Ticketmaster + Facebook: Sit with your friends

Social integration in Live Nation events lets you broadcast your seat location and sit with friends

Now this is just awesome. When we talk about social networking making life more awesome, we’re not just talking about funny tweets from Sarah Silverman. We’re talking about stuff like this.

Ticketmaster announced this week that it has integrated with Facebook to make the ticket purchasing and event planning experience more social.

The first part of this is that, after buying a ticket, you can now not only share those plans on Facebook but you can also tag yourself into your seats. If one of your friends then decides to buy tickets to the same event, that friend can choose to sit in the same section as you.

Already, over 9,000 interactive seat maps are available on Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the parent company of the former.

"Ticketmaster is taking an important step toward making every stage of the live event experience as social online as it is in real life," said David Fisch, director of business development at Facebook. "Ticketmaster's interactive seat map shows the promise of using social technologies to improve the event experience."

The new feature has a twofold purpose. For the consumer, it’s intended to make attending live events more fun, since you’re more likely to be with your friends. For Ticketmaster, of course, it’s about selling more tickets.

Depending on whose data you look at, between 35 and 50 percent of tickets for live events go unsold every year, leaving a mountain of cash on the table for ticket vendors and the industries putting on live events. These new social features will have achieved their goal if friends are enticed into going to events because their friends are going and if more people go to more events.

Social is changing the live event industry in many ways, so I wouldn’t expect this to be the last time we see Ticketmaster integrating with Facebook in a very physical way.