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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/28/15

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 7:42 AM Labels:

Winner of the Week: Do615!


Another week, another 5,000+ new users on the DoStuff app network-wide. With app launch parties in full swing, six metros (Do206, Do210, Do416, Do502, Do503, and Do615) had their highest week of new users to date. Check out your metro's contribution in the updated App User Leaderboard. The top 3 metros last week in new users were Do512, Do502, and Do416, who managed to secure even more featured app promo on the Canadian app store.
 
Checking in on non-app traffic, Do615 welcomed the start of autumn with some great content that secured their claim to Winner of the Week. Specifics below:
  • The first step to Do615's content win was creating this slick-looking How To Do Fall page, complete with nicely designed graphics and a simple layout that looks great on mobile. 
     
  • Of course, the best-made content is only as successful as your ability to get people to view it. In this case, almost all traffic came from social, where Do615 did all the right steps to help the piece take off. Stuff like calling out specific points of value to the reader in the post headline, tagging partners involved in the content piece, and securing shares from venues featured in the guide.
     
  • When Do615 added $15 in spend to all of the above, they were able to secure a total of 49 shares (second most shares of any content produced this year), good for right around 10K organic reach.
     
  • All of this social love propelled their fall guide to a total of 4.5K pageviews. Even more impressive is that the fall guide landing page accounts for roughly half of that traffic, with the other 2K+ pageviews going to the content featured in the guide from people clicking through the various posts, each of which got between 200 - 750 pageviews
For the rest of the metros that are pushing out your How To Do Fall page, take note of Nashville's success, and see if you can do the same in your market. We'll be chatting about it in depth on our next content call as well!

In the meantime, check out all of your stats below:
Read More

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/21/15

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 7:20 AM Labels:

Winner of the Week:
Do416, Do214, and Do206!


We're now in to the thick of the DoStuff App's public launch, so make sure you check out the App User Leaderboard to get an idea of where your metro stacks up against the rest of the network. The biggest delta in app user growth goes to Do416, who netted 519 new app users last week! That's third highest in the entire network, and 5X their user acquisition of any previous weeks. For those of you who haven't seen it already, they were able to use their connections with Apple to score a featured spot on the app store homepage.

Meanwhile, Do502 continues to bombard Lousville with press about the app, helping them secure 600 new users last week, second after Do512. Nice work everyone! Keep milking those partnerships and hitting the press outreach; it's easy to see the dividends they pay.
 
To round out our Winners of the Week, check out a few metros that took advantage of National Burger Day for some nice traction on email and Twitter:
In general when analyzing these content pieces, we find that these "holiday" roundups are useful because they give some relevance to evergreen content, helping to increase spread on social channels and entice people to check out the content. The National Whatever Day contextualization is part of the reason (among other things) why people like dog-friendly bars on National Dog Day more than just "here's where you can get a hot dog."

That's it for today! Knock yourself out digging in on your own stats below:
Read More

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Product Update: App Download Links, Search Fixes & More

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 12:29 PM Labels:
Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

Out Now - App Download Links

We've added app download links to all giveaway and RSVP confirmation emails.


Note: If you customize an event's RSVP confirmation email then this link will not be automatically included - but we highly recommend adding it to help drive app downloads.

Coming Soon - New Search Alerts

We're adding an alert to the old Radmin search pages to encourage you to use our new Beta Search.


 We'll be removing old search soon - so we want to make sure that everyone gets comfortable with the new search (Beta Search) before we switch over. The new search (Beta Search) is faster and more accurate than old search - so we'd recommend using it whenever you can.

Coming Soon - Features & Fixes

We've implemented a solution to prevent varying text sizes from appearing on /p pages within the app.

 There were a variety of actions that users could take to inject unwanted 'font-size' code into their /p pages' HTML - which then caused the pages' copy to appear in varying sizes on the app.


 Going forward, we will automatically clean these unwanted insertions out of /p pages' HTML. This will not solve every issue with fonts on pages - but it will be a big step forward in standardizing them.

A note that this fix will not be retroactive when it goes out - meaning that you will need to manually re-edit any /p pages that contain varying font sizes if they were created on or before this date (9/16).

 You will soon see event dates when setting up Featured Event ads in Radmin - to help you better identify events with similar titles.


 We've also prevented duplicate and/or past events from populating in this field.

 We've made sure that your 'Dang! Couldn't Find That Page' pages will feature the same links as your metro's (desktop) Featured Stuff.

 A reminder that your metro's Featured Stuff links are edited via Radmin -> Content -> Words.

We've also fixed a bug that was causing duplicate editions of the same event to appear in Radmin search.

And we've added validation into the 'Permalink' field of the /p pages editor to prevent anyone from saving permalinks that include spaces in their URLs.

 Our validation check will automatically turn these spaces into dashes.

So this:

Will automatically become this:

Tip of the Week

We recently discovered that HazDF was crashing in the DoStuff app because there were blank spaces in their advertisements' Destination URLs.


Not something you'd expect to crash an app, right? We were surprised too.

Going forward, our dev team will be taking steps to automatically 'sanitize' these URLs and strip away the spaces by default.​

In the mean time, please make sure to not include any extra spaces within your ads' 'Destination' and 'Link Override' URLs to prevent this problem from happening for your metro.

Thanks for reading the Product Update! 

Read More

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/14/15

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 8:52 AM Labels:

Winner of the Week: Do617!


We're T-minus one day until app launch, so make sure to check out where things stand in the App User Leaderboard. DoLA leads the total number of new app users in September, while San Antonio gains on Do317's % of audience lead. Do210 gained more than 100 new users last week a high mark for any metro launched in the past 2 years. Of course, when we hit public announce tomorrow and you guys start churning on local press outreach, all of this could change!
 
Outside of the app realm, Do617's September holiday cheer netted them our Winner of the (past two) Week(s) award. Check it out:
  • In the past month, Do617 received 2.1K RSVP clicks. Compare that to the 13 months from their launch until the start of August, where their total number of RSVPs was 1.8K. What made the difference? A little ol' event Do617 put together dubbed the Allston Christmas Block Party.
     
  • That event alone was good for over 1.7K RSVPs, which equated to a cool 7K pageviews on that one event. Or put simply, perhaps more impressive, it was their second-highest visited page for the entire year, only after their guestlist. For those of you keeping track at home, that's more traffic to that page than for giveaways to Foo Fighters, Madonna, or (gasp) New Kids on the Block. 
     
  • The event was a great example of co-opting a local tradition to have a kick ass party with bands, cheap PBR, food trucks, and even a bike valet. As is the case with most successful RSVPs, that traffic was spread fairly evenly between all channels, but with social taking the lead with 44% of total traffic. No surprise, as the event was a natural fit for Facebook (check out the hundreds of likes on this post, this post and this post)
     
  • Of course, the reason for the season was Do617 selling the event to PBR for a cool $10K, which is the greatest gift of all. Nice work guys!
That's all we have time for today; check out all of your stats goodness from the previous week below:
Read More

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Product Update: New Radmin Search + Targeting Ads In The Mobile App

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:13 PM
Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

Targeting Ads In The Mobile App

You now have the ability to target the mobile app as an individual property when creating or editing an ad - so you now have the power to exclude or include ads in the app as you see fit.

What types of ads are supported on the app?
  • 1/4-page Featured Event Ads
  • 1/2-page Featured Event Ads
  • Top Right Brand Ads
  • Middle Listings Brand Ads
What types of ads are not supported on the app?
  • Full page Featured Event Ads
  • Leaderboard Brand Ads
  • Featured Venue Widgets
  • Featured User Widgets
Please note: All of your current active ads that are supported in the app are currently live in the app.

If you would like to exclude any ad from the app, please uncheck the 'Mobile App' option within that ad's page in Radmin. Going forward, the app will only display ads that have the 'Mobile App' option checked - and this option will be checked by default during ad setup.

For launch, we recommend excluding ALL ads except for your launch partners for the first two months. Then, adding your regular partners back in. Make sure they all are fully aware of the new value they are receiving. You should also use this as an opportunity to increase rates for 2016.

We recommend that you ask any full-page advertisers for additional half-page editions of their ads for display in the app. You can then upload two separate ads for each full-page Featured Event campaign: one full-page ad for display on the site and then one half-page ad for display in the app.

New Search

Over the next few days, we will begin the process of connecting Radmin with our new, type-ahead Algolia-powered search. The old search UI will stick around for a bit while we work out the kinks with the new format - but it will ultimately be phased out in favor of the new lightning-quick type-ahead system.

Once we deploy the new search UI, you'll be able to click on the "Beta Search" links within Events, Artists, Venues or People in Radmin (coming soon!) to use the new type-ahead format.


We're beyond stoked to place the new Radmin search system into your hands. Can't wait to hear your thoughts!

Venue Imports

We added fields for 'Image,' 'Hours' and 'Facebook URL' to the importable venue spreadsheets. Need to create a long list of new venues? Make a copy of our importable venue spreadsheet, have your intern(s) fill it out, then send the completed sheet to support@dostuffmedia.com. We'll import the sheet directly to Radmin and automatically create the venues for you.

A Note about Notifications

Many of you have asked about notifications on the app. Currently, we are asking new app users whether or not they would like to receive notifications about events, artists and places in their area. However, we have no immediate plans to send notifications via the app - nor will we implement any notifications without involving your metro in the conversation.

Collecting these preferences during sign-up is easier than doing so at a later date - so we're collecting this information now with plans to revisit this topic later in the fall.

Tip of the Week

Have an event, user, venue or artist that you can see on the front end - but can't find through Radmin search? You can always navigate directly to the desired Radmin page by locating the page's unique system ID through the front end. Here's how you do it, using an event as an example:
  • Navigate to the desired page on the front end of the site.
  • Append ".json" to the page's URL
  • Locate the "id" near the top of the page

  • Append that ID to "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/events/" to locate your event.

Follow these same steps to locate artists, venue and users by replacing the "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/events/" link in the final step with:
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/artists/" for artists
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/venues/" for venues
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/users/" for people
Read More

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/31/15

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 1:42 PM Labels:

Winner of the Week:
DoLA + Share Digest!


We'll keep things brief this week, so dive straight into the meat of the App User Leaderboard. DoLA had a strong surge forward last week, with 780 new app users, earning them the top spot for last week. We've highlighted their strong app partnerships in past KPI updates, so help us highlight you by making sure to put anything you've got in the works to promote the app in the
partnership tracking spreadsheet.

And since it's been a while since we've focused on purely the social side of things, here's a quick rundown of what got the most shares on Facebook last week:
  • Do206 Goes Back to the Nerd Well: Seattle seized the opportunity of the recent PAX Prime gaming convention to trot back out their previously successful "10 places every geek should visit in Seattle" list. Great example of content recontextualization thatearned them 20 shares.
     
  • Do502's Dog Day Afternoon Delight: Louisville capitalized on the inherent social appeal of National Dog Day and put together this list of pooch-friendly spots around town. That content alone was good for a whoppin' 79 shares. We'll be digging in more on this content across the network on content calls, since it's something multiple metros have pushed out, so stay tuned..
     
  • Do512 Remembers a Legend: Austin racked up an impressive 1,129 shares on a single post by polling people for their favorite stevie Ray Vaughan moment on the 25th anniversary of his passing. Check it out, and think about similar icons in your city that matter to your audience. Definitely something that's replicable around the network.
Check out your successful shares along with all of your other stats in the newly updated KPIs below:
Read More
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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/28/15

Winner of the Week: Do615!


Another week, another 5,000+ new users on the DoStuff app network-wide. With app launch parties in full swing, six metros (Do206, Do210, Do416, Do502, Do503, and Do615) had their highest week of new users to date. Check out your metro's contribution in the updated App User Leaderboard. The top 3 metros last week in new users were Do512, Do502, and Do416, who managed to secure even more featured app promo on the Canadian app store.
 
Checking in on non-app traffic, Do615 welcomed the start of autumn with some great content that secured their claim to Winner of the Week. Specifics below:
  • The first step to Do615's content win was creating this slick-looking How To Do Fall page, complete with nicely designed graphics and a simple layout that looks great on mobile. 
     
  • Of course, the best-made content is only as successful as your ability to get people to view it. In this case, almost all traffic came from social, where Do615 did all the right steps to help the piece take off. Stuff like calling out specific points of value to the reader in the post headline, tagging partners involved in the content piece, and securing shares from venues featured in the guide.
     
  • When Do615 added $15 in spend to all of the above, they were able to secure a total of 49 shares (second most shares of any content produced this year), good for right around 10K organic reach.
     
  • All of this social love propelled their fall guide to a total of 4.5K pageviews. Even more impressive is that the fall guide landing page accounts for roughly half of that traffic, with the other 2K+ pageviews going to the content featured in the guide from people clicking through the various posts, each of which got between 200 - 750 pageviews
For the rest of the metros that are pushing out your How To Do Fall page, take note of Nashville's success, and see if you can do the same in your market. We'll be chatting about it in depth on our next content call as well!

In the meantime, check out all of your stats below:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/21/15

Winner of the Week:
Do416, Do214, and Do206!


We're now in to the thick of the DoStuff App's public launch, so make sure you check out the App User Leaderboard to get an idea of where your metro stacks up against the rest of the network. The biggest delta in app user growth goes to Do416, who netted 519 new app users last week! That's third highest in the entire network, and 5X their user acquisition of any previous weeks. For those of you who haven't seen it already, they were able to use their connections with Apple to score a featured spot on the app store homepage.

Meanwhile, Do502 continues to bombard Lousville with press about the app, helping them secure 600 new users last week, second after Do512. Nice work everyone! Keep milking those partnerships and hitting the press outreach; it's easy to see the dividends they pay.
 
To round out our Winners of the Week, check out a few metros that took advantage of National Burger Day for some nice traction on email and Twitter:
In general when analyzing these content pieces, we find that these "holiday" roundups are useful because they give some relevance to evergreen content, helping to increase spread on social channels and entice people to check out the content. The National Whatever Day contextualization is part of the reason (among other things) why people like dog-friendly bars on National Dog Day more than just "here's where you can get a hot dog."

That's it for today! Knock yourself out digging in on your own stats below:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Product Update: App Download Links, Search Fixes & More

Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

Out Now - App Download Links

We've added app download links to all giveaway and RSVP confirmation emails.


Note: If you customize an event's RSVP confirmation email then this link will not be automatically included - but we highly recommend adding it to help drive app downloads.

Coming Soon - New Search Alerts

We're adding an alert to the old Radmin search pages to encourage you to use our new Beta Search.


 We'll be removing old search soon - so we want to make sure that everyone gets comfortable with the new search (Beta Search) before we switch over. The new search (Beta Search) is faster and more accurate than old search - so we'd recommend using it whenever you can.

Coming Soon - Features & Fixes

We've implemented a solution to prevent varying text sizes from appearing on /p pages within the app.

 There were a variety of actions that users could take to inject unwanted 'font-size' code into their /p pages' HTML - which then caused the pages' copy to appear in varying sizes on the app.


 Going forward, we will automatically clean these unwanted insertions out of /p pages' HTML. This will not solve every issue with fonts on pages - but it will be a big step forward in standardizing them.

A note that this fix will not be retroactive when it goes out - meaning that you will need to manually re-edit any /p pages that contain varying font sizes if they were created on or before this date (9/16).

 You will soon see event dates when setting up Featured Event ads in Radmin - to help you better identify events with similar titles.


 We've also prevented duplicate and/or past events from populating in this field.

 We've made sure that your 'Dang! Couldn't Find That Page' pages will feature the same links as your metro's (desktop) Featured Stuff.

 A reminder that your metro's Featured Stuff links are edited via Radmin -> Content -> Words.

We've also fixed a bug that was causing duplicate editions of the same event to appear in Radmin search.

And we've added validation into the 'Permalink' field of the /p pages editor to prevent anyone from saving permalinks that include spaces in their URLs.

 Our validation check will automatically turn these spaces into dashes.

So this:

Will automatically become this:

Tip of the Week

We recently discovered that HazDF was crashing in the DoStuff app because there were blank spaces in their advertisements' Destination URLs.


Not something you'd expect to crash an app, right? We were surprised too.

Going forward, our dev team will be taking steps to automatically 'sanitize' these URLs and strip away the spaces by default.​

In the mean time, please make sure to not include any extra spaces within your ads' 'Destination' and 'Link Override' URLs to prevent this problem from happening for your metro.

Thanks for reading the Product Update! 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/14/15

Winner of the Week: Do617!


We're T-minus one day until app launch, so make sure to check out where things stand in the App User Leaderboard. DoLA leads the total number of new app users in September, while San Antonio gains on Do317's % of audience lead. Do210 gained more than 100 new users last week a high mark for any metro launched in the past 2 years. Of course, when we hit public announce tomorrow and you guys start churning on local press outreach, all of this could change!
 
Outside of the app realm, Do617's September holiday cheer netted them our Winner of the (past two) Week(s) award. Check it out:
  • In the past month, Do617 received 2.1K RSVP clicks. Compare that to the 13 months from their launch until the start of August, where their total number of RSVPs was 1.8K. What made the difference? A little ol' event Do617 put together dubbed the Allston Christmas Block Party.
     
  • That event alone was good for over 1.7K RSVPs, which equated to a cool 7K pageviews on that one event. Or put simply, perhaps more impressive, it was their second-highest visited page for the entire year, only after their guestlist. For those of you keeping track at home, that's more traffic to that page than for giveaways to Foo Fighters, Madonna, or (gasp) New Kids on the Block. 
     
  • The event was a great example of co-opting a local tradition to have a kick ass party with bands, cheap PBR, food trucks, and even a bike valet. As is the case with most successful RSVPs, that traffic was spread fairly evenly between all channels, but with social taking the lead with 44% of total traffic. No surprise, as the event was a natural fit for Facebook (check out the hundreds of likes on this post, this post and this post)
     
  • Of course, the reason for the season was Do617 selling the event to PBR for a cool $10K, which is the greatest gift of all. Nice work guys!
That's all we have time for today; check out all of your stats goodness from the previous week below:
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Product Update: New Radmin Search + Targeting Ads In The Mobile App

Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

Targeting Ads In The Mobile App

You now have the ability to target the mobile app as an individual property when creating or editing an ad - so you now have the power to exclude or include ads in the app as you see fit.

What types of ads are supported on the app?
  • 1/4-page Featured Event Ads
  • 1/2-page Featured Event Ads
  • Top Right Brand Ads
  • Middle Listings Brand Ads
What types of ads are not supported on the app?
  • Full page Featured Event Ads
  • Leaderboard Brand Ads
  • Featured Venue Widgets
  • Featured User Widgets
Please note: All of your current active ads that are supported in the app are currently live in the app.

If you would like to exclude any ad from the app, please uncheck the 'Mobile App' option within that ad's page in Radmin. Going forward, the app will only display ads that have the 'Mobile App' option checked - and this option will be checked by default during ad setup.

For launch, we recommend excluding ALL ads except for your launch partners for the first two months. Then, adding your regular partners back in. Make sure they all are fully aware of the new value they are receiving. You should also use this as an opportunity to increase rates for 2016.

We recommend that you ask any full-page advertisers for additional half-page editions of their ads for display in the app. You can then upload two separate ads for each full-page Featured Event campaign: one full-page ad for display on the site and then one half-page ad for display in the app.

New Search

Over the next few days, we will begin the process of connecting Radmin with our new, type-ahead Algolia-powered search. The old search UI will stick around for a bit while we work out the kinks with the new format - but it will ultimately be phased out in favor of the new lightning-quick type-ahead system.

Once we deploy the new search UI, you'll be able to click on the "Beta Search" links within Events, Artists, Venues or People in Radmin (coming soon!) to use the new type-ahead format.


We're beyond stoked to place the new Radmin search system into your hands. Can't wait to hear your thoughts!

Venue Imports

We added fields for 'Image,' 'Hours' and 'Facebook URL' to the importable venue spreadsheets. Need to create a long list of new venues? Make a copy of our importable venue spreadsheet, have your intern(s) fill it out, then send the completed sheet to support@dostuffmedia.com. We'll import the sheet directly to Radmin and automatically create the venues for you.

A Note about Notifications

Many of you have asked about notifications on the app. Currently, we are asking new app users whether or not they would like to receive notifications about events, artists and places in their area. However, we have no immediate plans to send notifications via the app - nor will we implement any notifications without involving your metro in the conversation.

Collecting these preferences during sign-up is easier than doing so at a later date - so we're collecting this information now with plans to revisit this topic later in the fall.

Tip of the Week

Have an event, user, venue or artist that you can see on the front end - but can't find through Radmin search? You can always navigate directly to the desired Radmin page by locating the page's unique system ID through the front end. Here's how you do it, using an event as an example:
  • Navigate to the desired page on the front end of the site.
  • Append ".json" to the page's URL
  • Locate the "id" near the top of the page

  • Append that ID to "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/events/" to locate your event.

Follow these same steps to locate artists, venue and users by replacing the "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/events/" link in the final step with:
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/artists/" for artists
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/venues/" for venues
  • "http://radmin.dostuffmedia.com/users/" for people
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/31/15

Winner of the Week:
DoLA + Share Digest!


We'll keep things brief this week, so dive straight into the meat of the App User Leaderboard. DoLA had a strong surge forward last week, with 780 new app users, earning them the top spot for last week. We've highlighted their strong app partnerships in past KPI updates, so help us highlight you by making sure to put anything you've got in the works to promote the app in the
partnership tracking spreadsheet.

And since it's been a while since we've focused on purely the social side of things, here's a quick rundown of what got the most shares on Facebook last week:
  • Do206 Goes Back to the Nerd Well: Seattle seized the opportunity of the recent PAX Prime gaming convention to trot back out their previously successful "10 places every geek should visit in Seattle" list. Great example of content recontextualization thatearned them 20 shares.
     
  • Do502's Dog Day Afternoon Delight: Louisville capitalized on the inherent social appeal of National Dog Day and put together this list of pooch-friendly spots around town. That content alone was good for a whoppin' 79 shares. We'll be digging in more on this content across the network on content calls, since it's something multiple metros have pushed out, so stay tuned..
     
  • Do512 Remembers a Legend: Austin racked up an impressive 1,129 shares on a single post by polling people for their favorite stevie Ray Vaughan moment on the 25th anniversary of his passing. Check it out, and think about similar icons in your city that matter to your audience. Definitely something that's replicable around the network.
Check out your successful shares along with all of your other stats in the newly updated KPIs below:
Posted by at No comments:
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