iggli.com

During the coming weeks, I’m planning to do something a little different with the iggli blog. We’ve managed to get to know quite a few people in the sports and entertainment, technology and ticketing industries. Some of them are very well known, others maybe not so much. But they all have a unique voice and a particularly valuable point of view. These folks will be “guest” bloggers from time-to-time, offering their own perspectives on everything from social media and marketing, the music industry’s challenges, new developments in sports marketing, friend-to-friend communication, ticketing (including primary and secondary market ticketing, paperless tickets, dynamic pricing) and more. We’ll see where it all goes, but wherever they take us, I know it will be interesting, educational and entertaining. In the meantime, go listen to some music or watch a game!

iggli just came off a remarkable week. If you check out iggli.com, you’ll notice dramatic changes to the website and to virtually every aspect of the service.

New partners.

During the last week we added support for AEG Live – check out the Ogden and Bluebird Theaters in Denver – and the WNBA. The Ogden and Bluebird, two of the premier venues in Denver, have begun to use the service on their event pages. Now when you find an interesting event, a great artist coming to either of these venues, you’ll be able to use iggli’s invite service to invite your friends.

The WNBA went live with iggli at the end of this past week. An extraordinary site and organization, you’ll find iggli’s invitation services used on the WNBA’s schedule pages.

New website look and feel. New event search.

We’re pretty excited about this, and we think you will be too. You can now use iggli’s home page to search for music and sporting events anywhere in the United States. (We’re not trying to leave anyone out, but we need to take a step at a time.) Enter a zip code, a city name, an artist or venue name, even the name of a sports team. Choose from among tens of thousands of available events. And, of course, invite your friends.

In the coming days we’ll be blogging about some of the other key changes to our services, including

• New top level navigation.
• New igg.li short URL services.
• New partner reports.
• New event pages.
• And more.

Stay tuned!

Facebook has provided a new attention-getting tool that you’ll want to know about if you are an artist, promoter, or venue responsible for promoting events, You already know that you can use iggli’s invitation services to leverage the power of email. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Now Facebook lets you use the @ symbol to get the attention of a particular person. You can read more about the service in the September 15, 2009 edition of Inside Facebook.

Here’s how the new feature works. Suppose you’re posting an update to a band’s status and you want me to know. For example, Crosby, Stills and Nash are playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 23rd. You go to the status box and type: Hey @ . . . and you’ll be given the option to add the name of any of your Facebook friends. So, you type, Hey @ Tom Higley let’s go see Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Greek! Presto, I get a message saying I’ve been tagged by you in a status update. Give it a try!

A note about CS&N. Their 1969 release was one of the first two albums I ever bought. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. While Young wasn’t yet a member of the group or featured on this recording, he made his appearance on DéjåVu and who could forget Ohio in 1970? Released when I was still a junior in high school, it had a pretty powerful impact on me and on everyone I knew.

Next Generation Viral Marketing Tool Is Designed to Expand Conference Attendance Levels

VERNON, CT–(Marketwire – September 1, 2009) – Ticket Summit, the leading conference and trade show for ticketing and entertainment executives, today announced that it has partnered with iggli, inc. to expand its reach to Ticket Summit attendees, enabling industry professionals to network online prior to the conference. The Ticket Summit conference and tradeshow will take place January 13-15, 2010 at The Waldorf=Astoria hotel in New York City.

iggli’s Web 2.0 viral marketing tool — invite — leverages the power of friend-to-friend communication to sell more tickets and enables partners to promote events, programs and ticketing opportunities to large fan bases. The company’s green invite button is designed to be placed in emails, on web pages and on ticket purchase confirmation pages. A single click on the button generates an instant invitation to an event that is distributed to other individual contacts via email and social networks similar to Facebook and Twitter. All invite users have a single online destination to post notes, manage responses, track social conversations and buy tickets to events.

“We look forward to integrating the invite service to provide ticketing and entertainment professionals with a medium through which they can pre-network before Ticket Summit, and chat about the industry as a whole,” said Dr. Molly A. Martinez, Executive Director, Ticket Summit. “The web is improving everyone’s ability to reach larger audiences and iggli’s service will help us achieve our overall conference goals,” added Martinez.

iggli CEO Tom Higley also stated: “We’re excited that Ticket Summit has selected iggli’s invite service to boost their 2010 conference attendance. It’s a great venue for us to showcase the effectiveness of our service and for Ticket Summit to connect with ticketing and entertainment professionals and sell more tickets to the event,” added Higley.

Ticket Summit –Ticket Summit is the world’s leading conference and trade show in the ticketing industry. This event attracts hundreds of global business leaders, entrepreneurs, and entertainment experts in the ticket community. Past attendees and sponsors include Billboard, eBay, Forbes, Google, Live Nation, NBA, NFL, NHL, StubHub, and Ticketmaster, among others. Ticket Summit was founded in 2006 by host company TicketNetwork, Inc. Ticket Summit 2010 is scheduled to take place at The Waldorf=Astoria in New York City January 13-15. For more information on Ticket Summit visit www.TicketSummit.org.

About iggli, inc. — Founded in 2007, iggli, inc. is the creator of invite, a web-based invitation service that serves fans and providers in the sports and entertainment ticketing industry. Fans use the service to create invitations for ticketed events, track responses, and create social conversations around an event. Partners, such as ticketing sites, venues, promoters, artists, sports teams and event aggregation sites, use invite to generate more awareness of events and make it easier for visitors to invite friends and buy tickets. For more information about iggli and invite, visit http://iggli.com/partners.