I don’t care what you like, I just want to know what you’re doing later.
I love the “Like.” The like is a great lightweight way to validate the actions of other people. The ”Like” is perfect for sites like Facebook and Instagram, because it sits at the intersection of instant self-expression and instant social validation. But the “Like” doesn’t work well for much more than that—it’s an awful way to express intentions and rally friends, for example. There are many more ways to express intent than “Like”—or even “Read” and “Watch”, two other, recently introduced Facebook verbs—can cover.
Take an event, like a football game or a rock concert. What does “Liking” one of these tell your friends? Not much that’s useful, and nothing that’s actionable. There are deeper kinds of intent we want to express around events, like “I’m interested in doing this” or “I’m going to do this.” For these, we need something better: we need the “RSVP.”
Tantamount to something like, “Joining” on Facebook, the “RSVP” is often a single click, like the link, which makes it incredibly easy to use. But the “RSVP” has a very specific purpose—it’s the perfect way to express intent around an event that’s upcoming. An event has a clear way to participate, can create a sense of community before, during, and after, and feeds a fear of missing out, all of which the single click of an “RSVP” can both capture and convey. Clicking an “RSVP” creates actionable social information that’s meaningful to the person “RSVPing”, because its allowed them to signal their intent to attend to others; to the friends of the person RSVPing, because they can see that intent and potentially act upon it, and share in the experience; and to the people putting on the event in question, because it allows them to gather significant and useful information about the people who intend to attend.
Concerts, movies, parties, and shows are all more meaningful when you have people to share them with. An “RSVP” shared socially allows you to capture your intent and broadcast it to the people you care about, in essence asking them to participate with you. Sure, Facebook has events you can create and that others can “Join,” but that’s a heavy way to ask your friends to come along. “RSVPing” allows us to ask for participation in a much lighter-weight way than creating an event and asking people to join; instead, you can just register your plans, and let others see and choose for themselves whether or not to join you. Plus, Facebook, big as it is, is just one site—the number of places you might want to share your “RSVP” with people is much bigger.
An event can be way more than a party or a concert, too. Every video premiere, album release, movie trailer, product sale, and product launch is an event. Liking those things is great, but doesn’t give anybody much useful information, and checking-in to them conveys no information beforehand and not much more in the moment. But “RSVPing” says a lot—and not just about what your upcoming plans are, but about who you are as well.
There’s so much that clicking on the “RSVP” says about you. People love lining up for things they love—one of the most important aspects of an upcoming event is the sense of anticipation. The “RSVP” is how people feed and express that anticipation. It’s science and it’s art—the anticipation of reward will often make us happier than the reward itself. The metaphorical clock counting backwards energizes people to take action—just ask Groupon, Gilt Groupe, or any other service that has used a limited time-frame for taking action to great effect. An “RSVP” done right serves a similar function.
At SonicLiving, we have created a new form of engagement called “Universal RSVP” that distributes “RSVPs” across our partners and many other networks, including Facebook, Pandora and RootMusic. Someone looking at Pandora’s concert calendar can see if a friend is going to see Lady Gaga, even if that person “RSVPed” on Live Nation and has never used Pandora.
We’ve tracked over six million “RSVPs” and powered many of the most successful music events on Facebook, including Lady Gaga’s single release of “Born This Way” and the Outside Lands Music Festival. “Born This Way” was the largest music event on Facebook and the fastest selling single on iTunes. Outside Lands had over 20,000 “RSVPs”, compared to a few hundred “Checkins” on Foursquare and a few hundred “RSVPs” on Songkick. In both cases, nearly half of the user engagement happened on other sites besides Facebook. I believe the odds are against a stand-alone event engagement site or app ever getting enough traction to be useful to the masses and therefore won’t do a meaningful job of getting people to participate, which is where “Universal RSVP” really shines, because where you “RSVP” doesn’t matter—we’ll do the work to make sure it’s seen by everyone who wants to see it.
Every service on the Internet is asking you a question, and the best services do something amazing when you answer because it does more with the information you’ve provided than you ever could have imagined. With “Universal RSVP” our goal is to do the most amazing thing possible when people answer the question, “Are you interested in doing this?”
