There is a big disconnect with nightlife and event marketing and the online world. Sure…Facebook and Myspace have event pages you can set up…and there’s sites like clubplanet.com and metromix.com (wait…they’re going under) that exist. But let’s be honest, few of us ever go to those sites and if you have, you probably don’t go back there often.

Teaming up with TheScene.com, we have devised a solution that literally “connects” events with the online world. Facebook Connect is a fairly new technology that Facebook has developed. It helps integrate websites directly into Facebook. What does this mean? This means you can take advantage of the traffic and activity that takes place on Facebook with your website - Plug your website directly into Facebook. For the event/nightlife industry, this is huge!!

Speaking in terms of special events, Facebook Connect can help increase the value of the marketing exposure. Special events are where sponsors, music, and celebrities become involved and make the night something unique…more than just a normal night at a club. To date, sponsors have been supporting special events in order to reach the hundreds if not thousands of people that attend the event - and they pay good money too if you do it right. At most, the outreach, beyond the day of the event, goes about as far as the marketing materials (flyers, tickets, etc) that are passed out days, maybe weeks (at most), before the event. This is so restricting!! A sponsor of a website can get hundreds of thousands of eyes, if not millions of eyes on their brand. How do you connect these two worlds together??

The only way to explain it, is to show it, then explain it: www.hollywoodprom2009.com

Here’s what’s we’ve done:

Using Facebook Connect, we are able to make the sign in process painless. All people have to do is click on Facebook Connect, verify their email, and they’re in. This is key because I think we all can agree that the registration process of a site is sometimes so annoying we don’t even bother.

It doesn’t stop there though. Any and all activity user create on the website is published in their newsfeed so all their friends can see what they are doing. For example, on the Hollywood Prom Facebook page, there are almost 3,000 fans (in less than a week). On this page, people have been posting funny comments and old prom pictures of themselves. People are excited and engaged. Using Facebook Connect, TheScene.com can import that wall content into the prom website so that the posting is seamless on both sites. What you see on the Facebook page, is what you see on the Prom website.

This is friends telling friends about the site…think of the potential viral explosion. Hundreds become thousands, thousands become millions, and the next thing you know, the mere thousands of impressions (at most) the sponsor was expecting to get at the event, has now become hundreds of thousands, if not millions, potentially spanning worldwide. When thinking in terms of CPM, this is stretching that marketing dollar farther than ever thought possible before. Noone can throw an event with millions of people in attendance (ok…Jesus Christ does a pretty good job of it twice a year, although I think God owns that title sponsorship).

On top of all this, you now have a destination site that people can go to for post-event activity as well. To date, people had to rely on sites like napkinights.com to upload pictures of their event to. With a destination micro-site, you can hog those pictures for yourself and make sure that your sponsors are getting more branding even though the event is done. Take it a step further…capture video content that is edited in a webisodic format, and you have a compelling video piece that can be virally shared for months after the event…building the hype for your next one!

You may be asking yourself, “Why don’t big events just create these social sites for their event themselves??” Answer: Because the cost of a custom site would be 50k+ which is more than most budgets for events!! They’d never make any money. That’s where TheScene.com comes in. They have the technology built; they have the team in place. They can whip up a microsite for an event in less than a week (I’ve seen them do it). And now you’ve added a resource that not only can help you sell your sponsorships…but can also be a promotional tool to guarantee exposure, tickets sales, media, celebrities, etc.

This is a very innovative concept, but let’s be honest, it’s not a new idea…social networking has existed for several years. This is just a new idea for nightlife/event marketing. Because up until now, it was too costly to even consider.