Looking for a Web site feature that would appeal to younger readers hungry for news about Honolulu nightlife, we launched Metromix nearly two months ago and it has been a smash success.

Metromix was launched by Tribune Co. 10 years ago as an entertainment guide for Chicago and was expanded to other cities where Tribune owns media properties. In October, it formed a joint venture with Gannett Co., owner of The Advertiser, and Metromix is now in 25 U.S. cities.

"The Metromix strategy was to build and maintain a database of venue listings and use that as a foundation for a site that is both stylish and reliable, peppered with photos and features of local people, events and food," said Andreas Arvman, The Advertiser's Information Center digital director.

Arvman and his team — Metromix managing producer Diane Seo and associate producer Tracy Chan — began with the help of freelancers and clerks loading a database with 1,000 current O'ahu venue listings and accompanying photos.

But our young and hip readers cannot live on listings alone so Seo lined up local celebrities willing to share some fun personal information. We launched our profiles with "American Idol" finalist Jasmine Trias and this week, it's 'ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro letting us know his favorite restaurants, songs and performance spots.

We didn't set out to do heavy promotion of Metromix, letting readers find it on www.honoluluadvertiser.com and it did fairly well at first, capturing 15,000 page views daily. At the beginning of September, we found a mixture of content we all liked that combined features with photo galleries of local nightlife and even more listings of food, restaurants and movies.

"What we've been trying to do is show how fun it is to eat, live and go out in Honolulu through photos and features," Seo said, "and readers definitely seem to like this kind of content."

When we decided we wanted to start marketing Metromix Honolulu, we called in our secret weapon, AC Shilton, the Metromix marketing manager who spends three or four nights a week out on the town as part of her job. Shilton knows she is trying to reach an audience of 21- to 34-year-olds that values knowing about the newest indie rock bands, the most obscure foreign films and the latest underground hip hop. Trying to reach this audience through television or radio is too mainstream, she said.

"Our goal instead was to help people find the site on their own via highly specific search engine marketing and using social networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg," Shilton said. "We strategically placed the brand into nightlife blogs and forums so that users found out about the site and became users on their own, and so that the site would spread by word of mouth."

At the same time, Shilton pulled off some amazingly inexpensive but cool parties to get the word out about the site. Her Metromix preview party drew 300 and featured body-painted models, professional wrestlers and free giveaways. The photo gallery alone from that party drove 90,000 hits — it's now at 142,000 page views and counting — and gave Metromix a solid footing as the place to go to find out what's going on after hours.

Even better, we topped 1 million page views for Metromix Honolulu in September, or about 40,000 page views daily.

We're off to a flying start, thanks to Arvman, Seo, Chan, Shilton, freelancers and those who write and contribute to our TGIF and Island Life sections.

Head on over to http://honolulu.metromix.com/ and find out what's going on when most of us are asleep.

Mark Platte is senior vice president/editor of The Advertiser. Reach him at 525-8080.