Besides being busy and looking pretty awful overall, notice what’s missing? How about a way for me to share the show to friends or add to my calendar? Considering I immediately shot a note out to a few friends about the shows I just bought tickets to, I think this would be a prime spot for them to at least add some social networking links.

I had a spare minute over the weekend, so I took to Microsoft Paint and created my reaction in visual form:

Now I know that TM/Live Nation have taken some small steps to make their websites more social, but from what I’ve seen, most of those social features are geared towards the pre-purchase areas like search and event pages. But having gone through the purchase process a couple of times on Friday, it struck me that the confirmation page was likely the best and most logical place to add social networking buttons and calendar options.

And this isn’t just me being a live music freak….there’s actual data to back-up the importance of social media for spreading events out to the masses. Ticketfly has been beating this drum for years now. Also, check out this recent blog post from Eventbrite: Social Commerce: A closer look at the numbers. A few of their key findings:

• Over the last six months, 40% of sharing through Facebook occurred on the event page (pre-purchase) vs. 60% of sharing which occurred on the order confirmation page (post-purchase). This tells us that the motivation to share is higher once the purchase is made and the attendee is committed.
• Not only is the motivation to share post-purchase higher, that share is more meaningful than a pre-purchase one. A post-purchase share on Facebook drives 20% more ticket sales per share than a pre-purchase one.
• 1% of the people who looked at an event page before purchasing a ticket shared it. But once on the order confirmation page 10% people shared it.
• A post-purchase share on Facebook also drives 20% more ticket sales than a pre-purchase one.

There ya go.

As a live music fan, I not only buy a lot of concert tickets, I’m usually the one that bugs all my friends about joining me for those shows. So, why not grease the skids and have an easier/more efficient way to help me do so?

Live Music 2.0: Concerts and the Social Web

Here’s a brief intro:

Over the past few years, as this whole web 2.0 thing has really grown and progressed, we’ve seen a number of new sites launch that are specifically geared towards live music fans on the web. In a sense, all of them exist to help fans track and follow their favorite touring bands/artists in a variety of ways, but with a focus on their live shows rather than their studio output (which is amply covered by a slew of Music 2.0 sites and services).

While a lot of these sites have not yet emerged into the larger music business landscape, there’s no doubt in my mind that web technologies in general will continue to affect and disrupt the live music space, as they’ve already been doing quite drastically with the recording industry. Back when I was able to dedicate more of my free time to Live Music Blog, I was really interested in exploring this space in depth. Although we have occasionally posted about some of these sites — mentioning iLike.com and ShowClix or talking up the latest feature from JamBase — we’ve never really focused on them directly as a key topic. We’d like to change that. Since we are a site dedicated to live music, it only makes sense to look at the related web services and sites that serve all of US as a community of fans. I’d like to finally re-visit my original idea and dig a bit deeper into all the sites and services that form what we call “Live Music 2.0.”

More (and much more to follow) over at Live Music Blog.

I recently connected my Facebook page with my Twitter account so that all my tweets automatically get posted as status updates on Facebook.  But one thing I have noticed is that within the Facebook context, lots of my Twitter updates don’t make a lot of sense. This is mainly because I often use some of the extra coding and markings that work only with the Twitter application. For example, users can highlight certain topics by adding  hashtags (the # symbol) to words (like #finalfour). This allows for all posts with those hashtags to be grouped together and searched (i.e. if you’re tweeting about the super bowl, it’d be #superbowl). Another really useful tag is the @ symbol, which allows you to tag and respond to another user by writing @username (for me @whitperson).  These are key interactive features that have made Twitter such a popular social media tool.

After watching the way that integrating my Facebook book account with my Twitter feed has worked, I have been thinking that Facebook really needs to add some similar features to further extend Facebook’s interactive quality and, in a sense, to compete with the popularity of Twitter. Both features above (the hash tags for topics and the @name of friends), could really be useful within the Facebook context. For example, the @name feature could be useful if you want to call out a friend by name and have that update show up on their profile. I actually tried to do this in a recent status update, as I wanted to give a shout-out to some friends who have turned me on to music and musicians that I now love. I posted an update as a  “musical discovery shout out” to my friend Dave, but he had no idea that I tagged him becuase it didn’t automatically show up in his profile. On Twitter I would have tagged him as @DaveSmith and he would have seen that on his feed and have been able to respond immediately. That kind of interaction seems to be exactly the kind of thing Facebook would want to encourage.

The #hashtag topics feature could also be very useful in discussing topics amongst your network of friends. For example, if you have a bunch of friends that are really into a certain TV show, they could easily post updates with a hash tag for the TV show, allowing for an ongoing and  open discussion of the show with all your Facebook friends.

Given some recent updates to the Facebook profile pages, it’s clear that Zuckerberg and crew are taking a serious look at Twitter’s popularity and understanding that Facebook needs to continue to innovate and adapt. They recently made some changes to give Facebook a more real-time, immediate type of interactivity, but I’d think if they were going to take some cues from Twitter, they’d find ways to emulate some of Twitter’s best interactive features. These seem to be two obvious candidates, and with the ever-expanding largesse of Facebook, adding features like these could have some resounding affects throughout the worldwide FB network.