Venues owners are well aware of how sales agents use their social influence to help sell more tickets to an event. But now there are websites offering social influence as a subscription service. Here's a quick look at this new trend as it relates to event awareness and your ticket sales.
Sōsh
As defined by wikipedia, social influence is when one's emotions, opinions, or behaviors are affected by others. Robert Cialdini defined six forms of influence as: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. These “weapons of influence”, as Cialdini calls them, attempt to bring about conformity by directed means. Persuasion can occur through appeals to reason or appeals to emotion.
Much of what constitutes influence, as described above is already a potent aspect of what ticket sales agents do for a living. Raising event awareness is the requisite precursor to selling more tickets to an event. And the hard working event promoter/sales agent digs deep into her social connections in order to move ticket inventory, all on a person-by-person basis.
A new trend is emerging that turns that person-to-person influence into an online subscription service, or "tastemaker-as-a-service" if you will.
Sometimes called "curators" or "influencers", the trend has been getting some serious attention from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. One of the hottest tastemaker-as-a-service offerings is Sōsh in San Francisco, which derived its name from the slang expression for the word "social."
Sōsh aims to bring as many influential people as it can under one roof and then offer up their opinions as a subscription service. Sōsh has a wide range of topics, most noteworthy are the events (supper clubs, nightclubs, concerts, etc.). From the website:
Follow tastemakers [to] find local activities like secret supperclubs, scenic hikes, pottery classes, and more. Because life's too short to be bored.
Also on the website are the individual tastemakers' webpages where they recommend activities and events in the form of Q & A. When asked "Where should out-of-towners go in San Francisco?" tastemaker and chef Lori Baker answers with a long list of venues, each one is a clickable link for the reader to use.
It doesn't take much to extrapolate just how this type of tastemaker-as-a-service can sell more tickets to an event. People live very busy lives and time is at a premium. Rather than scour local newspapers, or consult thousands of Facebook friends, a busy person can turn to a tastemaker service like Sōsh.
Top Down vs. Bottom Up
Past posts have put the spotlight on ticket trends, such as tweet seats, and other forms of social ticket sales. But those are bottom-up approaches, meaning as more and more individuals talk about your event, momentum builds as do additional sales not attributable to traditional advertising. The concept of a tastemaker influencing others ticket buying decisions is a top-down approach, albeit a radically new implementation in the context of tastemaker-as-a-service websites.
If you have one or more people functioning as sales agents, you are already using the top-down approach to social influence. When paired with diligent use of social media (bottom-up) your event awareness bases are pretty much covered.
However, both top-down (sales agent) and bottom-up (ticket buyers) need to be plugged-in directly into the sales chain of your online ticketing software. Ticket buyers need the tools to share your event with others and sales agents need the tools to promote your event across as many outlets as possible.
Sell More Tickets To An Event With ThunderTix
One of the most popular ThunderTix features for generating bottom-up ticket sales is the ability to include Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons in your event listing. The social sharing buttons can be part of the purchase process as well as made to appear in the confirmation email sent once the purchase is complete. ThunderTix offers several social sharing features to help you with selling tickets online!
For top-down tastemakers - your ticket sales agents - our new Event Restricted Access feature is a perfect way to leverage social influence to sell more tickets to an event. Event Restricted Access is well suited for 3rd parties that need the ability to sell tickets alongside your events or on their external websites without handing over the keys to your entire kingdom. For example, one of your 3rd party promoters or tour operators may need access to their own financial data from a remote location.