Social media stands out at Tattoo Show

Singapore - 15,000 people showed up at the inaugural Singapore Tattoo Show, a figure three times more than expected, thanks to some clever marketing on social media platform phenom Facebook.

The three-day convention, held on 9 January at Singapore Expo, was organized by Kirby Lian who appointed Pacific West Communications to handle the marketing communications for the show.

"Being the first time, funds were limited," Andrew Peters, regional director Asia Pacific, for Pacific West Communications, said.

Pacific West was engaged by organizers to market the Singapore Tattoo Show over three months ago, with initial PR efforts using the traditional press release proving to be less viral. Peters then decided to ramp up the social media aspect of the strategy - aggressively tapping on Facebook and his blog.

"With Facebook, I initially seeded it with 100 of my friends which I thought would be open to the idea of tattoos and then decided to look around the internet and set up Google Alerts for anything related to tattoos or anything related to Chris Garver [a celebrity tattoo artist who was invited to the convention]," Peters said.

In October, Peters created the Facebook Group called Tattoo Artistry as a promotional tool for the event and within two weeks it went from 100 people to 1000. It now has become an online regional tattoo community with nearly 4,000 members.

"I think if any event company not looking at least to engage social media as a way to generate activity for an event before it actually happens, are crazy," he said.

Peters chose Facebook over other popular social networking sites such as Friendster and MySpace because of his familiarity with the site.

"I know it. I also tried to put a group in LinkedIn because there are a lot of professionals that have tattoos but it didn't work. There was no traction whatsoever," he said.

Importantly, Peters also decided to bank on his own blog rather than start a new blog dedicated to the Singapore Tattoo Show from scratch.

"You've got a long way to go for it to be recognized on Google so now with my blog being quite recognized it's easy for the content to be found."

David Meerman Scott, the bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, told Marketing that: "As the tremendous success of the Tattoo Artistry Facebook group driving attendees to the Singapore Tattoo Show illustrates, social media is an important component in an overall marketing strategy."

"But marketers can't put all of their efforts solely into social media. It is still important to have an offline marketing plan and to work with mainstream media to help tell your story to an interested audience," he said.

The organizers of the Singapore Tattoo Show currently have a contract with the Singapore Tourism Board for two more shows which Pacific West has been retained for.

"If I had named the Facebook Group the first Singapore Tattoo Show, there would be no traction into taking it to the second show...so by me making it a generic one allows me to carry that group [for the next two shows]," Peters said.

Peters would not disclose figures for both his budget for this year's Tattoo Show and how much celebrity artist Chris Garver, a major pull for the event, was paid.