Retention and Relationships

I try to help a non-profit ”international neighborhood micro-center for artistic and intercultural life in San Francisco” with operating and marketing advice.  They put on 120 events a year and I’d always advocated getting the word out about individual events.  We looked at email, and while it would probably work, the overhead for so many was relatively high.  (Almost everyone is a volunteer and resources are scarce.)

Enter Facebook Events.  Set up the event, send an invite, and voila, there’s your email notifications.  Its timely, professional, and useful.  Now I know what’s coming up and can make quick decisions to change my schedule.  It doesn’t feel obtrusive, since I joined the group of my own volition and can control messaging.  It shows the intersection of time-based content, opted in peer to peer communication, and user-controlled media streams (i.e. I still choose email over text) can and will be incredibly powerful.

I expect to see attendance max out going forward.

Amazing how an app can tip so quickly. Maybe its the connectors that let you post to multiple networks, so you only need to write once. Regardless, once Twitter recast itself as a microblogging service (vs. a party/barhopping planning tool) its become the defacto communication standard. I figure it will last about 6 months, since the noise has quickly become deafening.

Facebook is already there. All the extra features that put additional information into the feed have crowded out the really interesting stuff – what friends and acquaintances are really doing and thinking about.

I remain convinced, however, that opt-in peer to peer communication will supplant email as the main communication medium within a couple years. This means the cheapest marketing medium will continue to implode, and marketers will need to keep innovating to stay up with their customers.