The legacy approach to escape room group photos today…
To those that work at an Escape Room, the attraction seems obvious. There are challenges that are generally undertaken by a group of 3-10 people. In many cases, they are co-workers or know each other socially. They usually have a time limit to solve their challenge. At the end of that time, they are brought together as a group to celebrate or commiserate their success or failure. Yet millions upon millions of people still do not understand the attraction. Within Escape Room blogs and group conversations there’s a debate if “Escape” is the proper term for such diverse themes that include “Meth Lab”, “Music Producer”, “Kid-napped”, “Space Mining”. The basic version has no theme at all. It is a puzzle to solve without the distraction and ambiance of a theme. In any case, there is often a misrepresentation to the inexperienced consumer. So how does an Escape room squash these narrow misconceptions that are in reality full of excitement, enthusiasm and team spirit.
Solution: One of the staff workers from the Escape Room venue grabs a camera and takes a group photo.
In most cases, people are asked to stand in front of a wall that has the name of the venue. This serves as the “branding” for the photo. Sometimes props are provided, and in many cases the branding is not room-specific.
The way most Escape Rooms proceed after taking the photo is, in some cases, to manually overlay branding on the photo then uploading the photo to their Facebook Page or a photo service like Flickr so that their customers can collect it later in the day. After that, the participants can share their photos with friends and social media. However modern this may seem, it is a labor-intensive process and offers little confirmation of any social activity or residual marketing.
There are many issues with this approach:
- Sharing the experience “in the moment” is very powerful; however, customers are expected to engage with the photos over the following hours or days, in addition to their normal daily distractions. The enthusiasm and excitement level is much lower, searching for the photo is tedious and therefor sharing is less likely to occur.
- The photos themselves are relatively simple. They are not posted in a technological way such that there are links back to the website of the Escape Room, and there is no way to track the social engagement of the posted photo (likes, comments, re-shares) outside the reach of the business Fan Page. By all means it’s an antiquated methodology.
- There is no two-way engagement between existing customer and the escape room by them downloading the image off a website. A huge missed opportunity sits on the table for your client to share your brand and endorse your venue with the entire viral loop embedded (which serves as an endorsement for escape room).
Using Social Flash MOBILE is radically different.
Social Flash MOBILE is an iPad-based application available on the Apple APP store (SocialFlash MOBILE). The cloud-based Social Flash Media Marketing Platform is designed to promote “experiential” industries over social media. It provides a platform from which dozens of themes, borders and promotions are created and used to customize every room with survive or fail content paths. This radically different engagement is instantaneous. You take the photos and instantly send them to their smart phone or email and by the time they leave your venue, your customers are sharing their experience along with your promotions, links, and branded material with their friends on social media. The process becomes consistent, efficient, and powerful. Dozens of iPads can be centralized for Escape Rooms that have multiple locations. This hyper-modern campaign management system includes features catering specifically to solve the Escape Room industry challenges.
There are 5 primary components to the Social Flash MOBILE process described below.
1. Take as many photos as possible – the more the better!
Capture your group photos with custom overlay frames that include your logo and room branding elements. A simple swipe left or right changes the photo overlay and the social content that follows to a “success” or “failure” path. For instance, one frame could be for those that beat the clock, and another for those that did not, simply by swiping to the right and changing the overlay and shared content.
As an optional but popular step in the process, the room master can be prompted to enter an escape time for successful teams, which is then embedded into the sharing and social content that follows. Gue
sts are amazed to see their time recorded in the default Facebook message when they share their photos. “We broke the island’s curse in 52:39! We had a great time in the #CursedShip Room at #LockoutAustin”. This customized content adds a level of personalization to the experience for the customers, and validates the gamification of the escape industry for their peers.
Social Flash MOBILE’s intuitive app makes it easy to see the finished product in real-time. Because it’s so easy, this encourages Escape Room operators to take several group photos with different props, angles or team members. The most dreaded job of taking and editing photos now becomes the best part of the job!
2. Send photos directly to your Customers immediately
Select Photos and Send to Smartphone or Email.
The second step is to send the desired photos to the customers.
Guest(s) have the option to send their photos to themselves, friends and family by text or email. The emails and phone numbers can be entered directly on the iPad or, with our professional package, they can be sent after the photos have been taken from another iPad, tablet or computer using Social Flash PHOTOS, our browser based sharing app.
Once you hit SEND, your employees’ work is done and the magic can begin! The photos are instantly sent from the Social Flash Media Marketing Platform and a link is sent to each customer to instantly view their photos.
3. A Brand Engagement comes alive.
Your brand and messaging come alive along with their photos.
Guests receive the message within moments of their share, leading them to your customized branded landing page containing their photos. They can save the photos, click banners that contain links back to your website, and most importantly, share them to Facebook or Twitter immediately with your hashtags and suggested comments attached! “We had a great time surviving the MethLab, and escaped in 50:22!”
You can control the entire campaign for your customers. For instance, you can have them preview a 10-second video ad before they see their photos or ask them if they want to post a review of your venue on the likes of Yelp! or Trip Advisor. Or maybe you want them to opt-in to your Escape Newsletter? It’s your campaign and you have complete control with our platform.
But wait! There’s more!
If they just completed Game Room A, you can begin to promote Game Room B for their next visit and perhaps an incentive to book another visit.
4. Let the sharing begin! Create Brand and Social Awareness via Endorsements.
Your Happy Customers are excited to be your Brand Ambassadors!
When your guests share their photos on Twitter or Facebook along with your brand, they are organically endorsing your venue.
- There has never been better advertising than word of mouth and a personal testimony.
- the average person has 338 friends on Facebook. This post will leverage the visibility of this social circle by placing the post into the guest’s wall and cascading it into the news feed of many of their friends.
- Their post serves as a brand or social “endorsement” when they post about your venue. To their friends and family, their opinion about your escape room venue matters a lot.
- The post is what we call “smart” in that it has lots of tracking information and click-thru links associated with it so you can track its influence and drive new prospective customers to your website or Facebook page.
Leveraging the group photo for marketing firepower is simple and easy with Social Flash Media.
5. Monitor your Escape Room Social Engagement Success
We track the viral spread of your messaging and engagement, in real time!
Instead of just taking a photo and hoping for the best, Social Flash Media can track the collective downstream social engagement for all photos: How many times they are shared, re-shared, tweeted, commented on, and liked.
Social Flash Media facilitates URL link posts in your clients’ social feed on behalf of the guest. You can track how many new prospective customers come back to your website and track them further through association with Google Analytics.
Reports are available within your web-based admin account and update in real time. See the effectiveness of your promotions and weekly engagement with your guests and their network. This allows you to know that your efforts and marketing dollars spent are effective and efficient.
Even Facebook has recognized that user generated content is key.
Facebook has reexamined their purpose and has implemented a return to its core roots of bringing people closer together and helping them build relationships. On January 11th, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg announced a dramatic set of changes in the way news will feed into each person’s personal stream to help re-calibrate Facebook back towards its original mission.
Facebook will put a greater weighting or emphasis on individual/personal friends and family postings that can engage interaction between people over posts from publishers or businesses. From Facebook’s communication video, they noted:
“Now, we’ll also consider whether a potential interaction is between two people, or between a person and a Page. Person-to-person will be more valuable than person-to-Page. Connections with people in your network will get the biggest boost because interacting with people you’re close to is more meaningful”
This means that for all those businesses that historically uploaded content on their Facebook Page and saw that distributed to their followers’ news streams, they are likely to see a drop in their reach and engagement. This is intentional on the part of Facebook, as they want to have interaction between people rather than people-and-pages take priority.
For those businesses relying on Social Flash Media’s marketing platform, they will see a rise in their reach and engagement. Social Flash Media, a leading provider of advocate-based marketing technology, is used by many companies to drive brand and social awareness and engagement through user-based posts.
As your customers are making the posts personally, rather than your Escape Room making posts on their business page, the personal posts will be weighted more heavily and considered more important in other people’s news feed.
Why it Works
There are several reasons why Social Flash Media’s MOBILE application combined with its cloud-based marketing platform work so well. No doubt, it all starts with having a great Escape Room experience and having lots of happy customers who are excited and invigorated from their experience at your venue. All the social marketing in the world is not going to save a bad venue offering.
Beyond that, looking at why Social Media Marketing works successfully comes down to three key factors:
CONTENT. The first building block for success is the photography itself. If done right, the escape room operator captures the group at the experience via a photo in the SFM app. This is very important as people like to share their experience with others. So, capturing photos of both the experience AND their accomplishment – the cracking out of a very challenging Escape Room – are key to social sharing. Using Social Flash’s MOBILE on an iPad “brands” the images with the business logo and sends it to them instantly. Moreover, you can snap different photos with different frames/campaigns depending on the experience the customers had. This dynamic capability goes a long way towards ensuring the customer gets a personalized commemorative photo.
VIRALITY. The second building block for success is the simple mathematics of virality in social networks. While a venue may have between 2,000 and 10,000 followers on its Facebook Fan page, that is no match for the leverage that comes from the social networks of its customers. The average person has 338 friends in their personal social network on Facebook. By sharing photos directly to their personal wall, your marketing reach is now extended beyond your followers to the sum of the social circles cascading through their friends. As a result, perhaps thousands of Facebook engagements can occur – Likes, Shares and Comments. For those friends of the customer that did engage, the originally shared post may now appear in their news feeds. This is the second-order impact of virality. Of course, this can go on and on, which illustrates the power of virality on social media.
TRUST. And finally, the third building block for success is trust. Though mentioned last, this is the secret sauce that cannot be downplayed in any way. Research by Stacy Wood from North Carolina State University found that the value of recommendations from ‘everyday people’ has potential impact on the brands. Consumers are bombarded by thousands of messages every day that make authenticity, believability, trust and credibility of these message questionable. Along comes a photo from a person in your personal social network, an “everyday person” who paid to have this experience endorsing it. This person is likely relevant, connected and trusted. He is NOT a paid actor/sponsor putting in the good word for compensation. Trust is key in the short-term as it causes more social interest and engagement, and in the long-term as the social endorsement is far more likely to cause a person to act – in this case book an upcoming Game!
