U2 - Photo by Phil Romans, October 3, 2005
It seems appropriate at this point to say a few things about why we built iggli’s invite service and what we think that service will mean for iggli’s partners and for the fans. We often say that great events are social. Whether you’re planning a night out to see your favorite local band or U2 in a packed stadium or maybe the LA Lakers, you will probably end up going with one or more friends. Often the decision to attend a particular event may have little to do with the featured artist or the teams that are playing. Because people often choose to attend an event because they want to spend time with the group that is going to the event or the person who sent out the invitations. To put it another way: it’s about the people.
Brad Feld reflects on a similar epiphany in a recent blog post: “It’s All About the Faces.” (No, he isn’t talking about Rod Stewarts’ bandmates in the Gasoline Alley / Maggie May era.) He reflects on his experience of changing his Twitter avatar from a photo to a graphic designed by Anthony Dimitre. Brad’s experience with this, and with the profile images that Gist makes available (via a Google search) was interesting. It boils down to this. We have an important, powerful and emotional connection to people. Our connections to people influence our behavior. And when we take an approach to software and services that leaves people out of the picture, or when we do things that ignore or constrain the basic human connection, the end result is something less powerful and less satisfying.
Back to iggli. It seemed curious to us that despite all the great, social events people attend, no one had developed an effective model for connecting people-to-people and friend-to-friend as part of the experience of deciding to attend an event. Please don’t get me wrong. I know there are more than enough invitation-oriented web services available. While Evite may be the most familiar, a dozen others exist, including Anyvite, Center’d, MyPunchbowl, Socializr, Eventbrite and more. Each of them has its own particular emphasis, and most of them are worth a look.
Nederlander Concerts - Schedule Page
But none of these services has focused on the space iggli has carved out: an industry standard “invite friends” service that has been designed from the first line of code to provide value to fans (”Power to the People”) and to iggli’s partners (venues, promoters, artists, sports teams and ticket sellers). iggli’s “invite friends” service is different in another respect. The button that invokes the service can be found on the event site iteslf. For example, one of our partners is Nederlander Concerts. A look at the event schedule for The Greek Theatre (in LA) or The Grove (in Annaheim) reveals the “invite friends” button that provides the doorway into iggli’s service.
The "invite friends" widget
And since iggli began providing its “invite friends” service for Nederlander Concerts, more partners have begun to embrace the service, inluding Bill Silva Entertainment and Management, Jason Mraz and the largest secondary market ticketing service in the world, StubHub. Why are they using our service? Several reasons. First, the service makes it really fast and easy for a fan to invite a numbeer of his or her friends to a concert or a sporting event and to publicize the event via Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. And getting back to what we were saying (it’s all about the people) there is no better way to promote an event than to get one friend talking to other friends about the event. We help bring to life that powerful conversation among friends.
There’s much more to the service than the basic tools for sending invitations to Facebook and MySpace friends. But I’ll leave those features for another post. The bottom line is very simple: the friend-to-friend communication of our “invite service” helps partners sell more tickets and helps fans connect the events they care about with the friends they care about.