NOTE: This is an archived post from ideablue.com
Tickets, Tickets, Tickets
Last week we sponsored the Twiistup 5 event in Los Angeles, CA. Twiistup is a social media gathering event where internet start ups show off their product for bloggers, investors, and other technology driven companies/individuals.
We started off just being one of 300+ people on the waiting list for tickets of this sold out event. The chances of getting tickets were slim though one can hope. The day before the event, the organizers sent out an email saying tickets are still sold out, though there is one sponsorship spot left (includes 4 tickets). Luckily for us, we were one of the first to call and get the last sponsorship spot. The event organizers Mike and Steph were amazingly helpful with getting us on board at the last minute. I was intending to setup a booth about Ideablue Network (our services/solutions) though since we are at a good spot with SocialSimple I figured showing off SocialSimple would be the better route. In the end, it was!
Majority of everyone already had set plans for Thursday night, though I was able to get Mary Salvatera to come along (she had to cancel other plans). She rocked it out! So, now I had 2 tickets left. I figured it would be easy to give these tickets away. Well, I’ll just say it was not. The problem was I was offering them to people in San Diego, duh, should have offered them to some LA peeps. We were able to give the tickets to Alex Carrillo and Rick Rodriguez of XOL Marketing.
Last Minute…
Now that we are a sponsor of the event, we’ll have a table to pimp out our product. Since this all was last minute we had NOTHING for our booth, no signs, no flyers, nothing. I threw together a quick diagram explaining SocialSimple and rushed on over to Kinkos. Going into Kinkos I was certain they would say “Sorry, No can do” though someone was looking out for us. Kinkos was able to get all of our signs printed, laminated, and boarded in less than 2 hours. I’m not sure if they know how much they helped us out – here’s a big THANK YOU to Ken at the Kinkos in Rancho Bernardo, CA. Now it was time to head to Target to get a big screen monitor (TV) and an iPod (giveaway). The iPod was $150, then noticed an Xbox 360 was $200 so decided to give away an Xbox 360 instead. Of course, they were out of the $199 model, they only had the $299 model, me being a guy, I went for the Xbox.
“What is SocialSimple?”
Now that we had our booth setup we were ready to rock-and-roll. The night started off with a mellow pace of people stopping by as they did their rounds of stopping by each booth. Since this was our first time publicly telling people about SocialSimple outside of our private beta group, were started the night with a lose of formulated words to answer the question – “What is SocialSimple?.” We came up with…”Your Social Life, Simplified”
SocialSimple aggregates your social networking life. With your permission, we connect and gather your social networking activity, crunch and analysis the data to generate personalized tags about your personality. Similar to a blog tag cloud. Participating advertisers and ecommerce companies would use these SocialSimple tags to better market to you and to offer a personlaized shopping experience. In return, you will receive exclusive discounts and promotions.
So, in a nutshell we have a tagline “Your Social Life, Simplified”! What do you think?
Once the night got started we were swamped with a steady flow of intrigued people. Each person we talked to 
had a unique and interesting perspective and viewpoint on social media and social networking. Majority of the conversions regarding SocialSimple were more like brainstorming on what the person can do with such technology. Pleasantly we received many comments about it’s “simplicity” (a good thing). We were also glad to see other companies like Scour and Music World interested in collaborating. We are BIG fans of collaboration!
Our goal was to get new beta users for SocialSimple. With the incentive of winning an Xbox 360 we signed up 80+ new users that night. Of the new users, Regina O was the lucky winner of the Xbox 360.
Thanks again to Mary, our Interactive Strategy Director, who was an amazing help! She was rockin it out, helping everyone have a good and inspiring understanding of SocialSimple.
Overall
The night was a success for getting SocialSimple into the public ear and we were delighted to have made some excited fans. I’ll be looking forward to sponsoring Twiistup again!
