RSS Feeds are now active on all accounts!

This week we activated RSS feeds for all client accounts. You can access the RSS feed for your account by customizing the following address:

http://www.ticketbiscuit.com/eventlist.rss?ack=ACCOUNTKEY where ACCOUNTKEY is the part of your TicketBiscuit URL immediately following www.ticketbiscuit.com. The TicketBiscuit URL can be found in the backend under Account > Account Details at the bottom right of the page. 

For instance, if the ticketbiscuit URL is www.ticketbiscuit.com/workplay, the correctly formed RSS address is http://www.ticketbiscuit.com/eventlist.rss?ack=workplay

For those of you who are new to RSS, it’s basically a simple way for your ticket buyers to subscribe to your upcoming shows as they are activated in the system – they can be automatically notified whenever you put tickets on sale. Learn more about RSS by watching this video, it does a pretty good job explaining the benefits.

Some tips:

• Put an RSS icon in the header of your website and link it to your RSS feed. Savvy web surfers will know what to do. You can find some RSS icons here.
• Publicize the availability and address of your RSS feed via your newsletter.
• Use services like rss2twitter , twitterfeed, and ping.fm to automatically update your twitter or myspace pages with your new events.
• Sign up for a feedburner account at www.feedburner.com and import your RSS feed into it. Then, you can get detailed statistics on how many people are reading your feed.

For help or questions about RSS, contact our support team.

Back in July, when the IPhone 3G launched, I wrote about the future of Mobile Ticketing. In October, Juniper Research released a study estimating that by 2013 over 400 million users worldwide will choose to purchase tickets over their mobile device. I think that number will be higher, partially because of the ongoing convergence of mobile devices and the PC, partially because of the increasing proliferation of cell phones, and partially because today, TicketBiscuit released our Mobile Ticketing software, and made it available to all of our clients free of charge.

Wait, what? Oh, yes. TicketBiscuit becomes one of the first ticketing providers in the nation to release this technology, and the absolute first to make it free.

For our clients, this means that they get a mobile optimized version of the TicketBiscuit powered pages on their website.

For our clients’ customers, this means they can now buy tickets using their cell phone, or handy, or celly, or piece, depending on where you’re from.

Check out the video release below.

If you want to see the mobile software in action, point your smartphone to any of these sites and click the “buy tickets” link

www.exitin.com

www.thebottletree.com

www.minglewoodhall.com

or check out any of our other clients’ websites. If your favorite club isn’t feeling the TicketBiscuit love yet, send them our way.

We never stop innovating to help our clients sell more tickets. That’s kind of become our motto here lately. We’ve been quietly building the Facebook integration for a few weeks and beta testing it to the hilt, and I am happy to say our super genius dev team has done it yet again.

Now, when you set up an account in TicketBiscuit, you can automatically publish your event to your Facebook page. If you update the event, it will be updated on Facebook as well. There is simply no easier, quicker, or cooler way to connect with your fans and keep them in the loop.

I know what many of you are thinking: “I don’t have time for some kid’s toy!” But think again. Rapidly approaching 100 million registered users worldwide, the Facebook community is expanding into all demographic categories. Those 25- 40 year olds with deep pockets? Over 11 MILLION are registered on Facebook in the United States alone. That will probably be 12 million by the end of the month. The takeaway is that this ain’t just a kids toy. It is a serious marketing tool and can reap mucho benefits. (UPDATE: read this blog post if you’re still not convinced)

Check this page out to learn more about Facebook Pages. Here’s another overview page about the other business products you can get.

If you’ve already set up a Facebook account and want to get this feature hooked up pronto, give us a call.

(Full Press Release: TicketBiscuit Ticketing System adds Automatic Facebook and Eventful.com Integration)

New research released by Juniper states that by 2013 there will be 400 million people using their mobile phones to buy tickets. This makes a lot of sense and seems like a logical next step in the evolution of mobility and Internet transactions. When I worked at Intel, they called the phenomenon “convergence” – that the line between computers and cell phones would gradually blur. Couple this with the fact that people are increasingly willing to purchase online, and voila- the boom of mobile ticketing.

As I have stated before, major roadblocks in the proliferation of this technology are bar code reading issues, lack of reader infrastructure and availability of near field communications (NFC) handsets.

Here’s a link to the full article just in case you’re made of free time, but the salient points are these:

• Mobile will catch on in Travel first, followed by live entertainment and then sports.
• Total gross mobile ticketing transaction value will reach $92 billion by 2013.
• The Far East & China region, together with Western Europe and North America will represent in excess of 80% of this global gross transaction value by 2013.
• Mobile ticketing must “make life easier” for users. In this respect, NFC, with its convenience, is a crucial development.
• NFC will reach its tipping point over the 2011 to 2013 period (meaning that my prediction of 2009 may have been a little aggressive)

What do you think? Would you be comfortable purchasing tickets over your mobile phone?

Yesterday we continued our absolutely frenetic pace of innovation and released what I feel is probably the coolest TicketBiscuit enhancement since print at home tickets. It represents a HUGE step forward in ticketing, and will definitely help our clients sell more tickets.

You can now publish your events AUTOMATICALLY to Eventful.com

You may have remembered our tip on how to sell more tickets from a couple of weeks ago- when we introduced a lot of you to Eventful.com. For those of you who missed the post, Eventful.com is an event aggregator site- they maintain a comprehensive listing of local events in cities nationwide. It is a very cool service and as of last count had upwards of 7 million users.

Well, thanks to our team of super genius developers at TicketBiscuit, we’ve now made the process of adding your event to Eventful.com as easy as clicking a button.When you set up your event, it will be automatically populated to Eventful and kept up to date as you update it in TicketBiscuit.

Seven MILLION more sets of eyes. Zero additional effort.

We’ve got more innovations like this in the pipe coming your way soon, all geared toward helping you have more successful events and helping you sell more tickets. If you have ideas or enhancements that you feel would be useful to your business, we’d love to hear them. Just drop us a line and let us know.

Jeff and I are in Colorado Springs, Colorado today at the Association of Railroad Museums annual conference.  We flew out here to introduce our latest product, WhistleTix. WhistleTix is a ticketing solution built for railroad museums and tourist railroads. If you’ve never visited Colorado Springs, you owe it to yourself to visit at least once. The scenery is simply gorgeous – here’s a shot of Pikes Peak taken from the window seat:

So what’s different about WhistleTix? WhistleTix has enhancements that allow trains to change train car configurations on the fly, and has a streamlined user interface to make it easier on volunteers to use the point of sale system. Those features are in addition to all of the great standard features in the core TicketBiscuit system.

You can read the full copy of the press release here.

We had a great time yesterday. Jeff and I met several interesting railfans and train characters, and we’re looking forward to the remainder of the conference.  Here’s Jeff hard at work, and a sweet shot of our new tradeshow display in action:

If you weren’t living under a rock today, you probably heard that Google released a new web browser called Chrome.  Initial reviews of the web browser have been extremely positive:  here’s what TechCrunch and Scoble had to say.  We’ve been doing some testing at The Biscuit and TicketBiscuit seems to run extra fast in Chrome.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.  Post your comments here or send us feedback at support@ticketbiscuit.com.  As always, thanks for using The Biscuit!

If you haven’t yet heard of or used Eventful, you are missing out on a world of free promotion for your venue or event. Eventful is (according to their website) “the leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events.”

Okay, anyone could say that. But the stats back up their story:

• 4 MILLION events posted online
• 600,000 monthly visitors (according to compete.com)

That’s a LOT of eyeballs, so merely posting your events to Eventful.com will increase ticket sales. BUT, Eventful has an even cooler feature that all promoters should know about. It’s called “Demand.” Again, from their site:

“Eventful’s unique Demand service empowers users to influence where their favorite performers, candidates and other celebrities appear by creating viral grass-roots campaigns to “Demand” them in their town. Tens of thousands of musicians, comedians and political candidates use Eventful Demand to engage with millions of their fans and supporters to find out where they are in Demand.”

How do you use it as a promoter?
1. Visit www. eventful.com
2. Use the button under the eventful logo on the top left to select your location

3. Click the “Demands” Button in the navigation bar at the top.

4. Select   “Near You” under the “By Location” section on the left hand side.

A quick search of my hometown (Birmingham, AL) shows that Plies, Dane Cook, and Pretty Ricky are the hot acts. You can search by performer type (Business, Comedy, Music, etc) to hone down the results. Find the hot acts, schedule the hot acts. Post your event to Eventful so all of the demanding fans can see it, and sell mucho tickets. Make sure you have Promotozoa hooked up to yourTicketBiscuit account so all of the demanding fans can invite their friends as well.

But even if you don’t use the Demands feature, you should use event aggregators to promote your events. Eventful is just one type of these event aggregator services. It is definitely the largest and most techno-advanced, with myspace and youtube integration and even an iPhone application.  Other similar services include upcoming.org (powered by Yahoo) and Going.com.

The bottom line: more eyeballs equals more tickets sold.

Battlepass.com

Today is a pretty cool day for us. We’re taking the wraps off of BattlePass – the first and only ticketing system custom built for mixed martial arts events. MMA is one of the fastest growing sports nationwide, with pay per view audiences rivaling those of boxing and professional wrestling. But in addition to the handful of elite leagues like UFC and Elite XC, there are multiple farm league promoters hosting events nationwide.

When we began discussing the concept for BattlePass a few months ago, we discovered that promoting an MMA or combat sport event is an incredibly complex undertaking. Not only do these promoters have to secure fighters and a place to fight, but also have to worry about getting the word out, processing payments, and above all, selling tickets. BattlePass was built for them – it takes all of the challenge out of the administrative side of event promotion.

We’ll be releasing this news to the press later this week, along with news of an alliance agreement with one of the nation’s premier farm league promoters.

BattlePass is cool, no doubt. I think even more than the benefits attached to the features though, it represents a different way of thinking about ticketing. Ticketing can no longer be about processing transactions, it has to be about adding real value to clients and their businesses, integrating systems and functionality to make the whole business better, not just handle the stubs of paper granting admission. We’re focused on the future of ticketing, and we’re making it happen on a daily basis.

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Seinfeld live (my apologies for the lousy picture as it was the best I could snap without being caught).  How did I get front row center seats at face value?  Piece of cake – as long as the ticketing vendor uses ticket outlets.  Simply show up at the outlet 10 minutes before tickets go on sale (it takes 10 minutes to get someone at the store to come over to the ticket register, dust off the keyboard, remember how to place an order, etc.) – don’t worry, nobody else will be in line as no one else buys tickets at outlets.  Two minutes after the tickets go on sale you’ll walk out with the best seats in the house.

Perhaps this post will reunite the pre-Internet ticket outlet fervor of the ’80s and ’90s, but I doubt it.  Why?

The use of ticket outlets is bad economics for EVERYONE!

• Ticket buyers pay the same fees at outlets as they pay for buying tickets over the phone and web.  Here’s what I paid:  $75 per tix plus a $10.80 per tix convenience charge – that’s 14.4% in convenience fees for buying at the outlet!
• Establishing and maintaining ticket outlets cost ticket sellers a lot of money, time, and resources.
• The outlet (i.e. grocery store chains, etc.) sell so few tickets that it can’t be worth the time and energy to train their staff on how to place orders.
• When was the last time you were in the check out line with your box of Ho Ho’s and said “let me walk over to the unmanned ticket counter, wait 10 minutes for someone to show up, and grab some tix to an event?”  How inconvenient!  Why not call and buy the tix using your cell phone on the way home?
• Has anyone seen any hard data that shows that ticket outlets increase profitability for anyone?  Your doctored sales report from your ticketing vendor doesn’t count.
• Cross sale?  I think not.  Does anyone ever go to a store to buy their groceries because they can also buy tickets to an event?

Why do old school ticketing companies still use/promote brick-and-mortar ticket outlets?

• Sunk costs – they’ve invested heavily in ticket outlets and try to justify their past investment decisions.
• It seems logical that the more places tix are on sale, the more tix you’ll sell.  WRONG!  It’s about overall profit, not top line revenue.  It’s about getting the message to the people that’ll most likely purchase tickets and buy a bunch of stuff while at the event.  Why not send a targeted email to likely buyers FOR FREE with a couple of clicks of the mouse or use viral event promotion tools like Promotozoa – one of our newest product offerings (check out some of our beta clients:  Comedy Club Stardome, Exit/In, The BottleTree)?
• But I’ll lose the customers that’ll only pay with cash?  You think you actually make any money off the tightwad that only uses cash?  The 0.0001% of the population that only uses cash is not your ideal customer – trust me.

At TicketBiscuit, we’d rather invest in building better tools that are proven to sell more tickets and increase everyone’s bottom line.  Call us old fashion, but we like having a profitable business model that is flexibile, low cost, and high value to all parties in the supply chain.