwing up the HTML. This is fixed so Events like happy hours that extend past midnight won't go haywire.
  • Pending queue now sortable by start date: This was a much-requested feature since the launch of Radmin. Now, when working in the Pending queue you have the option to sort by date or by Popularity ranking.



Read More

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/8/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:29 AM Labels:
Evening all,

We know you guys are all busy churning out and promoting your End of Year content, but when you get tired of sitting back and looking at how dang pretty everyone's best 2014 shows look, give a read through this edition of the Winner of the Week and then check out your stats for the first week of December at the end of the email.

Indy realizes it takes weeks of planning to get drunk. Early last week, we noticed that over 3,000 people in November were visiting Do317 after searching for what to do in Indy on NYE. Thanks to Do317's strong position on search results pages for queries involving "Indianapolis/Indy" and "New Years Eve," we knew this could potentially be a huge source of great traffic for Do317.

In response, the team in Indy spent some time sprucing up the page, getting good events listed, and generally making it a visually appealing and helpful landing page for users coming in through search.  

The result? On the NYE page alone, bounce rate dropped 40%. This is crucial, since traffic to that page is blowing up. The page is the most popular page on Do317 after the homepage, has received 74% more traffic than last year, and is continuing to grow its pageviews daily.

This NYE content win (in addition to a Lana Del Rey giveaway, a couple successful nightclub RSVPs, and their always popular First Friday list) helped to give Do317 its highest week of traffic and email clicks since we've been doing the Weekly KPI Report.

A couple lessons from this:
  1. NYE parties are huge. If you haven't built out a great list for this, you're already behind.
  2. Even more important than NYE (blasphemy, I know) is monitoring your organic traffic for peaks in people coming to your site. This will let you see what content people are searching for, so that you can make sure you provide them with content that's relevant.

    One great way to do this is via the Organic Traffic dashboard (download here) for Google Analytics. Also, if you want, I can enable search query data in your GA account. Just respond to this email, and I'll give you instructions on how to see that data.
That's all for this week! Updated Weekly KPI Report below:
Read More

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/1/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:24 AM Labels:
Happy December everybody!

It's Monday, which means it's time for a piping fresh delivery of your Weekly KPI Report. And although the weather might be getting colder for the most of us, this particular edition of the Winner of the Week comes from sunny Los Angeles:


DoLA gets EMOuntains of traffic. The 8th most popular landing page on DoLA for all of 2014 was this retrospective covering the LA emo scene and its relevance today. Some takeaways on why it was successful:
--It's an easily digestible list: 12 bands; one paragraph each. A few good quality images. There are links out to more information, so that readers can go further in depth if they wish, but everything on the page itself is concise enough to digest quickly.

--It has a well-informed local voice: The piece makes it immediately obvious to the reader that this is from someone knowledgeable about LA emo; it's not just an intern that had to do an artist interview and slapped 5 questions together.

--It uses event cards to keep the piece tied into events: DoLA is still about what to do tonight, not what you should've done 10 years ago. This piece reflects that by focusing on what the bands are up to now and by embedding in event cards for any upcoming shows. In the future, DoLA can keep content like this even more integrated into their site by making sure all of the related artist pages are up to snuff and linking in to them. 

DoLA showcased the content piece in their newsletter, which ended up being a complete hit with their audience. 1,369 people clicked the link in the newsletter, accounting for half of the traffic to the page on site. With all of the traffic taken together, the Emo List was the most popular page on DoLA for the previous week (400 more pageviews than the homepage) and drove DoLA to more than double their YoY traffic. 

Hopefully all of that is just going to be a taste of the kind of traffic all metros will see once the end of year content/lists debut, but until then, check out the updated KPI's and see how you can make next week even better:
Read More

How You (and the network did last week) - 11/24/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:22 AM Labels:
Holiday greetings (for those of you in the US; normal greetings to HazDF and Do416)!

We've got a lot to be thankful for network-wide this week, as Do214, Do617, and HazDF all had their highest weeks of traffic since we started the Weekly KPI reports. Do617 got bazonkers traffic to their Foo at Fenway giveaway, and HazDF got 3K+ pageviews (over a third of their total site traffic) from people checking out their Foodtruck festival event pages. Nice work guys!

However, for this week's Winner of the Week, we'll be honing in on Do214's novel, successful, and super-replicable content feature:

Dallas Arrives Fashionably Great. Sponsored content hits the sweet spot when it wins for the advertiser, wins for your metro, and wins for your audience. Do214 nailed this trifecta when they partnered with a local boutique owner and Tastemaker/aspiring blogger to produce a piece of content that tied together fashion with music events. The details:

--Win for advertiser: Dainty Lion (the boutique featured) got exposure to Do214's audience via Do214's social and email, plus they have a special coupon code for people referred from Do214, allowing them to track the efficacy of this sponsored content. Plus, they get to tie their brand, whose slogan is "Where Rock'n Roll inspires style," to Do214's brand of being the authority on Dallas music and nightlife. 

--Win for metro: Do214 was able to keep the content squarely on brand by relating each fashion piece to a related outfit-appropriate event, complete with embedded event cards. Plus, Do214 got exposure to an audience they otherwise wouldn't reach. Friends of Dainty Lion that engaged with and shared the post on Facebook helped drive it to an organic reach of over 5k, accounting for over half of the traffic to the Do214 page itself. 

--Win for audience: This piece of content was the #1 page on Do214 over the last week, accounting for 16% of their total site traffic. The event cards and special Do214 discount helped to keep people engaged once they got to the page, as the average time spent on the page was almost 4 minutes. 

Of course the stat that matters the most is $500, which is the amount of money Do214 received simply by connecting the blogger and boutique owner, hosting the content on their site, and then throwing an email mention and some social its way.

Odds are that there are some small boutiques in your city looking for innovative ways to push their products during the holidays. Consider taking their money by taking a page from Do214's book. 

Check out that win, and all of the other wins in your metro and the network in the updated Weekly KPI Report:

Read More

Friday, December 5, 2014

Metro News: DoLA’s Year-end Ad Reporting

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:47 PM Labels:
Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

We know you’re all busy with post-Thanksgiving work, pre-NYE work, and Network EOY campaign work, but we wanted to share with you a great strategy DoLA has implemented to give their biggest partners the VIP treatment.

Annotated Ad Reports

Knowing that the New Year is when venues and promoters start reviewing last year’s budgets and deciding where to pull back and where to double down, DoLA has been sending out 2014 recaps to their biggest advertisers.

More than just a regular ad report, these end-of-year recaps include additional notes and summaries from the year. Take a look at the Greek Theater example below.


Josh and the team at DoLA created a normal ad report, but then imported the screenshots into a Google Doc to add in ad summaries, recaps of social campaigns and other promotions, and a nice little note looking ahead to next year.

These aren’t too difficult to produce, but can make a big difference when your partners are deciding how much money to spend next year.

Feel free to make a copy of the Google Doc linked above, or reach out to Support for help!
Read More

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Product Update: A Few Notes on RSVPs & a Fix For Weekly Event URLs

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 2:50 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

With the DoStuff office closed last Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving calendar, there is a little less to report than the average week. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing...


RSVP Guestlists: “Bad” RSVP List Field Is Going Away

Back at the end of October, we added in a new dropdown menu for sending RSVP guestlists to partners. This dropdown fixed the old timezone issue where you would need to estimate the speed of the rotation of the Earth just to send out a guestlist on time.

When we added the new (“GOOD”) field, we told you we’ve give you a few weeks to transition all your RSVPs over. Well, time is up.

Friday morning the “BAD” field will disappear -- so take the next day to make sure all your RSVPs are switched over to the new field and the old one is left blank.

RSVP +1: Does NOT Affect The Vote Count

A quick note about RSVP +1 that shouldn’t be new to anyone, but we still wanted to clarify.

Last week we shared that RSVP +1 has now been fixed and added to Radmin. If you set up an RSVP +1 in the back-end, users can check a box on the front-end saying they would like to add a +1. This does NOT change the vote count, however, so do not look at the number on your Event page as an estimate of head count.

If you need to give your partner an accurate headcount, download the guestlist from Radmin, import it into Google Docs or Excel, and add up the number of RSVPs and +1’s that way.

URLs for Weekly Events Fixed

There was a bug where weekly repeating Events would be set up with the same URL if they had the same title (e.g. http://do314.com/events/weekly/sat/happy-hour). This meant that Event cards and other links would often send you to the wrong Event page.

This has been fixed and all new weekly repeating Events will given a unique URL. The system checks for a match and adds a footer to the end of the URL in the case that a match is detected. No more misdirected links!
Read More
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Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Product Update: New Show Email Alerts Fixed, Links to Google Maps, and more

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Our Product team has been over here knocking. shit. out. Check out the latest below!


New Show Email Alerts Fixed

Some of you may have noticed that you’ve been receiving a lot more new show alerts in your Inbox over the past week.


Automatically alerting users when a band they follow adds a show has always been a feature, but it had been working sporadically -- if at all. The Product team recently revamped the script that powers this feature and fixed all the old bugs that were breaking it.

Now, the script runs every three hours to check if a show has been added, leading to near-instant email alerts.

Getting this right has been a priority as we’re getting close to launch Mandrill as our transactional email provider. Mandrill will give us the power to customize the layout and content of our automated emails, but we needed to make sure they were actually sending first.

Venue Icon Links to Google Maps

We rolled out a little add-on to Event cards this week. Clicking on the little icon to the left of the Venue name will now open up a Google Map in a new window pointing to the Venue address.

Clicking on the name will still send you to the Venue page where you can find the address, phone number, social profiles, etc., but this will be a quicker way for users to find directions to the show.


The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:

  • Free Filter Added - You can now filter out shows that have the “Free?” box checked in the Approved Events queue in Radmin. This is useful when looking for the best free Events to to add to your Free list.
  • Ability to Delete Event Photos in Radmin - If you add a cover photo or a poster image that you don’t want anymore, you can now remove it by clicking a handy little “x” in Radmin.
  • Artist Tags Are Gone From Radmin - You’ll remember that this fall we removed tags entirely from the front-end. We didn’t like how they looked and a lot of them were pretty useless. Well, we finally removed them from Radmin, too, so there’s no longer a field filled with random, pointless tags.
  • Media Search Update - The YouTube tab in the Media Search widget now shows you how old a video is so you can find the most relevant music videos for an Artist.
  • Show In Footer? Bug Fixed - The “Show In Footer?” box that shows up when adding/editing /p/ Pages had a bug that caused it to disappear at certain times. This has been fixed.
  • Renamed Ads in Radmin - We renamed the types of ads in Radmin to make it easier to figure out where you’re placing a new ad. Your options when creating a new ad now read:
    • Featured Event
    • Featured Venue/User
    • Top Right Brand Ad
    • Listings Middle Brand Ad
    • Leaderboard Brand Ad


Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Product Update: Changes to “TODAY” Drop-down, Improved Artist Creation, and Sorting Pending Queue by Date

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are a wide range of changes and improvements across Radmin and the front-end this week, so listen up!

TODAY Drop-down Getting Some Changes


As with any change to the front-end functionality of your sites, we wanted to give you a heads up on this one before it goes live.

Sometime in the next week, we will be removing “WEEKEND”, “WEEK”, and “MONTH” from the TODAY drop-down on your front page. “TODAY” and “TOMORROW” will remain, as will the calendar widget.

The problem is that WEEKEND, WEEK, and MONTH display a very limited number of Events without a lot of explanation for how these Events are picked. To a new user, it could appear that these are the only Event options on the site for the entire weekend -- undercutting your brand as the most comprehensive Events guide in the entire city.

These display options may return in the future with a more intuitive UI, but for now your Top Picks and other editorialized pages should suffice as “best of” lists of Events.

Improved Artist Creation Across Front-end and Radmin

The Dev team has been working on a number of tickets over the past week to improve the process of adding new Artists.

Create Artists From Pending/Dupes Queues

Until recently, you could only add existing artists to an Event from the Pending and Dupes queue. If the show featured an Artist that wasn’t in our database, you would have to leave the queue to create the Artist and then come back to update the show.

Now you have the option to add a band that isn’t in the drop-down, and an Artist page will automatically be created for this new band. This is especially helpful when adding shows for small venues that host lots of local bands.

But be careful not to create duplicate pages for Artists that already exist!

Improved Front-end UI For Adding Artists

This one came to us from Courtney at Do512 via the DSD Queue. Do512 is organizing happy hours with local Austin bands to show them how to take advantage of their site, but wanted to make sure the front-end tools were as intuitive as possible.

We updated the New Artist form on the front-end (New Event > Add a New Artist) to hide fields for Flickr, Instagram, Myspace, and Tumblr, and add fields for the hometown, description, and Twitter handle.

This is more consistent with the info that gets displayed on the front-end, so bands know that what they enter here will have a direct effect on their Artist page.


Photo Bug Fixed For New Artists

There was a bug that wouldn’t save the attached photo for a new Artist. After pressing “Save” to create the new Artist page, you would inevitably find that the photo was missing and would have to be attached again. The same bug was affecting new Venue pages, as well.

Now when you attach a photo to a new Artist or Venue page the photo will save as expected -- across both Radmin and the front-end.

The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:
  • No more auto-voting for "Free" user: This shouldn't be new to anyone here, but we mention it since we removed the last remnant of Free user auto-voting from old Admin. Just to recap the new system, checking "Free?" on an Event in Radmin will add the "FREE" banner but you will still need to manually vote to add it to your Free list. This is so you have more editorial control over what Events show up in this list.
  • Fixed HTML for repeating Events: There was a bug where repeating Events with different start/end dates would look completely crazy on the front-end. This is because the date abbreviations (e.g. 12/10) were screwing up the HTML. This is fixed so Events like happy hours that extend past midnight won't go haywire.
  • Pending queue now sortable by start date: This was a much-requested feature since the launch of Radmin. Now, when working in the Pending queue you have the option to sort by date or by Popularity ranking.



Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels:

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/8/14

Evening all,

We know you guys are all busy churning out and promoting your End of Year content, but when you get tired of sitting back and looking at how dang pretty everyone's best 2014 shows look, give a read through this edition of the Winner of the Week and then check out your stats for the first week of December at the end of the email.

Indy realizes it takes weeks of planning to get drunk. Early last week, we noticed that over 3,000 people in November were visiting Do317 after searching for what to do in Indy on NYE. Thanks to Do317's strong position on search results pages for queries involving "Indianapolis/Indy" and "New Years Eve," we knew this could potentially be a huge source of great traffic for Do317.

In response, the team in Indy spent some time sprucing up the page, getting good events listed, and generally making it a visually appealing and helpful landing page for users coming in through search.  

The result? On the NYE page alone, bounce rate dropped 40%. This is crucial, since traffic to that page is blowing up. The page is the most popular page on Do317 after the homepage, has received 74% more traffic than last year, and is continuing to grow its pageviews daily.

This NYE content win (in addition to a Lana Del Rey giveaway, a couple successful nightclub RSVPs, and their always popular First Friday list) helped to give Do317 its highest week of traffic and email clicks since we've been doing the Weekly KPI Report.

A couple lessons from this:
  1. NYE parties are huge. If you haven't built out a great list for this, you're already behind.
  2. Even more important than NYE (blasphemy, I know) is monitoring your organic traffic for peaks in people coming to your site. This will let you see what content people are searching for, so that you can make sure you provide them with content that's relevant.

    One great way to do this is via the Organic Traffic dashboard (download here) for Google Analytics. Also, if you want, I can enable search query data in your GA account. Just respond to this email, and I'll give you instructions on how to see that data.
That's all for this week! Updated Weekly KPI Report below:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/1/14

Happy December everybody!

It's Monday, which means it's time for a piping fresh delivery of your Weekly KPI Report. And although the weather might be getting colder for the most of us, this particular edition of the Winner of the Week comes from sunny Los Angeles:


DoLA gets EMOuntains of traffic. The 8th most popular landing page on DoLA for all of 2014 was this retrospective covering the LA emo scene and its relevance today. Some takeaways on why it was successful:
--It's an easily digestible list: 12 bands; one paragraph each. A few good quality images. There are links out to more information, so that readers can go further in depth if they wish, but everything on the page itself is concise enough to digest quickly.

--It has a well-informed local voice: The piece makes it immediately obvious to the reader that this is from someone knowledgeable about LA emo; it's not just an intern that had to do an artist interview and slapped 5 questions together.

--It uses event cards to keep the piece tied into events: DoLA is still about what to do tonight, not what you should've done 10 years ago. This piece reflects that by focusing on what the bands are up to now and by embedding in event cards for any upcoming shows. In the future, DoLA can keep content like this even more integrated into their site by making sure all of the related artist pages are up to snuff and linking in to them. 

DoLA showcased the content piece in their newsletter, which ended up being a complete hit with their audience. 1,369 people clicked the link in the newsletter, accounting for half of the traffic to the page on site. With all of the traffic taken together, the Emo List was the most popular page on DoLA for the previous week (400 more pageviews than the homepage) and drove DoLA to more than double their YoY traffic. 

Hopefully all of that is just going to be a taste of the kind of traffic all metros will see once the end of year content/lists debut, but until then, check out the updated KPI's and see how you can make next week even better:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

How You (and the network did last week) - 11/24/14

Holiday greetings (for those of you in the US; normal greetings to HazDF and Do416)!

We've got a lot to be thankful for network-wide this week, as Do214, Do617, and HazDF all had their highest weeks of traffic since we started the Weekly KPI reports. Do617 got bazonkers traffic to their Foo at Fenway giveaway, and HazDF got 3K+ pageviews (over a third of their total site traffic) from people checking out their Foodtruck festival event pages. Nice work guys!

However, for this week's Winner of the Week, we'll be honing in on Do214's novel, successful, and super-replicable content feature:

Dallas Arrives Fashionably Great. Sponsored content hits the sweet spot when it wins for the advertiser, wins for your metro, and wins for your audience. Do214 nailed this trifecta when they partnered with a local boutique owner and Tastemaker/aspiring blogger to produce a piece of content that tied together fashion with music events. The details:

--Win for advertiser: Dainty Lion (the boutique featured) got exposure to Do214's audience via Do214's social and email, plus they have a special coupon code for people referred from Do214, allowing them to track the efficacy of this sponsored content. Plus, they get to tie their brand, whose slogan is "Where Rock'n Roll inspires style," to Do214's brand of being the authority on Dallas music and nightlife. 

--Win for metro: Do214 was able to keep the content squarely on brand by relating each fashion piece to a related outfit-appropriate event, complete with embedded event cards. Plus, Do214 got exposure to an audience they otherwise wouldn't reach. Friends of Dainty Lion that engaged with and shared the post on Facebook helped drive it to an organic reach of over 5k, accounting for over half of the traffic to the Do214 page itself. 

--Win for audience: This piece of content was the #1 page on Do214 over the last week, accounting for 16% of their total site traffic. The event cards and special Do214 discount helped to keep people engaged once they got to the page, as the average time spent on the page was almost 4 minutes. 

Of course the stat that matters the most is $500, which is the amount of money Do214 received simply by connecting the blogger and boutique owner, hosting the content on their site, and then throwing an email mention and some social its way.

Odds are that there are some small boutiques in your city looking for innovative ways to push their products during the holidays. Consider taking their money by taking a page from Do214's book. 

Check out that win, and all of the other wins in your metro and the network in the updated Weekly KPI Report:

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, December 5, 2014

Metro News: DoLA’s Year-end Ad Reporting

Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

We know you’re all busy with post-Thanksgiving work, pre-NYE work, and Network EOY campaign work, but we wanted to share with you a great strategy DoLA has implemented to give their biggest partners the VIP treatment.

Annotated Ad Reports

Knowing that the New Year is when venues and promoters start reviewing last year’s budgets and deciding where to pull back and where to double down, DoLA has been sending out 2014 recaps to their biggest advertisers.

More than just a regular ad report, these end-of-year recaps include additional notes and summaries from the year. Take a look at the Greek Theater example below.


Josh and the team at DoLA created a normal ad report, but then imported the screenshots into a Google Doc to add in ad summaries, recaps of social campaigns and other promotions, and a nice little note looking ahead to next year.

These aren’t too difficult to produce, but can make a big difference when your partners are deciding how much money to spend next year.

Feel free to make a copy of the Google Doc linked above, or reach out to Support for help!
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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Product Update: A Few Notes on RSVPs & a Fix For Weekly Event URLs

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

With the DoStuff office closed last Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving calendar, there is a little less to report than the average week. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing...


RSVP Guestlists: “Bad” RSVP List Field Is Going Away

Back at the end of October, we added in a new dropdown menu for sending RSVP guestlists to partners. This dropdown fixed the old timezone issue where you would need to estimate the speed of the rotation of the Earth just to send out a guestlist on time.

When we added the new (“GOOD”) field, we told you we’ve give you a few weeks to transition all your RSVPs over. Well, time is up.

Friday morning the “BAD” field will disappear -- so take the next day to make sure all your RSVPs are switched over to the new field and the old one is left blank.

RSVP +1: Does NOT Affect The Vote Count

A quick note about RSVP +1 that shouldn’t be new to anyone, but we still wanted to clarify.

Last week we shared that RSVP +1 has now been fixed and added to Radmin. If you set up an RSVP +1 in the back-end, users can check a box on the front-end saying they would like to add a +1. This does NOT change the vote count, however, so do not look at the number on your Event page as an estimate of head count.

If you need to give your partner an accurate headcount, download the guestlist from Radmin, import it into Google Docs or Excel, and add up the number of RSVPs and +1’s that way.

URLs for Weekly Events Fixed

There was a bug where weekly repeating Events would be set up with the same URL if they had the same title (e.g. http://do314.com/events/weekly/sat/happy-hour). This meant that Event cards and other links would often send you to the wrong Event page.

This has been fixed and all new weekly repeating Events will given a unique URL. The system checks for a match and adds a footer to the end of the URL in the case that a match is detected. No more misdirected links!
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