Yesterday Ticketmaster and Facebook announced that fans are now able to “tag” their tickets to show their friends where they’re planning on sitting at the large, assigned-seating concerts, an obvious move to get those big arena concert tickets sold and keep it a bit more enticing for “fans” that want to buy their tickets close to their friends. Makes sense, I guess…
Ticketmaster Teams With Facebook So You Can Sit Next To Your Friends [Fast Company]
After buying your tickets, you have the option of tagging friends for the seats you’ve purchased, much like tagging people in a photo on Facebook. Your friends get an alert asking if they want to tell people they’re going and to tag their seat and share that as well, creating more potential ticket sales. You can hide your seat, but the default setting is to share with everyone, not just your friends. The thinking, says Hubbard, is that people going to see a certain band or team have a shared passion. Why not enable them to connect before the concert?
I’d say that there is some truth that the casual music listener might only hear about a concert from their friends actually buying a ticket and tagging it (with a status update blast) with “yo, I’m sitting here…”
Our interactive seat maps integrated with Facebook [Ticketmaster Blog]
The combination of all of this has led to our latest product launch: the ability for buyers and event attendees to now have the option to share their seat location with their Facebook friends or even the entire Facebook community (if they choose) directly on the interactive maps on Ticketmaster.com and Livenation.com.
I guess the way I see it is, a majority of the high demand tickets that go on sale won’t have or see any benefit from this feature because the tickets sell out so fast with a ton going directly to scalpers and folks that have figured out how to rig the system. Most of us will never use this feature, and the press around it is always more deafening than the practical application of said feature. We’ll see how it plays out in real life; definitely holler our way the next time you find yourself saying “wow, that’s so great I can sit next to that random Facebook friend with whom I forget our random affiliation…”
I really liked what DaveO from Hidden Track wrote up on the subject; in short, he’s definitely not on board with the feature as any meaningful shift in consumer focus from the company long branded as Ticketbastard. While they’d never at all go with a plan that he suggests dreams about, it’s an optimistic outlook and one that I’m all for as a fan. Hopefully we see some young startup disrupters take that concept on full force and eventually get us back to a fan-driven consumer experience when buying concert tickets. We can all dream for the day that’ll happen.
