Eventbrite Director of Marketing Tamara Mendelsohn told us at SxSW Interactive that because “events are inherently social,” the online events organizer and ticketing exchange in uniquely positioned to leverage social media to allow literally anyone to post and share events.

But Mendelsohn’s team is amplifying its social strategy beyond simply enabling site visitors to engage in a variety of social actions (sharing, “liking,” tweeting). The company has customized a suite of analytics to granularly measure the effects of social integration on social commerce. In its first social commerce report, Eventbrite calculated and compared dollars per event share (DPS) across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, establishing Facebook as the clear leader in both DPS and referrals.

In the second installment, Mendelsohn does a deeper, more platform-agnostic dive to understand when social sharing is occurring (before or after purchasing an event ticket). The results are clear: The post-purchase point in the consumer funnel is significantly more conducive to social activity (see infographic below). As a result, post-purchase sharing drives a much higher ticket-sales-per-share percentage.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to maintain a heavy edge over all other platforms, notably Twitter, in DPS. In fact, a Facebook “like,” on average, nets  $1.34 in ticket sales to only $.80 per tweet.

Of course, not all events are the same (both in terms of shareability and social commerce revenues), and the report breaks this out across several categories. Moreover, the pervasive social nature of events cannot be generalized across other verticals. Kudos, however, to Eventbrite for substantiating its social case with solid metrics, not just mushy “social speak.”

Eventbrite cofounder Kevin Hartz is appearing on the “Turning Events Into Local Online Gold” panel at ILM East, March 21-23 in Boston.

Source: Eventbrite

The post Eventbrite Insights Suggest Facebook, Post-Purchase Sharing Are Big Winners appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Local consumers are looking beyond pure search when they are looking for family fun. That’s the unmet need that Boston-based Goby.com is trying to meet in its 350-category, events and family fun search site. The site is now reaching 500,000 unique visitors a month — double the number from our prior writeup of the company in March 2010.

CEO Mark Watkins tells us that the 10-person start-up, which has raised $7.5 million from Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners, including $2.5 million in October, has evolved from its roots as a local search engine. “We’ve been making it more of a social experience, and have started focusing more on mobile,” he says.

The key is to move beyond a pure search experience, which on the Web, is pretty much owned by Google. “Google is such a good aggregator of intent,” he says. Mobile audiences are much smaller, and (user) intention is really much more fragmented. User needs aren’t as easily met by a one-stop mobile search site.

At the same time, people have deeper relationships with mobile, Watkins says. Mobile apps that integrate with Facebook and allow users to share information with each other are likely to be more successful with audiences. Not that it is “either-or.” There is also a real connection between Web usage and mobile usage, Watkins says. People might make a list on the Web for use later on mobile.

For these reasons, the mobile apps are more likely to attract regional chains as advertisers, as well as national marketers, such as the movie studios. Disney, for instance, has been running a mobile ad campaign with Goby for its release of “Tron” — the company’s first direct sell. “They’re very interested in mobile, even though it has a smaller audience than the Web.”

The post Goby: Go Mobile (and Go Social), Event Marketers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Events are a vertical that cuts across many segments: travel, retail, sports, entertainment, education, dining, culture and others. Major players include specialists such as Zvents, Eventful, Americantowns.com and Center’d. City sites such as Citysearch and Yelp are active in the space as well.

A new one for us is Goby.com, a venture-backed firm that comes out of Mike Stonebraker’s relational database studies at MIT. The site, which launched in September 2009, has already had 250,000 visitors. It reviews 300 categories of things to do, from camping to opera. It can be embedded into other sites via Facebook Connect. An iPhone app is coming out “soon.”

The site breaks things up three ways: What would you like to do? Where? and When? It makes a special effort to go beyond “cities with airports next to them.” For instance, the most thorough listing of events in Carlsbad, CA 92009 that I’ve seen.

CEO Mark Watkins, a veteran of vertical search at Endeca, says the site is task- centric and created to be a “search engine for things to do in your free time. It does equally well for people planning a trip or sitting around the dinner table on Friday, wondering what they are going to do this weekend.”

It also approaches events in a way that Google may not. “Google gives answers for general purposes. But it understands keywords, not structured data. Plane tickets and other semantic information are not on Google,” he says. “We’re getting very focused results. We can sort Web data by price,” among other things.

The general model for search engines is to have a keyword and give back a URL, says Watkins. But Goby seeks to convert those Web pages to real world entities people can make decisions about. “We’ve cross-referenced photography from across the Web, and integrated more video types, and MP3 from concerts,” he says.

Another focus is to figure out how people decide to go to events. “We want to know: How did you decide to be at that restaurant?” says Watkins. It is the interaction of the search and gaming worlds, building off location-based sites like Foursquare and Gowalla.

Indeed, Watkins emphasizes that Goby.com is not just about events. “Events are really important. But they are one dimension of how we spend free time.” Travel is another aspect. “We’re coming at it like a search engine, as opposed to TripAdvisor,” he says. Travel is surprisingly local oriented and is more complementary to local than is generally realized, notes Watkins. More than half of queries — 55 percent — are typically near users.

As for revenues, the site expects to initially receive the lion’s share from affiliate and lead generation fees. It anticipates revenues from sites such as Priceline, and tour providers if it can recommend an Alcatraz tour in San Francisco, for instance. Or its personalization and recommendation engines can promote an Opera performance. When the site gets bigger, it will be more interesting to advertisers, says Watkins.

The site will also have a white label “pro” model for sites that might be licensed by media publishers, or travel suppliers.

The post Goby.com: Search Engine Focuses on Local Events + Travel appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.