Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

Ticketmaster Tweaks Ticket Fee Transparency Via Twitter

Posted on August 24th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • 10 Comments

Ticketmaster has announced that it intends to “do a better job”  explaining those universally-detested “convenience” fees. They telegraphed this on Twitter — on a Sunday — maybe because there isn’t much to see here.

The number one complaint by music fans (who tend to agree on little) is the additional cost which are disclosed late in the ordering process when you have more invested in closing the deal.

Ticketmaster’s fees are divided between Ticketmaster, venues, promoters, artists, managers, tour managers, etc. on a sliding scale depending on how the deal is structured. They aren’t trivial: As the illustration to the right shows, this fee can add 45 percent to the cost of the transaction.

Tickemaster boss Irving Azoff Tweeted the news on a lazy, end-of-summer Sunday that doesn’t seem to befit an major announcement, perhaps it is much less than meets the eye. Ticketmaster will — we don’t know when — just list these fees up front so that potential customers can see them without clicking all the way through.

Ticketmaster echoed Azoff’s Sunday morning tweet with an official blog post Monday:

We get it — you don’t like service fees. You don’t like them mostly because you don’t understand what the heck they are for. We’ll try to do a better job in this space over the coming months of helping you understand our business, and how our fees compare to others in the industry (both in ticketing and e-commerce in general). But the reality of the live entertainment business is that service fees have become an extension of the ticket price. Most of the parties in the live event value chain participate in these service fees either directly or indirectly – promoters, venues, teams, artists, and yes, ticketing companies – and service fee rebates are our largest annual expense at Ticketmaster.

This new system is not totally transparent because Ticketmaster doesn’t explain the exact breakdown of the fees between the various stakeholders in each transaction. (As Azoff tweeted, “The fees don’t go to TM. Only a portion do.”) If transparency is the point, why not tell fans where these fees are going?

That’s not all. When you select a certain number of tickets from the dropdown menu, Ticketmaster does not update its prices to include the total price and fees for all the tickets, but instead, keeps listing the single ticket price. To that charge, Azoff tweeted in response last night that Ticketmaster “can’t boil all fees down to a per ticket fee until we know how many tix are bought and shipping method chosen, so it has to happen later.”

We understand that the bit about the shipping method, but why not reveal the fees as pertain to single versus group purchases earlier in the process? Ticketmaster charges a flat per-ticket fee now, so it has nothing to hide on this front other than the way those fees add up.

Ticketmaster as much as acknowledges that it’s ridiculous to list the fees separately, saying in its blog post, “You will begin to see many of our clients move to truly all-in pricing, because they know it sells more tickets and makes you happier.”

But the company should go even further and require its clients to list “all-in” prices, even if some artists and other stakeholders are insisting that the fees be listed separately.

[Story continues]

Read the original post on Epicenter

 

Sex Positive URL Shortening Service

Posted on August 20th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

That’s right. Sex Positive. Positive in the sense that you are not going to be censored for linking to something – which we’ll assume to be responsible content – just because it implies or refers to sex.

Violet Blue, yes, you know who I’m talking about, has launched vb.ly so you can safely shorten your NSFW urls. There’s also an API for anyone who want’s to tinker with the service or integrate it into their website or application. There’s also rumor of a Wordpress plugin, but I haven’t found it yet. If you come across the plugin, let me know. Now, go out there and link to things like there was no tomorrow.

 

Ruder Finn Intent Index – Intent-Driven Social Media

Posted on August 12th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • 1 Comment

Three out of five Americans go online to influence the opinion of other people, and twice as many to socialize than to shop. I suppose that speaks a lot about the intent of folks participating online whether it’s Twitter, blog commenting, sharing with Digg or shopping on Amazon. So with that, the folks at Public Relations firm Ruder Finn bring us the Intent Index. Now we know why we do what we do and it’s all presented to us in a pretty Flash interface.

Link: Intent Index

Link: Ruder Finn

 

Tweeting Joyce

Posted on June 7th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

So I walk in to the office, that I occasionally share, and am greeted with this question;  ”Do you think I have enough friends, that if they all help, we can can Twitter Ulysses between now and Blooms Day?”

Ulysses in 6 weeks?

Not if you want to keep them as friends.

I didn’t bother to ask why. Sometimes it’s better that way. But I did offer to Tweet Ulysses for her. Not myself of course, but a combination of Guttenburg Project, PHP, MySQL, and the Twitter API. Of course by the time I got around to it, we were short on time, so it’s one tweet, every 2 minutes, 24 x 7.
My apologies to anyone who would follow. It’s too many tweets. It’s not meant to be followed. At least not now.

You will find, come June 16, the entire text of Ulysses by James Joyce. Unlike others before us – yes it has been done – we are tweeting lines from end to start. So once it’s all up there you can sit in a cafe somewhere with your cigs and iPhone and read Joyce.

What should we do next? Finigans Wake?

@bloomsdaytweet (as of today we are at 20,000 plus update and on schedule)

 

Briefly Connected

Posted on April 18th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Here’s a quick outline of the online tools I’m currently using. I’ve started, stopped, wiped out, and started this blog several times over the course of about 4 years. Don’t think that means that I’ve figured out the perfect toolset or that I even have a real handle on what this blog is about. It’s still very much about my online life in the sense that I collect things and share them here online, some found, and some created. I’m not here to provide an authoritarian voice about the Web, but I am here to share some, just some, of the things I find of interest.

While I have a couple of dozen accounts for online services, many of them were created just to try them out and are now lingering. How many millions of account profiles are out there not being used? So here’s a list of my primary online services and how I’m using them.

Wordpress
- Blog where I post items I want to share, and use as a record for a later date.

Zemanta

- The Zemanta plugin for Wordpress suggest images, tags, links, and related posts. I can write a couple of sentances and Zemanta will recommend images, tags, etc., helping round out the context of my topic.

Flickr
- Photos I want to share publicly. The Zemanta plugin will find recommendations here within my Flickr photos as well as photos from other sources.

Twitter
- I have two accounts on Twitter, which I suspect will become one account soon. @mediarosa with over 2,000 friends currently, and @Jamie_T which I limit to friends and family and to feed my Facebook status. See Hootsuite and Twitter to Facebook below to see how that works.

Facebook
- Yeah, the obligatory Facebook page, with a schizophrenic mix of friends, family, and work related connections.

Hootsuite
I use hootsuite to post to both of my Twitter accounts and to shorten URL’s. Hootsuite also pulls from the rss feed on mediarosa.com to create a new Tweet.

Twitter to Facebook
- This Facebook application takes my Twitter updates from @Jamie_T and re-posts them as my Facebook status updates.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The New Skittles Website Is A Twitter Search For “Skittles” (laughingsquid.com)
• TweetMeme Finds a Revenue Stream (readwriteweb.com)
• AlertThingy Goes Head to Head with TweetDeck (readwriteweb.com)