Andrew Peters has done it again. The has launched Singapore’s First Tattoo show drawing crowds of about 15,000 exceeding the initial expectations by 300%. And all this was achieved using Social Media over a period of 3 months. So how did he do it?
He used :
- Blogs
- Friends
- Niche market enthusiasm
- Complementary parties
Now if there is anyone who knows how to spin a story, Andrew Peters would be able to link “Space aliens getting a tattoo in Singapore after crash landing in Area 51 and taking advantage of budget flights to Singapore sponsored by the Singapore Tourism board”. What?! Made you look, and that is something that Andrew excels in.
“With Facebook, I initially seeded it with 100 of my friends which I thought would be open to the idea of tattoos and then decided to look around the internet and set up Google Alerts for anything related to tattoos or anything related to Chris Garver [a celebrity tattoo artist who was invited to the convention],” Peters said.
Starting with a Facebook Group as a promotional tool for the event, Andrew garnered niche support and within two weeks it grew from 100 people to 1000. The group now boasts 4000 members from the Asian region.
“I think if any event company not looking at least to engage social media as a way to generate activity for an event before it actually happens, are crazy,” he said.
The target audience for the tattoo show would probaby be in MySpace, Facebook and possibly Friendster. But even though multiple social networks could be used, Andrew chose to use primarily Facebook because of his familiarity with the platform.
“I know it. I also tried to put a group in Linkedin because there are a lot of professionals that have tattoos but it didn’t work. There was no traction whatsoever,” he said.
Using Andrew own blog was probably very important in providing a reference point for people on the internet. People know Andrew. Google knows Andrew. They may have never heard that tattoo were publicly available in Singapore, let alone if he had created a new website/blog dedicated to the Tattoo show.
“You’ve got a long way to go for it to be recognized on Google so now with my blog being quite recognized it’s easy for the content to be found.”
David Meerman Scott, the bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, told Marketing that: “As the tremendous success of the Tattoo Artistry Facebook group driving attendees to the Singapore Tattoo Show illustrates, social media is an important component in an overall marketing strategy.”
“But marketers can’t put all of their efforts solely into social media. It is still important to have an offline marketing plan and to work with mainstream media to help tell your story to an interested audience,” he said.
The organizers of the Singapore Tattoo Show currently have a contract with the Singapore Tourism Board for two more shows which Pacific West has been retained for.
Andrew no doubt understands how people think, and how social media works. Andrew is also a principal at Harro where he leverages media intelligence to achieve these results.
