Sometime last February I noticed that basically 90% of my staff was on Facebook all day long, doing their Patron Technology work in between games of Scrabble. This got me thinking that either I had to ban them from being on Facebook all day - or do the opposite.
So I started thinking about whether there could be a way to harness Facebook as a marketing tool for the arts. I knew that arts organizations could create a "fan page" as a profile for their organization, but those pages don't do very much other than replicate your existing Web site content. What we really needed was something that takes advantage of the amazing power of the social networking capability of Facebook.
We put together a team here that conceptualized a new application for Facebook, which we are very proud to have launched today in beta version.
Here's the scoop, in a nutshell:
i'll go! is a free new Facebook application that enables New York arts organizations to take advantage of the power of social networking by listing their events and offering exclusive discounts to Facebook users.
i'll go! provides:
- A way for Facebook users to identify events they want to attend, and to invite friends to go with them.
- A way for Facebook users to broadcast their interest in going to cultural events to their network of friends.
- A way for arts organizations to offer discounts directly to Facebook users, to motivate first-time arts attendance.
We are testing this out in New York now, and assuming it works, we'll roll it out in other cities across the country in the months ahead.
First of all, if you're on Facebook, please go download it and take a look.
If you're an arts organization in New York and want to add your events to it (it's FREE), you can read all about it at the Web site, illgo.patrontechnology.com. And since you're obviously the blog-reading sort, there's a link to the official i'll go! blog on the main page.
This is a completely "Web 2.0" program, which means that its success depends on arts organizations participating by listing their events (did I mention it's free?), and Facebook users engaging and using it!
