How Gates Helped Us Build a Multi-Million Dollar Ticket Selling Business, Part 2

Earlier this week, I talked about the first three “gates” that Goldstar has used over the years to build a business that currently serves more than a million people and thousands of venues, sending scads and scads of people to live events each year that otherwise might not have gone.  Before I move on to Gates 4 through 6, Gates 1, 2 and 3 are reminding people they’d like to go out more than they do (which is true for most), getting them to be aware of events they might have an interest in, and then developing that interest.

But just being interested isn’t enough.  If it were, every 15 year old boy in the world would own a Ferrari Testarossa.  Gate 4 is overcoming the psychosocial obstacles to going to an event. Here’s an example:  most people over the age of about 30 would sooner poke themselves in the arm with a fork for a couple hours than standing in a line outside a music club on Hollywood Boulevard at midnight on a Saturday in hopes of getting in.  They may KNOW there’s a band playing there and they may be INTERESTED in the music, but without some major intervention, there just never going to make it to the show because it doesn’t (yet) fit with their mental model about how they want to spend their time.  Likewise, some people would sooner clean out their garage than get fancied up and sit in an opera house.  We did some research a few years ago that suggested people do hesitate to go to different kinds of venues for purely psychosocial reasons.  One of the benefits of having user reviews on the Goldstar site is that people who might have a bit of unease can see that others have gone before them and had a good time.  We also give people the ability to create ‘tips’ for other users about parking, dining, how to dress and other things that we know for sure create just that little bit of inertia that keeps them at home.  These are very real barriers that we take pretty seriously.

At this point, we’re getting close, but then that’s that whole pesky reality thing.  Gate 5 is the logistics of getting out.  Time, location, duration, parking, availability,etc., are reasons enough not to go to a show that a person knows about, is interested in, and is comfortable with.  It turns out that despite all those factors, if a venue makes it impossible to park or if the show starts too late (or too early) or if a potential customer needs but can’t find a babysitter, she has the nerve not to come.  I know!  It’s outrageous, isn’t it?  Most organizations do a good enough job with this, and at Goldstar, we’re doing our best to back you up all the way.  My advice (to myself and everybody else, I suppose) is that there are probably even more ways this could be made easier for people that we’re not doing.

Finally, none of this matters is the price doesn’t work for the customer.  Gate 6 is pricing the show right.  Because 84% of people who come to Goldstar buy tickets to a show they were not thinking of buying before they came to the site, we know that price isn’t why they buy.  It is, however, the last gate and one that stops the momentum of going out and trying something new right in its disco boots.  We refer to a 50% discount as a ‘behavior-changing price point.’ That means, simply, that it’s enough to turn “virtual consumption”  (where people get through gates 1 to 5 and then stop, thinking idly about how much they would enjoy going to your show but not going) into actual consumption.  We may have done 5/6ths of the work, but we have achieved, in essence, zero.  No ticket buyer for you; no revenue for us; no growth of the live entertainment market.  It’s like catching a long pass in a football game on the last play, running all the way down the field to the other team’s five yard line and then sitting down as the clock expires.  Sure, it was a nice play, but it didn’t have a payoff.  The other team still won.  Our job is to get people over that line on our venue partner’s behalf.  Price alone can’t do it, but with customers who are new to something, it can help to reduce their perceived risk of getting out there and trying things.

So every time we send somebody to a show, we’ve gotten them through these six gates.  The way we look at our business is simple:  what can we do to help people get through those barriers in greater and greater numbers.  The result, we believe, is a bigger, more robust live entertainment industry, happy venue partners, happy members, and a more prosperous organization with a happy and helpful staff.

So far, the theory seems to be holding up pretty well.

Industry Tweeting @goldstarjim

So after about a year and a half of managing and running the @goldstar Twitter account, I’m making a change.

The problem was that @goldstar is the one that Goldstar members were going to and there were often things that I wanted to say that were more like what we talk about here on the Live 2.0 blog.  Venue partners were following us on @goldstar and getting member-oriented stuff and of course, members were sometimes getting industry-oriented stuff.

So we stopped the schizophrenia and split the two identities.  @goldstar will be run by Tommy King, Marni Landes and Emily Larson of the Goldstar communication group and…

@goldstarjim will be me, talking about the industry, entrepreneurship, marketing, customer service, and the rest of the stuff I always seem to be on about.

So if you’re on twitter, and you care to do so, follow me at @goldstarjim.  I’ll do my best to make it worth your while.

How Gates Helped Us Build a Multi-Million Dollar Ticket Selling Business, Part 1

Goldstar was started in 2002 by me, Robert Graff, and Rich Webster.  The company is 100% founder, family and employee owned, and despite selling tens of millions of dollars worth of tickets each year, has need very little money to get there.  We’ve grown consistently over our eight year history at a 50 to 100% annual rate and we’ve delivered millions of new customers to venues everywhere, including millions of dollars in revenue generated on behalf of non-profit organizations who are our partners.

Sometimes people ask me how we were able to do this with no venture capital, no installed base of customers and, at the beginning, precisely zero relationships in the venue world.  My answer is that we have been focused from the very beginning on a single thing:  how do we get people out more?  From the start, it became obvious to us that growing the audience for live entertainment was the key strategic question, and that’s what we set out to answer.

Our take on this is different from that of a venue or production company because rather than developing audience for a specific  show or venue, we think about the challenge of audience development from an industry-level point of view.

We think of it as the challenge of getting people to choose live entertainment more often.  In essence, our concept is that we’re taking share away from TV watching, movie watching, goofing around on Facebook, sitting at home staring at the floor and other really, really worthwhile activities.  As far as I’m concerned, just about any kind of live entertainment is a major upgrade on any of that stuff, and people do a lot of it. You can’t really “grow the pie” of how much time people have, but you can certainly grow the pie of how much they spend not wasting their lives on things they don’t really enjoy and don’t really do them any good, and that’s where we focus.

But to be more specific, we figure there are six gates we need to get a person through in order to make this happen.

First, we try in various ways to get them to think about this question:  do you wish you went out to live entertainment (however you want to define that) more often than you do?  In my experience, and I’ve done this 100 times in all kinds of groups, about 90% of people raise their hands.  Try it for yourself and see if you don’t get the same result.  (One warning:  if you try this with a group of people in the live entertainment industry, they might throw something at you.  But other than them, almost any group will work.)

And that’s the founding marketing insight of Goldstar:  people want to go out more.  The next obvious conclusion is that if their behavior is different from their desire, there must be something (or some things) getting in the way.  Those are the other five gates.

So, Gate 1 is making people realize they want to go out more than they do.  Help them uncover the ‘latent interest’ in musicals, sports, comedy, and all the great stuff the live entertainment world has to offer.  It helps to contrast the excitement and fun of going out with their normal night at home or the crushing dullness of most trips out to see a movie.  This is a concept that most consumers immediately get.

But just like smokers all know they’d like to quit, it’s not enough.

Gate 2 is making people aware of specific events. The problem is that all events are not created equal, and every potential customer is different.  If we waste our bullets telling somebody about an event that’s not right for them, we’re really setting back our cause.  For Goldstar, it means that we use a range of technologies and promotional techniques to try to put the right event in front of the right member.  For example, we sent more than a million email newsletters on Tuesdays, and each one is completely different.  The differences are driven by what’s known as a collaborative filter, like you see at Amazon when it predicts what book you might be interested in.  That way, even if we send a member an email with 100 events in it, the ones she is most likely to be interested in will rise to the top, automatically.

But just knowing about something isn’t enough.  Everyone knows about K Mart, but when was the last time you bought something there?  (No offense, K Mart shoppers.)  Gate 3 is getting somebody interested in an event.  The biggest problem with a lot of promotions for live entertainment is that it’s not oriented to getting people interested in an event.  Instead, it’s geared toward telling people about what the event is.  One classic example of this is saying something is a “West Coast Premiere” of a certain play.  I mean, really, we can be honest with each other here.  Who cares?  This is not moving one nanometer in the direction of getting somebody interested in the show.  Jim Royce of Center Theatre Group in LA was raving to me about the production of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” that he’s got in one of his buildings, and the clincher was when he told me that the ending is a huge, unpredictable surprise.  There are a million ways of getting somebody interested in an event, but insider-y descriptions or empty phrases aren’t them.  “A recently discovered play by Chekhov, Boredom is the story of a man confronted by a choice between two different ways of life.  Which one will leave behind and which one will he embrace?”  I just made that up but it sounds a lot like things I’ve heard and read, and it contains almost nothing that would actually build interest.  At Goldstar, we work hard to avoid this by writing in a style that we think of as being person to person, as though we were describing an event to a friend.  The first priority in this process is finding two or three excellent reasons for a person to want to go and then trying to bring it out in everything we say about it.

Later this week, I’ll take you through gates 4 through 6.  UPDATE:  Here’s the link to part 2.

Group Sales is Dead, Part Two

The following post is by Trevor O’Donnell, noted arts marketing and sales consultant and author of the recent Live 2.0 post “Group Sales is Dead.”

Recently Jim McCarthy published a post I wrote called “Group Sales is Dead,” which he tells me generated a surprising amount of interest. If you’ve read the piece, which you can do here, you may come away with more questions than answers so I’ve selected a handful of the more interesting ones to answer in this post:

Are you really serious about group sales being dead? Yes. No. Yes. Maybe. Um…yes.

Why do you hate group sales? I actually love group sales. I was sitting at its side when it died. In fact, just before it gasped its last breath it leaned up to me and said, “Hey, Trev, make sure to give my regards to Br… ungh…ghrfnuh…fluhghnh.”

(By the way, if there’s anyone from Branson out there, Group Sales says hey.)

Why do you pick on Broadway? A suburban housewife can buy two discounted tickets to a Broadway show with a few keystrokes and know exactly where her seats are. But a corporate CEO who wants 100 top-dollar tickets has to wait DAYS to find out if they’re available then pay for them without knowing where he and his clients will be sitting. Any industry that lets this happen deserves to be picked on.

If sales is such a good idea, wouldn’t we be doing it already? I remember when people asked that question about marketing so here’s some historical context: In the 1950s we ‘publicized’ our events. In the 1960s we began ‘advertising’ our events. In the 1980s we learned to ‘market’ our events. Recently we discovered that we have to ‘sell’ our events. Welcome to the sales era.

What exactly is sales? A publicist, a marketer and a salesperson walk into a bar where they see three gorgeous women sitting across the room. The publicist asks the bartender to send them a round of drinks and say, ‘the good-looking guy at the bar sent these over.’ The women nod their polite thanks. Next the marketer draws a clever picture with a provocative message on a cocktail napkin and tips the bartender to send it to them. The women read the napkin, laugh and acknowledge the guys again. Finally the sales guy walks over, speaks briefly, sits with the women for a while and eventually the four of them get up and leave together. The next day the publicist and the marketer ask their colleague how he did it and he says, “Simple. I asked them which one worked better, the drinks or the note, and then listened intently for a very long time.”

Can you talk about sales without being flip or insulting? Well, OK. But it won’t be as much fun.

The point of the joke is that publicity and marketing only go so far; the old message sending model doesn’t work as well as it used to. Sales is the persuasive element, the personal element, the relationship building element that bonds us to a network of ‘mavens,’ ‘connectors’ and ‘salespeople’ (a la Malcolm Gladwell) who amplify and activate our brands. If we want their business, we can’t keep shoving them into a decades-old pigeonhole and pretending they don’t exist.

The simple truth is that many of our most valuable and potentially lucrative relationships are being managed by whoever’s doing our group sales right now, or by message-sending marketers who don’t have the time or incentive to invest in their full potential. At some point we have to ask if that’s the best scenario for the industry’s long-term success.

C’mon, Trev, is group sales really dead? Saying group sales is dead is like saying print media is dead. It’s a rhetorical statement that calls attention to either a dire end, a fascinating transition or an intriguing opportunity.

I’m inclined to go with opportunity.

Plan Your Garden; Don’t Just Complain about Weeds

In the future (or if somehow people from the past traveled to the present), “paywall” is one of those words that would probably puzzle them.  Just like when we sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” most people probably don’t have a perfectly clear idea of what a “rampart” is*, in the future “paywall” is one of those words that’s going to seem oddly dated.

A paywall is a virtual barrier to online content that you have to pay to get through, whether it’s in the form of a monthly subscription to a magazine online or to an individual article or other piece of content.  Years ago, when the Web was shiny and new, all periodicals and newspapers assumed that they would be able to charge people for access to their content because, after all, they pay for it offline.  But it turned out that the friction of paying to read an article about the doings of the stars of Melrose Place or the latest controversies of the Clinton administration (which, upon reflection, were often not all that different) was just enough to keep people away from your magazine or newspaper’s website and browsing somewhere else.

In other words, a paywall kept people out.

With rare exceptions (e.g., the Wall Street Journal), the paywalls came down, and traffic and ad banners multiplied.  And alongside all that was the rise in volume of online commenting.  An activity that used to be limited to the geeks of the usenet and newsgroup world became something that a wide, wide range of people participated in.  This produced a lot of great stuff.  Not only is user participation responsible for things like Amazon reviews or the entire content of the Yelp site, but it has also brought us more dubious achievements, like 4chan.

Anyway, it’s brought us a lot.  I would venture to say that most people now EXPECT to be able to talk back to the information they get because that’s the kind of world that has been built by the Internet/Web, collectively by all of us.

But it’s not all four star reviews of the new sushi restaurant, thoughtful discussions of public policy, and “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” hilarity.  Oh, no.  Sometimes, it’s bad.  I even talked about it a couple weeks ago, saying that “Online Comments are As Bad as Hitler.” Here’s a snippet:

“Discussions have to be shaped.  People need to be given a purpose, and, yes, there should be ground rules for any given conversation.  Of course, if all you want is “conversation,” you can skip this step.  Some people really enjoy the jabber and think the hatefulness in support of different ideas is productive.  I don’t buy it.  You could get a lot farther a lot faster if you didn’t have people focused on winning unwinnable arguments.  After all, the other guy can always find a way to accommodate his own feeling of being better and more important than you.  And vice versa, naturally.”

And then funnily enough, somebody passed this article my way.  Here’s the key snippet:  “Enter the comments section of almost any newspaper, and you begin to believe Hobbes’ assertion that absent government, human lives would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Small-mindedness, nastiness, racism, sexism, and a host of other -nesses and -isms run rampant…A small paper based in Attleboro, Massachusetts near the state’s border with Rhode Island, has an idea. Henceforth, to comment at The Sun Chronicle you’ll need to pay 99 cents… with a credit card. And the name on your comments will be the name on your card. ”

The idea is straightforward:  if you pay something, you’ll take it seriously, and by using a credit card, we can attribute a name to you.  Therefore, you’ll have to live with the consequences of what you say and will be less likely to resort to argument reductio ad Hitlerum.

While on some level, I appreciate what’s being attempted here, it’s off base for a few reasons, but one is sufficient.  No one is going to comment.  So in a sense, they will have achieved their goal if it is to reduce the uncivil tone of conversation.  Instead, it will be the peace of the grave.  99 cents is an absurd amount to charge, and that’s just the first problem with this.

I do like breaking the anonymity thing, although some communities have done very well not by making you say your legal name, but by placing a value in your identify on that community.  In other words, my handle may be SuperDude85 instead of Jim McCarthy (and I’m not saying that is my handle…) but if I care about what the community thinks of me, I care what they think of SuperDude85 just as much as though it were my real name.

And ultimately, if the civility and constructiveness of your online discussions are something you value, it all comes down to this:  can you provide and maintain guidelines for people that walk a fine line between erring on the side of free expression while appealing to user’s sense of actually building the community they’re participating in.

If you don’t give the discussion shape, it will find its own (if you’re lucky enough to have a discussion develop).  If you don’t provide any ground rules and you aren’t cultivating a particular kind of audience that’s going to be well behaved naturally, you’re going to get people calling each other Hitler.

In other words, the Attleboro, Massachusetts paper doesn’t have to charge people to comment.  They probably just need to invest some time and energy in some conversation and community  management.  They know what they don’t want in their comments section, but the right approach may be to envision what they DO want and then invest the time in seeing that to fruition.

And that’s the key.  Start by defining what you want from online discussions and build a plan to create that.  Most organizations, in my experience, go the other way.  They launch with no direction and then eventually find things they don’t want.  It’s like buying an empty field.  If you plan a garden, landscape and plant it, and then spend the right time maintaining it, you won’t know exactly what you’ll get, but that’s part of the fun.  By contrast, just letting nature take over means you’ll probably have a field full of what you consider weeds.

If that happened, would you be surprised?

*By the way, a rampart is a defensive wall, or a  fortification consisting of an embankment, often with a parapet built on top.

The Broker’s Dilemma

Last week, I was honored to be asked to speak at Ticket Summit in Las Vegas for the second or third time.  Although I’ve always wondered why an audience that’s primarily composed of ticket brokers was interested in hearing from me, I’ve always been pleased to accept their invitation because Ticket Summit is a surprisingly powerful week.  As a contrast to the more box office operations focused Intix, Ticket Summit has, over the last several years, been in some ways a  more general, marketing and trends-oriented conference, despite its origins as a broker conference.

In this iteration, I felt as though Ticket Summit were returning to its roots.  The crowd seemed to me to be more heavily weighted to brokers, especially individual brokers than in the past, and they all had a burning question in their minds:

What are we going to do now?

Just about every session that I sat in (including the one for which I was on a panel) gradually turned into a search for answers to the problem of being squeezed between higher prices from primary sellers and the new and numerous constellation of discounters.

Throw a severe economic downturn into the mix and you’ve got a real pickle for brokers.  If you’re in the business of “taking a position” in tickets that you think you’ll be able to sell for above face value, it’s a pretty unfavorable environment right now.  Primary sellers have raised prices over the last few years to capture some or all of the upside that the secondary market used to get.  At the same time, discounting has become far more sophisticated and popular, in part because of, but at least coincidental with, the recession.  Together, these have blunted consumers appetite for way-above-face-value tickets.  Or at least that seemed to be the conventional wisdom at Ticket Summit.

I know what many of you in the primary market are saying:  boo-hoo.  It’s true that most sellers in the secondary market, back around 2006, were about as insensitive as could be to primary sellers’ concerns about their activities.   They saw history being on their side and happily cried “Free Market!” whenever the primary sellers complained.  They didn’t take the opportunity, most of them, to improve their relationships with primary market sellers, and the primary market responded by pricing the upside out of many tickets and protecting themselves on the downside with better discounting policies and outlets.  And then the worst economy in a generation flattened demand, particularly in the already-frothy premium market.

The result for a broker is that most or all of the upside on most events is gone and a more empowered consumer expects price AND quality.

So now what?  This is a question our panel got, and while I don’t presume to have a solution to the Broker’s Dilemma, I do have some suggestions:

1.  Get a niche and serve it well. You can’t be in the business of selling tickets to ‘whoever.’  Work with Japanese Travel Agents or specialize in Catholic parishioners or Doctors and Lawyers.  Only sell the first two rows to every show everywhere.  These might all be dumb examples, but if you can get prohibitively good at something, you might be able to build a business on it.

2.  Build a ‘membership.’ Whatever you do, don’t spend your life trying to find buyers for your tickets; spend it trying to find tickets for your buyers.  It’s not about the inventory; it’s about the customers.    Yes, build a database and an email list, but more than that, build a loyal following and spend your time serving them well.  (This is much easier when you have already done number 1.)

3.  Put an emphasis on service. Let’s face it.  Buying tickets is pretty convenient now.  With just a little work, people can find what they want.  But if you provide a service that some people don’t want to provide for themselves, you’ve got a chance.  I know several very successful guys (and yes, they all happen to be guys) who couldn’t really care less how much they pay for a ticket; they just want to make one short phone call and get exactly the ticket they want  with absolutely no further effort on their part.  If those guys are out there, there must be more people who want service like this or similar.  Provide it and you might have a chance.

4.  Build your relationships with venues.  I know many brokers have relationships with venues, but if I’m being completely honest, it feels to me as though most brokers think of their interactions with the primary sellers mostly in terms of “what they can do for me.”  Obviously, there’s a lot you can do for them too, but if you’re not investing time in these relationships, how would they know that?

5.  Be humble and adjust. There’s no law of nature that says the secondary market has to exist and thrive.  The last few years have been kind because of the rise of e-commerce and soaring ticket prices during a more or less decent economy.  But remember that if you’re just a re-seller, and not adding value, that’s basically arbitrage, and once the potential for arbitrage becomes well-known, it tends to disappear.  Imagine if a supermarket were giving change back from your purchase using $1 denominated gold coins.  How long do you think it would take for that to end?  That’s arbitrage, and if you’re not doing something to make your product special in the secondary market, you’re basically doing arbitrage too.  So you’ve got to remember that and you’ve got to constantly adjust so that you’re always finding new ways to create value for your consumers.

The broker’s dilemma is serious, and while I know many people have mixed feelings about the secondary market, it can be good for the industry if done well.  A secondary market that offloads risk from the primary market and adds value to the market by doing something special for the consumer would be a boon to the industry.  A secondary market that has nothing to add and grumbles about the primary sellers “not giving them what they need” is not.

The next few years will tell us which we get.

Lebron Passes Up the Opportunity for Greatness

I’m not judging Lebron James.  Really, I’m not.  I’m just disappointed.  (For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, well, you really should read something other than the Arts and Leisure section sometimes and/or come out of the unabomber cabin you live in every few weeks just to see what the rest of us are up to.  Read this to catch up.)

And I’m not disappointed because he was “disloyal” to Cleveland, his hometown and professional base of operation for his whole career.  After all, a person’s got to do what they’ve got to do professionally, and he doesn’t owe anybody anything.

And it’s not as though he did it for money.  Cleveland was actually offering him a little more than Miami, I’m made to understand.

To some degree, I’m disappointed by the ridiculously vain way he announced his leaving Cleveland, by demanding an hour of prime time TV on ESPN.  When I heard that, I assumed it meant he was staying in Cleveland, because really, how much of a tin ear do you have to have to dump your hometown in a one-hour TV special?  As a way of reinforcing his commitment to Cleveland, it made sense.  To announce he was leaving for a more glamorous locale, it just reeks of vanity.

But hey.  I can live with that.  He can be as vain as he wants.  We all have choices about how we want to be and be seen and being vain is typically its own punishment.

but I’m disappointed, and if you give me a few minutes, I’ll explain why.  Last summer, I was tremendously moved by the story of the Detroit Tigers baseball team and its owner Mike Ilich.  Here’s a little snippet from the piece that’s at the heart of what I found so powerful about it:

“They [the Tigers] were also 48–26 at Comerica Park [their home stadium], a record they attribute to the overwhelming responsibility they feel playing in front of their home fans, many of whom are presumably using what little discretionary income they have to watch the team play. In his first spring training meeting manager Jim Leyland told his players, “People are going to be spending some of their last dollars to come to these games, and we need to give them our best effort. This is not the year not to run out a ground ball.”

I still get chills when I read Leyland’s comments.  How many of us think that way about what we’re doing.  “We need to give them our best effort.”  Don’t you want to live that way?  Don’t you want to feel that what you’re doing is bigger than just what you’re doing?  How many ground balls have you and I metaphorically failed to run out on a day to day basis?

Cleveland is a city that’s in a very bad way.  It may not be in total distress that way that Detroit is, but it’s bad.  The future could hold better things, or it could hold a Detroit-like collapse.  TBD, right?

I’m mindful of Magic Johnson, just a year beyond announcing he had AIDS, standing at the scene of the LA riots in 1992 and telling us that this is where he was taking his stand.  That he was going to build on the ashes and make LA a better place.

And we were all thinking, secretly, dreadfully, that not only would he not be able to do that, but that he’d be dead inside a few years from a disease you just didn’t survive.

And while the corner of Florence and Normandie still might not be Beverly Hills , there’s no question that Magic’s influence on the city (and beyond) have been tremendous.  Here’s a snippet from a NYT article from way back in 2000 that gives an idea of what Magic was (and still is) up to:

“Johnson employs roughly 3,000 people who live in inner-city neighborhoods across the country. Over the next two hours, as Johnson sips herbal tea and tirelessly plays host, he talks about the satisfaction of employing people. In his recent venture in Harlem, Johnson’s multiplex, which opened in July, and the Harlem USA mall it is part of, have sparked a renaissance of 125th Street. Last summer, after the Harlem theater hired 100 people from the 5,000 who had waited in line to apply, Johnson decided that he wanted his new staff to go through four weeks of rigorous training. On opening day, dozens of young men and women stood before him in pressed uniforms. “Just looking at those faces, the hope and pride,” he says, remembering the scene, “that may have been the best moment of my life, right there.”

Not winning the five NBA championships or an Olympic Gold Medal.  Not surviving AIDS.  The best moment of his life is seeing the “hope and pride” of the young people in Harlem that were going to work for him.

What Magic did, and what Lebron could have done, was transcend basketball.  He was a great player, and yes, others, like Michael Jordan, have used their on-court greatness to make bucket-loads of money, but Magic Johnson’s not just making money.

He’s making prosperity.

Lebron James says he wants to “win championships” so he’s going to a team in a city with a healthier economy, more marketing power, and a couple of high-priced stars to help him win those “rings.”

Here’s a newflash for Lebron James:  in your wildest dreams, you’ll have the same number of “rings” Magic Johnson has.  Probably not, even on your new, stacked team, but maybe.

But Magic Johnson has so much more than that.  His wildest dreams, apparently, are much bigger than Lebron James’s because they include greatness that only starts on the basketball court.

Some of us thought you might have that in you too.  I’m not a Cleveland Cavaliers fan and have absolutely no personal connection to Cleveland.  I’m not even a particularly big basketball fan, but I’m a huge Magic Johnson fan.  (Hell, even Larry Bird is a huge Magic Johnson fan.)

Not everybody has the opportunity for true greatness.  Few people have the platform to contribute to the world quite as big or quite as publicly as Lebron James or Magic Johnson.

Lebron James doesn’t owe the world anything.  He’s just a basketball player.

And that’s too bad.

Online Comments are as Bad as Hitler

As a person who’s been in the internet biz for, well, most of the existence of the internet biz, I’ve always been a big fan of open systems of review and comment.  In fact, here at Goldstar, we built the world’s first review system for live entertainment, and comments appear unedited and in real-time.

So for me, discussions of user comments and reviews are always interesting, including this one I came across on the PBS site. In it, Kenneth Baker, an arts critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, says “Fortunately, most reactive responses, the negative sort, are easily dismissed because…people haven’t seen what they purport to be talking about, and I have.”

Baker goes on to say that he doesn’t read online comments on his stories at all because they are the “lowest common denominator” and “don’t call for a response.”

I’m going to shock some of you when I say that I agree with much of what Baker is saying here.  Not that I don’t believe in the value of “crowd sourced” commentary, but when it’s not cultivated well, it does tend to devolve  into the realm of Godwin’s Law, wherein someone inevitably is compared unfavorably to Nazis or Hitler.  Along the way, there’s a lot of spurious and juvenile personal venom and people trying to get “burns” in on each other by picking on a specific choice of words or turn of phrase to prove their opponent’s Hitlerian nature.

It’s idiotic.  It’s also the clear gravitational pull of completely open-ended commentary on most of the Internet.  People call it ‘dialogue’ when it’s mostly just self-indulgence, a cheap way to feel superior to others with absolutely no requirement of introspection.

What to do?

Discussions have to be shaped.  People need to be given a purpose, and, yes, there should be ground rules for any given conversation.  Of course, if all you want is “conversation,” you can skip this step.  Some people really enjoy the jabber and think the hatefulness in support of different ideas is productive.  I don’t buy it.  You could get a lot farther a lot faster if you didn’t have people focused on winning unwinnable arguments.  After all, the other guy can always find a way to accommodate his own feeling of being better and more important than you.  And vice versa, naturally.

That’s a big part of the reason that the review system on Goldstar is A. just reviews of shows, and B. requires that you’ve actually bought tickets to the show and that the date you’ve bought has passed.  In other words, you’ve probably seen the show you’re talking about.  As a result, and because people generally enjoy their experiences, the reviews are frank, but focused on the topic at hand.

On our Facebook page, it’s a little different.  People do get into mild arguments about different things, and our process there is that if they get to be personal, we step in to say that we don’t mind lively discussions but that they should remember to treat each other with respect.  In fact, at this point, often times our Facebook fans do that for us.

Spend a few minutes watching this video, especially the first part, where Kenneth Baker is talking.  It reminds me a bit of something Seth Godin said a few weeks ago: “Not sure why you would want to reinforce the noise in your head that tells you not to speak up, stand out and do work that matters, but if you do, a surefire way to do it is to focus your attention on every piece of negative feedback in your environment. Or to imagine every possible disaster that could befall you, and to do it repeatedly. Or to carefully study anonymous comments, tweets and online reviews from people who don’t like the work you’re doing.”

I guess I’d put it this way. Respect feedback, but respect your work enough to give feedback only the respect it deserves. If it’s well thought out and informed, listen. If it’s unhinged ranting from a person who just likes to hear himself talk, it doesn’t deserve much respect and you can move on.

Group Sales is Dead

The following post is by Trevor O’Donnell, whose thoughts I’m happy to share with the Live 2.0 readership.

Six years ago I wrote a book called Group Sales for Arts and Entertainment: The Myths, The Markets, The Methods.  If someone asked me to update or revise it today, I wouldn’t. It’s an irrelevant book about an utterly ridiculous enterprise.

My advice to readers is this:  Put it down.  Throw it away.  Burn it.  It won’t do you any good.  Anyone who’s doing group sales now should dismantle their entire sales operation and toss it in the trash.  Anyone who’s thinking about doing group sales should stop right now and start looking into more productive ways to sell tickets.

Take it from me; I’m the guru; I wrote the book: Group sales is dead and it’s not coming back.  Go ahead and stick a fork in it.  It’s done.

Now some folks – those who’ve been paying attention – will welcome the news and take the opportunity to capitalize on a broader range of sales opportunities.  Others will be paralyzed with confusion:  “But, but, but we’ve been doing it this way for years.  How else would we know how it’s done?”  And still others – most notably on Broadway – will chant group sales is dead as a gloating eulogy for a business practice they never liked and never learned how to manage.

But make no mistake: The only thing dead about group sales is the word ‘group.’  ‘Sales’ is more alive than ever and those who think they can bury both and try to survive on traditional marketing and PR might want to keep their antiquated business models for a while.  Better to do sales the old-fashioned way than not at all.  Barely.

How do we know group sales is dead?  It’s simple.  Death is present in the phrase itself.  Say it to anyone and they’ll start to die.  If you don’t believe me, try this:  Go up to your boss or a colleague and say, “At next week’s meeting we need to discuss business-to-business sales channels.”  They’ll say, “Wow.  B-to-B.  Absolutely.”  The next day, go up to that person and say, “We also need to talk about how consumers plan ticket purchases using social media.”  They’ll say, “Social media.  Excellent.  Let’s put it on the agenda.”

On the third day say to that person, “I can’t wait for our meeting about group sales,” and their eyes will glaze over, their facial muscles will melt and their IQ will drop 50 points in five seconds.  It’s like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.  I’ve seen entire conference rooms full of the smartest people in the entertainment industry turn into brain-dead zombies at the merest mention of ‘group sales’ and then proceed to squander millions in revenue opportunities before the spell is broken.

“Group sales. Group Sales. Group SALES. GROUP SALES.” Mmmwwhoaaahhh!!!

But seriously.  It’s dead because the model no longer fits the business.  The group model we use today was developed sixty years ago for little old ladies and school kids AND THAT IS NOT WHO’S BUYING THE FRIGGIN’ TICKETS!

Individuals who buy in bulk and third parties who facilitate bulk purchases represent a broad range of B-to-C and B-to-B market segments, each of which needs a different sales relationship with your product.  (Read that sentence again and burn it into your brain.)  If you’re still trying to capture sales from these buyers with a remote sales operation, a one-size-fits-all service infrastructure or an under-supported, low-level staff, I can promise you this: You’re doing it wrong and you’re failing to capture significant revenue potential.

So here’s the deal.  If I were to write another book about volume ticket sales (See?  The fog is lifting already), here’s what it would say.

Be smart. Banish the phrase ‘group sales’ from your business lexicon.   Start talking clearly about SALES.  Place all of your organization’s sales activities in one department, give it equal status with marketing, hire a seasoned pro from the sports or attractions industry to run it and then make a top-to-bottom organizational commitment to selling rather than just marketing your product.

Be logical. The more tickets you sell per transaction, the lower the cost per sale.  It’s a simple fact but the entertainment industry devotes nearly all of its marketing resources toward generating huge quantities of low-yield “single-ticket” transactions.  With rising marketing costs and diminishing audiences, putting all of your energy into moving tickets two at a time is just insane.

Be professional. Climb out of that stupid group sales pigeonhole and take off those ridiculous little-old-lady-and-school-kid blinders.  Start behaving like a real business.  Stop selling discounts and start selling value.  Offer businesslike services to B-to-B buyers and start persuading consumers to come to your shows with members of their social networks.  (If you’re not thinking about the convergence of group sales and social media, by the way, you may actually be a zombie.)

Group sales died because the world changed and we neglected to change with it.  Now we have a lot of catching up to do.  Smart, strategic, professional, proactive volume ticket sales is the only sensible response to this new world and stands to become the fastest-growing trend in an industry that’s been subsisting far too long on conventional marketing methods.

Many have already seen the light.  Some are changing now.  But an awful lot are still doing it the way they did sixty years ago.

You?

Trevor O’Donnell is a marketing consultant who has worked with Disney Theatrical Productions, the Nederlander Company, Cirque du Soleil, Cameron Mackintosh, Blue Man Productions, Center Theatre Group, TDI, Goldstar, numerous Broadway shows and leading arts institutions in New York, L.A. and cities across the US.  Email: trevoro (at) earthlink.net