This week we made it possible to follow your favorite cigar bars and lounges on CigarPlaces.com, and be sure that you never miss another cigar event again! With hundreds of upcoming cigar events being listed on Cigar Places, it’s the best way to make sure that you don’t miss one!
Click the orange Follow button on any page and we’ll email you about each upcoming event that happens at that location. We’ll also list the events on your homepage, as well as new photos and tips that get added by users at the location.
Get Started by browsing the site and clicking Follow at your favorite places. Then pull up your homepage to see all of the upcoming events in one place!
Create Your Account
If you already have a CigarPlaces.com account, you can start clicking Follow to add places to your homepage right away.
If you don’t already have an account, create one! It’s free and it’s the best way to keep in touch with what is going on in the cigar world.
For Managers & Owners
If you’re a manager or owner at a cigar friendly place, this is just another reason to make sure that you’ve claimed your location and join the Manager Platform, and that you add all of your upcoming events to Cigar Places!
Earlier this week there was a discussion on SmokeStack Radio about what makes a great cigar event (and what should be listed as an Event on CigarPlaces.com).
The short answer is that you don’t have to be hosting Rocky Patel himself (or throwing a huge, epic event) in order for you to list it on Cigar Places and get the word out.
Throughout the discussion, Smoke and I talked about how whether we’re on the road for business, or we’re in our home town, if there’s anything going on at our local cigar lounge or cigar shop, we want to know about it! Smoke may have put it best when he said, “If you’re ordering some pizzas and putting them out in the shop and turning on the game on Sunday, I want to know about it!”
If you have any of the following coming up, list them!
- Happy hour deals or drink discounts on certain nights.
- Football on Sundays (list each game!)
- College Football Saturday
- Ladies’ Night
- Hosting a Band or Singer
Right now the Add Cigar Event page has five fields that you need to fill out to add an event; it’s pretty easy. If you can think of a way to change it to make it easier, I’m all for hearing ideas.
Events will likely be hitting the iPhone App soon, so cigar smokers who pull out there iPhone and look for a place to smoke a cigar will be able to see events that are currently going on, and that are upcoming.
Earlier this week we released v2.0 of the Cigar Places iPhone App which empowers cigar smokers to add tips and photos to CigarPlaces.com right from their iPhone. In order to keep cigar store and cigar lounge managers and owners on top of all of this new activity, we’ve also added Alerts to the Manager Platform (if you haven’t claimed your location yet, now is a great time to do it; it’s easy and free).
When you enable alerts in the Manager Platform for each of the locations that you manage, we’ll send you a quick email whenever a cigar smoker adds a tip or a photo at your location.
Why Setup Alerts?
If you look at the content of many of the tips that are left on CigarPlaces.com, you see that many of them contain:
- Questions (hours of operation, where smoking is allowed, whether alcohol or food is served).
- Compliments or complaints about the service.
- Comments or questions about upcoming events.
Each of these comments are extremely well-suited for an official response from a manager, and the best response is a timely one!
Pick whether you want to receive alerts for tips, photos, or both in the Manager Platform, and you’ll receive an email like the one below whenever a tip or photo is added.
Setting Up Alerts
To setup alerts visit the Manager Platform and select Alerts from the right toolbar. Check the alerts that you want to receive. Your alerts will automatically be saved and you’ll start receiving alerts the next time someone adds a tip or a photo.
Add a Photo & Leave a Tip
Finally users of the Cigar Places iPhone App can do more than just look at photos and tips. With the release of v2.0 it’s now possible to be a more active participant in the Cigar Places Community, right from your phone.
Cigar Photos
Snapping a picture and adding it is now just a couple of touches away. Grab your iPhone and take pictures of your favorite cigar lounge, you holding the cigar that you’re currently smoking, or whatever comes to mind. All of these photos are helpful to other cigar smokers who are using the app to find a place to have a cigar, and want to see what a cigar place looks like before they head over.
Tips
The same goes for tips. Things are always changing when it comes to cigar lounges and bars. They hold events, the run special deals, they remodel, they offer great service (and sometimes terrible service).
Seeing tips from other users makes it easy to know what to expect when you’re walking into a cigar shop or cigar lounge, so the next time you sit down at a cigar friendly place to enjoy a smoke, leave a tip for the rest of us!
We Also Improved the Map
If you conduct a search or you’re looking at cigar friendly places nearby, and you need to zoom the map out slightly or drag it to a new location, clicking Redo Search in This Area will display cigar friendly locations in the new area.
We think this took a lot of the clunkiness out of the old way of searching (having to put in a new city every time).
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
And the Way You Search
We introduced a new way to handle ambiguous city names by displaying a selector that allows you to choose (are you searching for London England, or London, Ontario?).
Finally, You Can Manage Your Account Right in the App
If you’re an existing CigarPlaces.com user, you can log right into the app using your email address and password. If you don’t have an account, you can create one and manage it right from the app (it’s only 4 fields).
Stay Tuned for More
This version is barely a week old, but we’re already working on the next version of the app. Let us know what features you want to see, or if you find anything that needs to be fixed/tweaked.
If you haven’t Claimed Your Location and gotten access to the Cigar Places Manager Platform yet, here is a great reason to do so.
You can now add your location’s hours to your page on CigarPlaces.com. We’re always out to find new ways to provide cigar smokers with the most accurate and up-to-date information about cigar friendly places, and with the introduction of the Manager Platform, we now have a way of getting accurate hours of business info.
To add hours to your location, login to the Manager Platform and click “Location Info” in the right menu. You’ll see the Hours: entry right below your location’s description.
Your location’s hours will be displayed right under the categories on your location’s page.
We’re excited to announce the first revision to the Cigar Places iPhone App! This update includes the ability to remove locations from the map, and fixes some small bugs that we found in the search functionality and the Places Nearby feature (read below for news about the next big update!).
Easily Remove Locations From the Map
Earlier this year we re-vamped the way that locations are removed from the map on CigarPlaces.com by allowing unregistered users to easily flag a location a not-cigar-friendly. This update led to a big jump in the number of places that are removed from the map, and increased the overall accuracy of the site.
With version 1.4 of the app, we brought this same functionality to the iPhone!
If you’re browsing the map, and you see a location that you know is not cigar friendly, is out of business, or is listed more than once (a duplicate), just click Remove Location at the bottom of the location’s screen, and let us know why you’re removing it. The location will be removed from the map within 24 hours.
Improved Search and “Places Nearby” Features
Hate bugs? So do we.
In this version we fixed two bugs that were impacting the search features and the function that allows you to find cigar friendly places near you (using the phone’s GPS).
In the past version, a user searching for a city such as London, who would expect to get London, England, would frequently get a smaller city named London that was close to their current location. This felt counter-intuitive, so we fixed it.
Give it a shot. Search for London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, or Miami, and feel confident that you’re not going be taken to a map that shows cigar friendly places in the 3,000 person township of London, Michigan.
If you happen to be spending a weekend in London, Michigan, just search for “London, Michigan”, and you’ll be taken to that section of the map. Anyone know of any cigar friendly places in London, Michigan?
In the Next Update
We’re working hard at developing the next round of features that we think will make a big splash. Most noteworthy, the ability to snap a photo on your iPhone, and easily add it to the app. We’re also adding a Tips feature that will let you write a quick tip or review of a location. Stay tuned for this version coming up soon!