Dance Weekend

Last week, I posted an article about which is better for promoting your event: groups or fan pages.  While similar in appearance, I think fan pages are better, both for the users and for promoters.  But some people weren’t convinced.  Fair enough and understandable, because I purposefully left off the biggest advantage of Fan Pages.  It’s something so cool that I decided it deserved a post of its own.  This is that post.

It’s simple, really. Fan pages can add applications. “Huh?”  Yes, with a Fan page, you can add functionality to your page in the form of additional profile tabs. Now, you’re probably wondering, “Why in the world would I want to put a Farmville tab on my workshop’s fan page?”  Hopefully, you wouldn’t.  Please don’t!  But what if you could have an extra Venues tab or a Competitions tab?  What about a tab where people could register for your event right from within Facebook without ever leaving your fan page, pay using paypal, set their RSVP status on your events-page, and post to their stream, automagically, without ever leaving your fan page?

Hmm, now things are getting a little more interesting, eh?  What if you could completely offload coordinating housing simply by adding a Housing tab to your Fan-page where dancers and hosts can signup and make their own arrangements without stressing out one of your volunteers?  Or maybe you’d want a Volunteers tab where people could select their own working hours on a first come, first-served based on the time-slots and positions you’ve configured?  All of that is possible with a fan-page.  With a group: none of it.

But don’t get too excited because most of these things don’t exist yet.  But it’s an idea I’ve had for a long time.  Over the past several nights, I’ve whipped up an example Fan-page to put a more concrete face on what I’m imagining.  Check out the fan page and play around with the Registrations tab for an example of what can be done.  You’ll be prompted to add the “Dance Weekend Registrations” app.  Facebook requires this so you know you’re dealing with a non-Facebook app but don’t worry, it doesn’t collect any information about you, save anything you submit in the form, post anything to anyone’s wall, or send any invitations.  It’s just to show the kinds of things that are possible.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If after taking a look at the FubarEX fan-page, you’re interested in having something like this added to the fan-page for your event, workshop, class-series, whatever, I’d love to work with you.  For free.  I’m just looking to work with a real organizers to make sure I’m building the types of things you’re interested in using.

As an event organizer looking to leverage the power of Facebook to promote your site, there are many things to take into account.  One point of confusion is which is better, a Fan page or a group?  At first glance, they seem to be practically the same thing. However, there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to each.  I’ll cover the two most relevant differences here to help you decide how to use Groups and Fan Pages to market your events and dance organization.  Those two things are streams and events.

First, events.  Obviously, having a Facebook event-page is desirable because, for a workshop or exchange, Facebook event-pages are the main way to hook into Facebook’s social graph.  As users RSVP to your event, stories are displayed on their wall for their friends to see and more and more people become aware of your event.  Awesome!  That’s putting social media to work for you.

If you have a group, you can create events “as” that group and invite all of the members of your group to the event.  Unfortunately, Fan pages cannot create events.  At this point, you might be thinking, “well, that settles it.  Groups are the way to go.”

But hang on.  Fan pages offer something arguably even better that groups do not: access to your fan’s stream.  When someone becomes a fan of your event on Facebook, it’s pretty much like them adding your event as a friend.  Things you post to your Fan page’s wall appear in your fan’s streams just like other posts by their flesh & blood friends.  You now have a direct channel to alert your fans of things like deadlines, new venues & bands, and any other exciting news about your event.  Posts you make on your group’s wall, however, just sit there on only the group wall and the only time people see them is if they visit your group.

Yeah, the decision just got a lot tougher now, didn’t it?  So which do I think is better?  Well, luckily, you can have both, but if I could only choose one, I’d choose a Fan page over a group.  I believe organizers should create Fan pages for their events and organizations and build their “fan base”.  That way you can “reach out and touch people” and put your event and organization in their consciousness at will, without needing them to do anything differently than use Facebook how they normally do to interact with their friends.

But what about events?  If you have a Fan page, you can either create events with your personal account and promote it on your fan page.  Or you can have a group that you use to create events with…and then promote the events on your fan page.  But the bottom line is if you’re not using Fan pages to promote your event, you’re not using Facebook to its full potential to market your event.

“But John, all I see are organizers using groups!”  Yeah, I know, and they’re doing it wrong.  Setup a Fan page and start promoting it.  You won’t regret it.

And while you’re at it, become a fan of Dance Weekend!

I haven’t update the blog in forever.  That’s a good thing because I’ve actually been working on the app!  If you haven’t check out Dance Weekend in a while, you definitely need to.  I’ve given it a completely new look and feel to match the blog.  Yes, most sites make their blog match their site, but we like to do things differently around here.  And by we, I mean me, or I, or whatever.

Besides the new look, I’ve added fully-featured profile tabs.  If you haven’t added the Dance tab to your facebook profile, you need to because it’s awesome, if I do say so myself.  Check it out and proudly display your events right on your profile! (Click on the plus-sign next to the tabs at the top of your profile and select Dance Weekend.  You may need to type in Dance Weekend if you haven’t used the app in a while.)

I kind of yanked out the “dance card” thing since I’m really still not clear on how I want that to work.  In the meantime, you can use the dance weekend app to directly post a message to your friend’s feed about an event.  Instead of the form I was using for the dance card thing, I’m now using the familiar Facebook feed form.  Users are used to the interface, they know exactly what it does, and it allows them to preview exactly how to post will look on their friend’s wall.  And it looks pretty damn, good, by the way, complete with the event’s image and links back to the event.  (Pro tip: This feature is great for some grass-roots advertising for your event.  Get some volunteers to use Dance Weekend to post on their friend’s walls.  i.e.: “Hey Joe, I hope I’m going to get to dance with you at FubarEX!”  It’s a great way to get your event’s logo in front of a lot of people quickly and easily with a personal touch…and for free!)

Next on the agenda is to build the stand-alone site and tie it into Facebook using Facebook Connect.  Wish me luck, send me feature ideas, and most importantly, invite me to your events so I can add them to Dance Weekend!

I apologize for my AWOL-ness, lately.  But see, that’s the problem with free stuff: you get what you pay for.  All of December was pretty insane for me.  I had some big projects going on at T-Mobile, then a new position materialized that I interviewed for (and got!), and then, well everyone knows Lindy Focus is the place to be for the last week of the year.  Then this last week has been hectic trying to make sure I give a good pass-down to all the peeps at the big pink T before I turn in my security badge today.

But now, I am back on the job for you, my fellow dance freaks and geeks!  I just finished approving a ton of new event submissions.  Thanks, y’all for adding your events!  Sorry some of them sat in the queue for a while but it looks like the earliest new event is in March so it’s not too bad. This weekend I hope to knock out some issues that have cropped up and also add some new things.

Then on Monday, I start my new gig and will be spending a lot of time getting up and running there, reaquainting myself with a mac, etc… So whatever I’m able to roll out this weekend will probably be the last update for a couple of weeks.  Wish me luck and I’ll see y’all on the dance flo’! Or, as Solomon Douglas would say, the dance floor. (That’s a little inside joke from Enter the Blues, which is coming up again on May 21, in Atlanta!  Don’t miss it, ’cause it’s always the jam.)

I finally fixed the profile publisher of DanceWeekend so I can show events in user’s profile boxes.  It’s ugly as home-made sin right now and I need to strucutre it so it’s easy to tell which events the user is definitely attending vs maybe attending.  I also plan on using smaller pictures for events that have occured in the past.  But that’s all cosmetic junk.  The main thing was re-figuring out all of the different hoops the app has to jump through to publish to a user’s profile.

And on that note, I’m contemplating calling it a night.  but I’m not really tired so I might go ahead and clean some things up tonight.  I guess you’ll find out when you check it out!

Users (you!) can now submit your events to the DanceWeekend app on Facebook.  I wanted to make the process as easy as possible so all you need is the link to th event’s Facebook page and the app pulls the rest of the information directly from the Facebook page.  Well, most of it.  After submitting the link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can enter a few more things such as dance-styles, whether there are workshops or comps, etc… but there’s no need to type anything.  Even the event graphic/banner is automatically pulled from Facebook.

I also added some search capabilities to filter through the tons and tons of events you’re all going to submit as soon as you finish reading this!  (Hey, one can dream, right?)  As you would expect, you can search by dance styles (Lindy Hop, Balboa, Blues, and West Coast Swing) and also whether the events have social dancing, workshops, and competitions.

I also added an option for separating single-day and multi-day events.  I figure some people might submit smaller one-day events and I don’t want to be all snooty and reject events just because it’s not a full-weekend event.  So what I’m deciding to do is not show those events by default but make them available to users via search.

I’ve also stubbed-in the capability to search by distance from a zip code.  I should have this finished by the end of the week (which means in about three weeks).  So, I don’t know why you’re still here.  Go submit an event!

Oh, man, I’m really getting excited!  Today I hammered out the code for listing a pass for sale on DanceWeekend and I’m really excited because the more I worked on it, the more I realized that this is actually going to help people sell their passes!  In fact, although I’m a bit partial, I really think DanceWeekend is going to be THE way place turn to to sell their passes.  Why’s that?  I’m glad you asked, so let me break it down for you.

When a user lists their pass for an event up for sale on DanceWeekend, the app can automatically scan the list of Facebook users who’ve indicated an interest in the event by RSVP’ing as “attending” or “maybe”.  Of those people, DanceWeekend can choose to send notifications directly to a limited number of those people (currently 20) per day that your pass is available for sale, whether they’re FB friends with you or not!  So unlike just posting a status message, which only your FB friends can see, that you’re looking to sell your pass, this allows DanceWeekend to directly reach out to people who aren’t even in your network but are interested in attending the event.

So far, the notification I’ve settled on is, “Hi, I’m selling my pass to {Event_name} for {asking_price}.  Please message me if you’d like to buy it or know someone who might. Thanks!”

I’ve gotten everything working up to that point, including sending the notifications, but there are more plumbing bits to workout before I roll it out, such as modiying the price, listing all the for_sale passes for an event, etc.  But I think this is going to be awesome and I’m bangin’ away to get it finished by the end of the weekend.

Stay tuned!

But not much to show for it.  But that’s not such a bad thing.  It’s been a long, slow week of behind-the-scenes coding on the DanceWeekend app on Facebook.  I realized I’d made a false step due to Facebook’s data access and storage restrictions and the way they handle displaying data on tabs and profile pages.  I didn’t realize, until I tried it, that when you access a tab on someone’s page, that tab doesn’t have access to Facebook’s API data such as that user’s friends and events.  For many apps, that wouldn’t be a problem but since DanceWeekend relies heavily on Facebook’s “social graph”, it’s a bit of a problem.  And I’m not allowed to store any information about the relationships between users and events or users and other users.  Argh!

Oh well, it wouldn’t be fun if it were easy, I guess.  I was hoping to get the tabs and profile boxes sorted out before moving on to other functionality like passes and housing and such because that visibility is needed to spread the word about DanceWeekend and help it reach the “tipping point” of usage among dancers.  But I’m going to have to let this one sit for a bit and subconsciously workout a solution to the problem while I work on other things.  And there are already over 800 dancers who’ve added the app from it’s LindyWeekend days so spreading the word isn’t a huge deal, I guess.

The next feature on the to-do list for DanceWeekend is the buy/sell passes functionality.  I’m not sure how much use it’ll see but it’s an important feature if for no other reason than it’ll help me solidify how I want to build the user-to-user interaction model for the housing functionality.  Keep an eye out for it as I hope to have it rolled out by the end of the weekend.

Keep the leather-side down.

Advertising your Lindy Hop or West Coast Swing event by posting messages on internet forums is so five years ago.  Sure, there are some must-hit forums like Yehoodi, and even posting on the smaller scene-centric forums is never a bad thing, per se, other than the time commitment.  But it’s time for organizers to start taking better advantage of the free advertising opportunities presented by the so-called “social media”.  Social media, Web 2.0, social networking, my-twit-friend-space-face-ster-bookr, whatever you want to call it.  It’s a gold-mine of free word-of-mouth advertising and information distribution that has yet to even begun to be effectively tapped by the swing dance community.

In this series of posts, I’m going talk about some of the different social media sites and tools available and give some ideas for how you might want to use them to help promote your event.  Today, I’m going to tell you about Twitter.  If you’re like a lot of people, the whole concept of twitter doesn’t make much sense.  It’s a silly little toy site with a silly toy name and it’s hard to imagine any real utility to be gained from the site.  And you’re absolutely right!

You’re right, that is, if you think Twitter is a social networking site.  But it’s not!  Twitter CEO Evan Williams said recently that Twitter isn’t a social network, it’s an information network.  Indeed, twitter is a fantastic opportunity for organizers to quickly and efficiently push out information to a self-selected audience that has explicitly indicated an interest in hearing what you have to say about your event.  When a dancer follows your event on twitter, it’s like they’ve set-up a “red phone” directly from you to them and are saying, “Send me all the important details, right here!”

Think of the opportunities for “tweeting” out information: “Early bird registration is now up!”, “Sign up soon, only 5 early-bird spots left”. “We’ve picked the dates for MOJO-LX 2011.  Going to be on May 1.  Mark your calendars!”, “Housing is full but we have a waiting list. Go sign up if still homeless.”, “Just booked an awesome band!! Can’t mention their name yet but you will enjoy!”  The opportunities for building buzz and keeping your event in people’s minds is endless.

And the beauty of twitter is that once a dancer has opened the communication channel by following you on twitter, you can dissemenate information at will.  For an annual event, there really is no excuse to not have a twitter account specifically for your event.  Your “follow Foobar Lindy Exchange on Twitter” link should be on every page on your site and at the bottom of every email/forum post about your event.  Even if your event is still in the infancy of it’s planning stages and you don’t have your site built, you should at least have a page that says “Website coming soon.  Follow us on Twitter.”

People want to dance and want to know what dance events are happening.  But they don’t want to have to go hunting for information.  They don’t want to have to remember that your event is in about 7 months so they can remember to check the forum to find out when registration opens so they can remember to actually go signup and snag a cheap pass.  Make it easy on them by allowing them to open a channel of communication where you can unintrusively give them exactly what information they need, exactly when they need it.

So if your event doesn’t have a twitter page, go signup for one now!  And be sure to follow @danceweekend so I can follow your event and keep track of the important details.

Oops, I forgot to mention that for an example of an event that is already using twitter, check out DCLX on twitter. DCLX obviously “gets it” when it comes to everything Lindy Exchange and it’s no wonder they’re one of the best swing dance events around.  Emulate the best!

I was at a party several months ago with some dancer friends and the topic of Lindy Weekend came up.  (I didn’t bring it up, I swear!)  One of the dancers who’d never heard of it asked me what it was…and I really didn’t have a good answer.  Sure, I had plenty that I could say but I wasn’t sure whether to tell her all of the neat things I wanted it to do or manage expectations and just mention the rather boring things it actually did.

Now mind you, none of it is boring to me because I wrote it and am intimately familiar with all of the little widgets and assorted behind-the-scenes magic that all comes together to make the app work.  And well, geek that I am, that’s sort of “my thing”.  But to an outsider, my users and friends who want a tool to help them get the most out of their dance opportunities, it just looked like yet another list of events on a webpage somewhere.  Big deal.

But rest assured, my plans for the Dance Weekend App are much grander than a simple static calendar of events and I want to share some of ideas with you now:

• Dance with your friends – OK, this one’s pretty obvious.  In addition to a list of events, Dance Weekend will alow you to share and see which dance events you and your friends are planning on attending.
• Find and share housing – Dance Weekend is going to allow hosts and guests to take the reigns of their own housing arrangements.  Hosts will be able to post availability in their homes and share that info with all attendees or just their friends.  For hotel events, dancers will be able to arrange room-shares with other dancers.
• Buy and sell passes – It’s the worst when you’ve paid for a pass and suddenly find out you can’t attend shortly before the event.  Then it’s a mad scramble to try and find a buyer.  The sad thing is there are always last-minute attendees who would love to get a little discount on a pass before paying the “gotcha!” at-the-door price.  If only there were a way to bring these people together in one place.  Enter..(wait for it…)  Dance Weekend.

So that’s just a taste of what I’ve got in store for you all.  There’s even more cool stuff I want to do but dare not mention lest you all think I’ve lost it.

I’m having a blast re-writing the Facebok App and am improving it all the time so keep checking it out.  pretty soon you’ll be telling everyone how awesome it is.

See you on the dance-floor!