Armchair Theatre "Flips The Funnel" - free tickets for citizen reviewers

The Armchair Theatre is a well established little venue in Obs, Cape Town that has remained popular by constantly innovating with their marketing in very practical ways. Their latest promotion on their MySpace page is as practical as it is innovative.

They sent out a Myspace message (login req.) to all their friends (i.e. people who have given them permission) saying:

Get free entrance to The Independent Armchair Theatre by reviewing the next show you go to.

All you have to do is post a review in our Myspace comments section. This will get you 1 x free entry. The next time you arrive at The Armchair your name will be on the guest list.

Your review then gets posted on their website - so they get lots of reviews for free, while also attracting opinion leaders (who care enough to write reviews) for a follow-up show. The reviews get republished on their main website to give the reviews even further reach... Effectively Turning Customers Into Evangelists (<< click if you didn't get the obscure reference to a funnel in the title of this post).

Comments

[The Don]

It's an interesting concept, I know Gil has been trying to up his review content for a while now (even trying to rope in very lazy bloggers like us).

Now I would never want to put an idea like this down but it quite difficult to get people to
1. Write anything
2. Write about music

There seems to be such a pretentious vibe around writing about music that most people are quite intimidated by giving their opinion in case they are seen to be wrong or off topic. ( I am well aware that there are countless other disciplines where this also applies but I think it is most prevalent in subjective criticism about art, there can be no logical right and wrong and the critique is bound by no level of rationality).

We see this quite a bit at our site where we get far fewer comments than our traffic would imply. (an alternate explanation is that people are merely going to the muso to steal free songs, but I am not feeling that cynical today).

Another problem is that the sort of people that can overcome this intimidation do not necessarily have the insight or skill to write about what they see, it can be very tough, and one of the concern, if I were the armchair, would be the degrading of our site by allowing a number of poorly informed reviews.

Rant over. sorry.

[Dave]

Yo The Don, thanks for your comment. I guess the only sane and satisfactory answer to your rant would be to check the response to the promo on their MySpace. As far as I can see, there's no real downside to this promo - if a review is crappy, then Gil doesn't have to post it on the site.... But in aggregate, I'll bet that the reviews will offer great insight to the scene at Armchair.