I had the pleasure of being invited to the Social+Cash conference last week, which focused on how to gain business value through social media. Key note speaker was Chris Heuer, founder of the Social Media Club. One of the things I took away from the day, except meeting up with a lot of good old and new friends, was a case story from Los Angeles. This case was initially presented at SXSW in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.
The Social Strip
It’s the story about the three Sunset Strip clubs the Viper Room, the Roxy, and the Comedy Store, that joined forces to drive business via social media channels. The clubs decided in 2009 to leverage the power of their collective network. The L.A. Times Music Blog writes:
“It all started when Roxy owner Nic Adler saw the Viper Room enter the world of Twitter. He virtually and publicly welcomed his competitor to the space by announcing their virtual presence to the thousands of “followers” interacting with the Roxy via Twitter. That simple gesture of goodwill opened the floodgates of camaraderie that has helped the Roxy increase its business by 30% over last year, Adler said, and has helped the Viper Room see its regulars return.”
By using social media channels the clubs managed to revitalize the legendary bar street. For example, visitors that checked in to the Roxy on Foursquare were upgraded to VIP status. Another initiative was the Tweet Crawl, a web 2.0 version of the old pub crawl, described in the video below.
Sunset Strip Tweet Crawl on KTLA from nic adler on Vimeo.
This way of collaborating with competitors is labelled “coopetition” and you can read more about the case in this presentation on thesocialstrip.us. See also The Social Strip on Facebook.
