'Tis the season for wrapping major dev projects. Hats off to those dudes for finishing some BIG STUFF.
The Feed Emerges In iOS
We'll be releasing a new build of the iOS app tomorrow morning. This build will offer the first glance at one of the year's biggest projects, the Feed.
The feed is a personalized content stream that features show announcements by artists, users and venues that you follow - as well as all of the metro's mobile Latest posts.
To make way for the Feed, we'll be moving the app's type-ahead search and Featured Places to the Discover screen...
... while the Do and Me tabs will remain unchanged.
Feed Content
The recently-added ability for new users to sync their Spotify and Facebook accounts to auto-follow artists and venues on our sites will help populate these users' personal Feeds with the content they're most interested in.
We've also started auto-following the Top Picks and Giveaways lists for all new users so that they'll have some awesome lists to peruse in their feed (and to drive engagement with these lists).
Please make sure your Top Picks looks beyond awesome and that you're always adding the best events in your city to the list as you add them to your site - especially since more people are now going to see this feature than ever before.
What about Android and Desktop?
Our plan is to release the Feed on desktop (to replace Latest) within the next month. We'll have much more on that coming soon - and Android will be arriving shortly after Desktop.
The version of the Feed that you will see in the next app build is just the first version. We'll be iterating on its functionality after seeing it in the real world and capturing feedback from metros and advertisers. We already have a number of additional features that we're planning to build and test soon, such as the ability to pin a Latest post to the top of the Feed.
The version of the Feed that you will see in the next app build is just the first version. We'll be iterating on its functionality after seeing it in the real world and capturing feedback from metros and advertisers. We already have a number of additional features that we're planning to build and test soon, such as the ability to pin a Latest post to the top of the Feed.
What else is coming down the app pipeline?
Even more exciting news! The impending iOS build will allow us to test push notifications on small segments of users. Please don't sell or promise any push notification campaigns just yet - but please do stand by for further instructions here. We'll likely be reaching out to multiple metros to help us test these out - and will keep everyone posted with the results.
We're also currently testing onboarding links for existing users that will automatically log these users into their accounts when clicked - and will allow them to sync up their Spotify and Facebook accounts via our new onboarding process.
We're also currently testing onboarding links for existing users that will automatically log these users into their accounts when clicked - and will allow them to sync up their Spotify and Facebook accounts via our new onboarding process.
Many metros have also asked about beacons and location-based functionality within the app. These features will be ready for testing in the next build (after this one) - which should arrive within three weeks.
On this note, our developers are fired up by all of our progress and are planning to release a new iOS build every two weeks going forward. This will help us continuously improve the product and address bugs more quickly than before.
We'll shoot a quick follow-up to the network the moment the new iOS build is available. We can't wait for you to check it out!
A Quick Request From Our Data Team
Want better data on your newsletters' performance? If so, we ask that you please pick a standard format for your newsletter campaign names in MailChimp and stick with it.
Why? DoStuff does a lot of automation to pull in your email data for things like the Weekly KPI report and monthly goal tracking. Having wording in your campaign name that denotes it's a newsletter (i.e. "weekly" "daily" "top picks" "newsletter" etc.) helps us easily create automation rules that pull in your data without having to log in to each metro's MailChimp to pull reporting.
Here's a snapshot of some pretty ideal campaign naming:
Tip of the Week
We are currently syncing up every metro's MailChimp account with their Radmin CMS. However, those syncs will begin to fail if any list fields besides email address are set to 'Required'.
For this reason, it's important to make sure that going forward, if any member of your team adds a new list field to your MailChimp list, (s)he does not make that field required.
Here's a snapshot of some healthy list fields:
We'll of course be watching for error reports from HQ as well - but arming your metro with this knowledge will help prevent them from happening in the first place. Thanks much!
For this reason, it's important to make sure that going forward, if any member of your team adds a new list field to your MailChimp list, (s)he does not make that field required.
Here's a snapshot of some healthy list fields:
We'll of course be watching for error reports from HQ as well - but arming your metro with this knowledge will help prevent them from happening in the first place. Thanks much!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thoughts to share? DO!