Creating the Conversation
Nuno Lopes Talks About the Vital Interaction of Today's Electronic Marketing

Nuno Lopes is based in Portugal, where he operates Independente Record Label (Universal Music), a nightclub/live music venue, an Irish bar, a production company and a marketing agency, IGMarketing. Lopes and company have produced tours, events and conceptual projects for Bacardi, Heineken, Super Bock, Mini, Nissan, GMC, BMW and Carlsberg, to name a few. Further, they work with online communities, helping companies interact with and engage their consumers.

NCB: What do you feel are the most important elements of electronic marketing in today’s bar industry, and in what areas of that marketing do you see bar owners or marketers falling short?
Lopes: It’s important to understand, first of all, the profound changes in the market reflected in the shift from communicating TO the consumer to initiating and maintaining the conversation. This is probably the most important concept that all owners must grasp. Any marketing that entails just sending information to the consumer falls short of the consumer’s need to become involved in the conversation. This is why blogs have become so popular as people interact and converse.
    The second point is that marketing should never interrupt the consumer. Instead it should integrate into the consumer’s experience whether online or offline. So in short, bar owners should concentrate on their sites as the central platform using widgets and other services such as YouTube and Flickr to host their assets.
    Placing all photographs of the venue and different events on Flickr ensures that you have your venue duly represented online in another large community. No one should attempt to keep their consumers within the barriers of their site; it won’t work and they will leave when they want. Therefore, help them move on. They’ll come back and thank you.
    Electronic marketing is neither e-mail nor SMS. That’s not an effective way to talk and listen to your customer. Most in the nightclub and bar industry will fail to understand the implications. An integrated approach is the most effective strategy through the use of e-mail (double opt-in), RSS feeds, blog, audio and video, photos and a combination of all the other services that emerge almost weekly. This month’s flavor? Twitter.

NCB: Text messaging has many uses for bar marketers. Which text messaging functionalities do you see as the most important right now, and where do you see text usage headed?
Lopes: I believe in the mobile phone as an extension of your Web page, ensuring you keep focused. SMS is a powerful tool, though, in specific circumstances.

NCB: Lately it seems many bars have let their Web sites sit dormant, without updates, as they turn their focus to their free, user-friendly MySpace pages. How can they maximize the use of both?
Lopes: MySpace is a great testing ground for owners before they begin to think of how to build their Web site (community) and decide what tools to integrate. Whilst on MySpace you will begin to understand how people sign up, what information they are prepared to give up and what they look for. Consumers are actually more interested in interacting with a site that informs and educates them — events, location, drinks, type of customer, etc. — rather than full of flash-enabled animations that get updated far too late. MySpace should be used as a presence in a large community, but owners must concentrate on their site — context, not text, and relevance, not just content.
    So learn from sites like MySpace and create and run your own community. The time and effort is well worth it. Your customer spends a couple of hours in your venue a week, (but) he is online for twice as long every day. Why not be there?

NCB: What other important trends in electronic marketing do you see, and what should bar owners consider when putting together a marketing plan?
Lopes: Spending very little time on planning and as much time as possible testing the different forms of conversing is essential. You need to get involved now. A central platform such as a blog (www.typepad.com or www.wordpress.com, for example) enables you to get the conversation going. Be human, not corporate. Avoid clichés such as terrific nights with beautiful people.  Ask people to comment and then respond rapidly online.
    If you want to advance from the blog, add a platform (example: www.kickapps.com) to it as you register and build your community. Place all your photos in a site such as Flickr and link to that from your site. Use the same tags on different sites so that users can find you easily. Add videos to YouTube and soon you’ll find people adding themselves to your channel there. Test out all the different widgets or services out there such as Twitter that enable you to interact with your audience.

NCB: How have MySpace and YouTube changed the marketing paradigm as the new word of mouth. It seems these forums may be difficult for many bar operators to figure out how to utilize for their benefit. Can you offer any suggestions for ways to harness them for bar marketing?
Lopes: Without a doubt, 2007 will be the year of word of mouth, but you have to understand what word of mouth is. Seventy percent of word of mouth is actually offline which means that the remainder is online. So, you need to ensure that the consumer’s experience (physical, in the venue) is your focus.
    Word of mouth propagates when the message is strong and/or creates a sensation worthy of telling other people. A great story can go a long way across many people as they tell their friends, colleagues and family. In fact most people will hear about you from their personal group. That’s why the physical experience is so much more important.
    MySpace and YouTube are only two, albeit major, players in the Web 2.0 era, and I consider them both very different in that with MySpace you set up your “base,” much like your Web, but within an outrageously large and unmanageable community.
YouTube is a service provider for video, as Typepad is for blogging and Flickr for photos.                NCB