Tweet-Tourage
By erasing the lag time between message blast and message viewing, Twitter is shaping up as a very useful platform for running real-time promotional campaigns — particularly when it’s accessed wirelessly on the move, over a notebook computer or a mobile phone.
In mid-July, a selection of clubs along L.A.’s famous Sunset Strip held the first-ever Twittercrawl for patrons. Fans of the Comedy Store, the Viper Room, the Roxy Theater and the Andaz West Hollywood Hotel — all within a mile-long stretch of the Strip — were invited to sign up for a special @thesunsetstrip Twitter feed and then to come out on the evening of July 12. During the seven-hour event they were reached with dozens of tweets announcing drink specials, free cover charges, contests and scavenger hunts for music and T-shirt swag. A local radio station joined in with tweets offering tickets to Dodger games and a private Coldplay concert.
“We’ve been hit by the down economy on the Sunset Strip,” says Nic Adler, whose father Lou started the Roxy back in 1973. Nic took over the business in the late ’90s, revamped a static Web site into a blog, and launched a MySpace profile for the business. The Roxy started its Twitter account in 2007 and now has about 16,000 followers. All told, the four venues in the Sunset Strip crawl had about 30,000 followers and added about 650 more with the event.
“We weren’t looking for massive turnout,” Adler says. “The Roxy only holds 500 people. We were looking for the people active in our Twitter community, the people who know us from Flickr pages. Those are the people who interact with us every day, the influencers.”
