(Lolla lineup page:  http://2009.lollapalooza.com)

The big benefit to our fans is that for the first time ever, people looking at our lineup can see which of their personal friends are interested in each band.  This helps spur a lot of conversation among friends, and helps to extend the excitement of the festival planning process - which for a lot of people is a big part of the fun.  When you’ve got 100+ bands you can see in just 3 days, you’ve got to figure out how to pare that list down to 20-30 max - and a huge factor in that decision is which shows you can share w/friends, and which new music you get turned onto by friends.

(ACL Fest Mos Def bio page:  http://2009.aclfestival.com/band/mos-def)

The big benefit to us is that people are sharing more stuff about our Fest with their friends, which is good for our business.  We can measure both the outbound sharing events and the inbound traffic that they drive - and the results are great.  For example, since the integration of FB Connect and all our new social sharing features:

• Page Views are up 99%
• Pages Per Visit are up 34%
• Average Time Spent on the sites is up 20%.

These measures were all pretty steady vs. last year right up until we introduced the social features, even though both of our festival lineups had largely leaked before the official lineup announcement - which strengthens the evidence that the improvements are influenced by our new features (and not just the lineups alone).  Additionally, more than 70% of the traffic we’re getting back from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is driven by links from our sharing features and from our messaging to our communities on these platforms.

Thanks much to our friends at DoStuff Media, who built the platform for the FB Connect-enabled parts of our sites.