A game changer..events for events sake? No thanks, I'd rather not come.

It's a new dawn, it's a new life, and I'm feeling good.

After starting this blog a year ago and not doing much with it for some time. I have decided that I might start to 'critique', comment and other wise explore, extrapolate and examine campaigns and trends. Let's start the conversation with something that is dear to my heart, event promotions on Facebook.

Web marketing relating to night clubs is an area within marketing, social media and social life that I have become somewhat an expert at.

Facebook cleverly built into its platform the ability to create events where an invitation can be send to all your 'friends'. At one point all friends could be invited at once very easily, this quickly became problematic and it was taken away.
A Java script code was quickly invented to allow all friends to be invited at once. Although the ability to invite all friends at one has had speed bumps put up it seems near impossible to take the ability away.

Why was 'invite all' taken away? Direct mass marketing/personal selling, in an attempt to disguise it as referral marketing was the main reason. Who was the perpetrators of this? Promoters of night clubs, concerts, live music and anything else that an 'event' invitation was sent out for.

There were also those that would show the weakness and vulnerability of the system. Pranksters who wanted to show the 'security' flaws of Facebook and the ability to exploit the fact that things can get out of hand easily. E-anarchists.

Now whilst this tool was beneficial at first about notifying people. Once it was harnessed with the power and speed of Zeus' lightening bolt by the web 2.0 marketers of the world things quickly turned from light rain to a torrid thunder storm. If there is lightning, thunder is sure to follow and soon the events became noise within the cloud that is the internet. What is the result of this noise to the peoples personal database of 'friends' and acquaintances? They get blocked from sending events, ignored on news feeds and muted from the internet community that is facebook. People opt out, without the marketer realising it.

To criticise is one thing, but it's useless if no alternative is suggested. What I would suggest a night club for a specific night to do is rather than saturate the market with 'meaningless' promotional events (not that your event isn't the most important in the world, but rather it can't be given in a effective and efficient way to the target audience). Move to SMS marketing techniques were it's possible to opt out. Further to the point, utilise the 'like' and fan pages in order to propagate events directly to the people that genuinely want to engage in conversation with the event/club etc. When this is done properly the people that need to know will know through more effective promotion.


Photos need to be utilised as well as interesting content that makes people enjoy seeing the page come up. This is not to say that mass invites should be used at first as a tool to generate awareness but it should be temporary and phased out, so that only new clubs/nights/events use it rather than a constant stream that gets bigger and bigger.

Marketing channels need to be carefully watched as to the effectiveness of them. Are you using it as a useful tool for awareness or have you become annoying in your attempt to make people aware? It's shocking but you probably aren't as interesting as you think you are.


When the people that want to know, do know, they will tell others. This creates TRUE word of mouth, referral and viral, marketing.