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Hannah Rudman sees geolocative technologies as offering a win/win solution for promoting ticket sales

Half of all Internet connections are now mobile, 67% of the world’s population have a mobile phone. Fifty per cent of American adults have a smart phone1, as do 43% of UK adults. Sometime next year, it is estimated that the inflection point of PCs/smartphone sales will occur. As well as giving people access to the Internet on a device that is becoming ubiquitous, smartphones (phones with an Internet connection, camera and compass) can provide you with geo-locative services. As smartphones increase in popularity, people are utilising geo-locative technologies to discover local events and local businesses of interest.

Diana Pouliot, Director of Mobile Advertising at Google, revealed that one-third of all Google searches via the mobile web are about some aspect of the searcher’s local environment2. One of the most popular uses for smartphones is generating directions to and/or information about local businesses. This has increased demand for businesses wanting to implement effective mobile marketing campaigns.

Google Places and Facebook Places are rapidly overtaking Foursquare as the mechanisms to most easily share (by ‘checking in’) where you are, what you’re doing, and the friends you’re with.

Many of you will be users of social selling/buying websites like Groupon or LivingSocial – these services are currently growing massive followings. They offer deals based on location and have a time-limited, and often capacity-limited, availability. Google bought Groupon last November for £2.5bn proving that social buying is one of the hottest online trends, where people share great deals in a group. LivingSocial partners with businesses to offer consumers incredible savings on products and services. The deals are shared and promoted on social networks like Facebook. Social deals create a win-win situation for both the consumers and the businesses. Consumers benefit from highly discounted deals while businesses benefit from a more focused and inexpensive advertising, and at the same time they increase their customer base.

Now, Google and Facebook Places are integrating social selling services (Facebook calls it Deals) into their technologies. So you can make a time/capacity-limited offer available to people that check into your Place.

Imagine a Saturday afternoon in the centre of Edinburgh. A local or a tourist gets out their Smartphone, loads the Facebook application and taps Places. There’s suddenly a list of shops and cultural venues in their vicinity, some offering Facebook Deals on checking in. The user can load the venues’ Places pages to see what the deal is before checking in. Once someone redeems a coupon a venue has set up, Facebook posts to their wall that they are in your Place and that they got a Deal. The Facebook user’s friends see that there are savings to be had, like and comment on the deal (thus extending the news to their own networks) and head down to your venue to redeem the deal. Facebook has over half a billion regular users worldwide, and Facebook Deals are moving to national brands quickly.

What does all this mean for an arts venue?

1. You MUST be recognised by Google or Facebook as a place! The importance of having an up-to-date listing in both Google and Facebook Places is essential. To ensure that your organisation appears in a Google or Facebook Places mobile search, you must first make sure that you register with Google or Facebook Places. You will need to do this on a GPS-enabled device in your venue, then follow up with evidence that you are the business in that venue (Facebook Places asks for a utilities bill addressed to your company name at the place you are trying to register, for example).

2. Offer an effective mobile marketing campaign. Give people something on their first check in, and then reward them for coming back. Make sure a first check in deal is something that the widest group of people would appreciate (would a free cup of tea in your café actually sell more tickets to your shows through getting people through the door than a straight free ticket offer?)

3. Google and Facebook have sophisticated stats for Page and Place owners: use them to pick up real-time statistics like: total daily check-ins and Deal redemption over time, your most recent visitors, your most frequent visitors, gender breakdown of your customers, what time of day people check in, the portion of your venue’s check-ins that are broadcast to Twitter or ‘liked’, etc.

Geolocative technologies are worth getting to grips with now that they integrate so well with social selling and they do not require expensive development. Get claiming those Places, get redeeming those Deals!

Hannah Rudman runs Rudman Consulting Ltd.

e hannah@consultrudman.com
t 07971 282261
TW @hannahrudman
W http://consultrudman.com

Resources AmbITion’s guide How Do I get to grips with geolocative technologies? www.bit.ly/fjrteg
www.facebook.com/places/
www.google.com/places

1 A Nielsen Company report recently indicated that US smartphone penetration will be over 50% in 2011
www.bit/ly/ptJPT

2 www.bit.ly/dCFQCd