Archive for the 'New Marketing' Category



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An Evaluation of Web Strategy in the Musical Instrument Business

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 19, 2009
in New Marketing and Social Web
. 0 Comments

Crossposted at the Heavybag Media blog.

With NAMM taking place over the weekend and several of our clients in the musical instrument business, I thought it would be appropriate to evaluate the participation level in social media and web strategies of musical instrument companies. (Disclosure: a few of these companies are Heavybag Media clients, noted below.)

As part of this evaluation, we have set up a site bringing in RSS feeds from as many musical instrument related companies we could find at TheyAreTheMusicMakers.com (a reference to an Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem) using Sweetcron.

Many corporate websites are becoming irrelevant, serving as static brochures. Visitors are expecting more than just information and positive spin. Social media, blogs, syndicated news, widgets, and videos are just some of the ways these companies are participating, along with a new approach to sharing and conversing with customers. Using the network effect of social networking sites allows content to be more discoverable than being on an island (aka, your website). More searches are happening on YouTube than on Yahoo (Google being first place). For this reason, along with zero bandwidth costs to you, there is no reason to not have your brand’s content on YouTube.

The Musical Instrument industry (including makers of brass and woodwinds, guitars, basses, drums and percussion, keyboards, synths, pianos, recording and effects, live sound reinforcement, DJ, karaoke, and all related accessories and educational products and services) is using a variety tools and tactics to execute their web strategy for marketing and customer contact. They can be classified into 12 areas:

Newsletter/mailing lists with a public news archive

You can tell these companies have been using the web to engaged with their customers for years, because at one point newsletters were the easiest way to reach out to customers, back when sending and managing e-mail was easier than posting a blog. I would still recommend both newsletters/mailing lists and blogs to make content available in as many formats as possible. Feedburner allows publishers to be notified of new posts by e-mail.

Bias: news, press releases, newsletter
SKB Cases: news and mailing list
AKG: mailing list, news
Sony: mailing list, press releases

Newsletter/mailing lists with no public newsletter archive

You need to sign up for the mailing list just to see if any news is happening. This strategy means that there are fewer pages for search engines to spider, and then other sites have a better chance of receiving search traffic about a companies’ product, like Harmony-Central forum.

D’Addario
Ovation Guitars (Disclosure: Heavybag client)
Korg
Dean Guitars
Dipinto guitars
Gretsch Drums
Toca Percussion
LP Percussion
Steinberg Software
Roger Linn Design

Hosting Forums

These are a great way to get search engine queries from users that helps them find answers to product questions saving companies repeated support inquires over time. They do take some time to manage, but they are a great way to show customers that you are listening and willing to help. Several of these brands below are with the Harmon Group.

Fishman: news, forum
Jackson Guitars: news, forum
Lexicon: news, forum
Digitech: forum, news
dbx: news, forum
TC Electronic: forum (more below)

Using a blogging platform or good content, but no feed

This is coming from a good place, but for blogs to live in the blogosphere properly, they need to have feeds and comments. Wordpress is free, runs on any commodity LAMP server. There is no reason to re-invent the wheel here. Although, there is one blog in my survey that seems to be using Blogger.com but has disabled the feed. This is no way to get people to go to your site. Allowing people to subscribe to your feed makes your content stickier. (Update: I spoke to Rick at PreSonus and he is now aware of the problem).

PreSonus: blog, YouTube
Access

Blogs on Blogger, MySpace, or Wordpress

These guys are seeing the light. In some cases, maybe it is a rouge employee in the marketing department who is living the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” rule. It is really easy and free for anyone to go on to these sites, start a presence, and link back to the main site.

Epiphone blog, Twitter
BC Rich: blog
Jomox: MySpace (no posts yet), news and newsletter
Seymore Duncan: MySpace blog

RSS syndicated press releases

These companies understand the benefits of syndication. Both musicians and publishers looking for news updates and stories can subscribe to news feeds directly from the sources by subscribing to RSS feeds. This has less management headroom in comparison to having a mailing list. But some are just putting out the same type of content they have always put out: product launches, personnel changes, partnerships, and promotions. And these sites are not using a full blown blog platform so there are no comments or trackbacks.

MoTU
Akia (with bonus Digg button)
Crown Audio
ElectroVoice
Monster Cable

RSS syndicated news and newsletters/mailing list

From an infrastructure perspective, these guys have everything covered. Some are also using social media. But some are not using blogging platforms, so there are no comments or trackbacks.

Behringer has a blog posts by Uli Behringer himself and three other Behringer personnel so far. It looks like they just started the blog in December 2008. They are also on Twitter.

M-Audio: news, newsletter
Moog Music: MySpace blog, YouTube, news (no feed or newsletter)
Digidesign
Alesis
Native Instruments: news, newsletter

Blog on the company’s site, used as a channel to push promotions

These sites have a full blog platform such as Wordpress, allowing comments and RSS feeds, but still the content is not helping or teaching potential customers. In some cases the companies are well-known companies in their categories. Maybe they think they can only push awareness of promotions, which may result in a spike in sales, but does little to help build a long-term relationship with their user base. Some posts are about events and profiles on organizations that use the companies’ products. Most do not have comments or have them disabled.

Mackie
Fender
Taylor Guitars (featuring ShareThis.com links on every post)
Ernie Ball

All of the Conn-Selmer brands have at least an RSS feeds on their news pages. Some have Facebook fan pages:

Blog on the company’s site (or on Blogger/Wordpress.com), with content that helps or teaches

If a company is doing this, in my opinion, they have seen the light. They are using their brand’s influence to help their user base, teach them why they should pay more for finer features, and help them kick ass with their products after the sale. These blogs are also not afraid to put a face on the companies’ personnel. Some blogs have an actual byline from an person in the company.

Kessler:blog, written by the owner’s son
Gibson Guitars: MySpace, news, Twitter, YouTube
Dixon Drums: blog, YouTube (disclosure: Heavybag client)
Propellerheads Software: artist profiles, YouTube

Roland has 8 different content channels, all with feeds, and most with a newsletter option, each one for a specific market need. These include:

They certainly offer the widest range and best frequency of content if you count ever channel. Roland has a long history of content production with their RUG (Roland User Group) print magazines. They are also one of the only companies profiled here to have a support channel as content available in a feed. This makes sense since they are a technology company. These notifications are are mostly software updates. They specifically cater to the church musician niche with their Worship Connection content channel, offering advice on live sound that fits in well with their organ products. They have a link to Worship Northwest 2009, a conference sponsored by many audio companies.

The Best are using two or more: blog, forum, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook

These companies have embraced the tools of social media. I don’t like the content style of all of them (some are too press release-ish), but they are going to where their users are. They do not need to reinvent concepts, and are fine using open source software or free web 2.0 services. Their blog content is decent as well.

ElectroHarmonix: YouTube, MySpace blog
Ludwig: MySpace, MySpace blog, Facebook, news, Twitter
Yamaha: The Hub: podcasts, blogs, and videos
Kaces: blog (disclosure: this is our client)
Rock n’ Roller Cart: blog (disclosure: this is our client)
Line6: news, Twitter
Reunion Blues gig bags: blog, wiki (a directory for touring musicians), Twitter, MySpace (disclosure: this is our client)
Sabian: news (no feed), forum, Twitter
Taye Drums: blog, community, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook

D’Addario bands have MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and forums for most of it’s brands. They are listed on their ToTheStage.com community site along with a directory of sites that teach you how to play better:

TC Electronic has news across multiple categories available in one RSS feed, a forum, videos on YouTube, a Netvibes Widget, and a newsletter: news (on the home page), YouTube, Netvibes news widget, newsletter, forum, news page for the TC Helicon brand, and a Flickr stream. These guys really get it, and I think they are the best example of a company that is really participating in the social web, allowing their brand to be found across many platforms. I especially like how their news is part of their homepage. They understand that the context of their web presence is immediacy.

Newspage and newsletter/mailing list, no feeds

BSS Audio: newsletter and news
DM Pro: newsletter, news
Focusrite: newsletter, news
Mapex: newsletter, news
Marshall Amps: newsletter, news
Novation: newsletter
Peavy: newsletter, news
Soundcraft: newsletter
Sabian: newsletter and news
Zildjian: newsletter and news

Non-syndicated news page with press releases and/or collection of press mentions, no feed or newsletter, no forum

When companies can speak directly to musicians from their sites, why do they need to write a press release? It’s as if the only other place the musicians will read about new products is magazines and other niche sites. These news pages are written for them. There could also be content for end users.

Allen and Heath
Audix USA
Buffet-Crampon
Dave Smith Instuments
DW Drums
Fostex USA
Gibraltar Drums Hardware
Hosa Cables
JBL Pro
Johnson Guitars
KRK Systems
Kurzweil Music Systems
Middle Atlantic
Novation
Nord Keyboards
Numark
OC Drum and Percussion
Ovation Guitars (disclosure: this is a past client)
Pearl Drums
Paiste
Premier Percussion
ProCo Sound
Samson Audio
Shure
SennheiserUSA
Sony Professional
Tama Drums
Tascam
Ultimate Support

Some of the tools we use

For Heavybag Media clients, we use Twitter for “ambient awareness,” Wordpress as a blogging platform, PHPList for mailing lists, YouTube for free video hosting and syndication, MySpace for demographic outreach, Google Analytics and Feedburner to track visors and subscribers.

Our Favorite Picks

We are happy to see Conn-Selmer syndicate all of it’s news. TC Electronic has done a fair job using social media and RSS syndication, and YouTube. Yamaha has not only great videos that help to educate customers on their products, but podcasts also. Roland has the richest and longest running content channels.

Comments and Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions on companies we forgot to include, corrections, or would like help with your web strategy, leave us a comment.

(photos by synthesizers, psycht, Squiggle, and TCElectronic on Flickr)



939 views

Using Social Media to Market Music

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on June 9, 2008
in Consumer Electronics, DRM Rant, Disruptive Business Models in Content, I heard it on a podcast, Innovation, My Projects, New Marketing, Photoblogging, Product Support and Customer Service, Social Web and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

My colleague at Heavybag Media, Jackie Peters has a post about the great opportunities record labels have in using social media as a marketing strategy. The challenges they are facing: they must switch from selling music in physical packages to selling musical experiences, allow fans to interact with the music in meaningful ways, and allow music to be an experience to share with friends. The convergence of downladable, infinitely available music along with the ability to learn about new music via word of mouth/social media in the form of music blogs, podcasts, recommendation (both algorithms and friend) is the perfect fit.

But for now, the transition is rough for music industry veterans. Almost every week for the past two years the music industry manages to make one puzzling move after another, while independent artists are free to make decisions who’s only stockholders are themselves along with their artistic and commercial aspirations. Increasingly, independent artists commercial strategy is not in selling CDs, but in the more scarce goods such as early access to new releases, performances, and limited edition vinyl or DVDs, reliable discovery and immediate access to files on iTune or Amazon MP3 . They now they need to sell their fans something they cannot get for free.

People love to talk about the music they love. Allowing them to share it easily and legally, and talk about it online, and put it in new contexts is the new path to commercial success.



314 views

Free e-books

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 11, 2008
in DRM Rant, Disruptive Business Models in Content and New Marketing
. 0 Comments

Mike at Techdirt points to some half-hearted efforts at free e-books. The books will only be available for a limited time, and they cannot be printed. It is all posturing by the book publishers who still believe that completely free pdfs will cannibalize physical book sales when authors like Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have proved otherwise.

The new definition of “free” is DRM-free as well as free-as-in-beer. The restrictions on printing and the books’ availability for a limited time are just other forms of DRM.

It is true that it is cheaper to buy books than it is to print them. Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine is a free to download/print/read book I was looking into printing at Kinkos, but it is going to cost $43 when the book will probably cost $25 in stores and $20 from Amazon when it comes out (thanks to someone who linked to it in the comments on Techdirt.com from a post a couple of months ago).

Also newly available to to freely download/print/read is The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson.

And finally, Neil Gaiman is deciding which of his books he should release as a free download.

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An Intro to Web Strategy for Creatives Seeking New Success

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on November 2, 2007
in Disruptive Business Models in Content, Innovation, New Marketing and Social Web
. 1 Comment

I am having dinner tonight with an old friend whom I have not spoken to at length or hung out with for a couple years. He is in the creative field (an illustrator). He does not follow social media and new media as much as I am and I wanted to tell him about all of the opportunities that are available, so I made this list. This is also especially relevant to any striking Hollywood writers that might now turn to the web to make a living. This is relevant to filmmakers, musicians, writers, designers, visual artists, and analyst, and consultants.
So, here is my advice (all from observation, none learned first hand) for all creatives who are new to the Internet an need to know the key points success with the web:

1. Give away what is free to make infinite copies as a way to get noticed. License some of it Under Creative Commons, and encourage your fans to remix these works. Example: Cory Doctorow’s books, Ze Frank’s online community.

2. Sell/license most of your works that are free to make infinite copies of, and when multiple parties can pay you multiple times for it. Examples: the preachings and teachings of Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

3. Sell (don’t give away) the resources that are scare at a premium, regardless of the time they take to create (short amount or long amount of time).

4. Use social networking sites, blogs, podcasting, Twitter, blogsearch, and IM to stay in contact with fans. Use some of the ideas they suggest to you (the good ones, of course). Take the time to thank them individually and/or publicly. Meet with them in person if you can. Never poo-poo a fan’s idea publicly. If you don’t make time for these things, you limit your visibility to the market and it will be much harder for you to succeed. Examples: Ask A Ninja, Ze Frank.

5. Partner with a contemporary or friend using the these sames strategies and talk about each other in the social media space every once in a while. Example: the Chris Brogan/JeffPulver mojo combo.

6. Never get into any exclusive licensing deals for the brand you create, (unless it is no longer fun AND you can retire and live off the payout for rest of your life and/or you are ready to start your new venture). Never get into any exclusive licensing deals for ALL works you create.

7. When starting out, never order 100’s of physical goods to resell. Use a service that makes one-off’s on demand. example: use lulu.com

8. When you need to get work done that you cannot do and you cannot hire anyone or have no enthusiastic fans to do the work, partner with others at the same level but with different skills and cross promote each other. Example: almost all open source projects.

9. Take smart risks in areas where competitors will not. Break the rules. Break some laws. Be remarkable or don’t bother (hat tip to SethGodin). Example: Jet Blue, YouTube, Perez Hilton

10. Try not to compete with others, try to work with them, differentiate, harmonize. Example: Nintendo Wii

11. When you are dead sure you know how to appeal to a niche in a big way, never fall under the pressure to compromise by trying to appeal to a broader audience. That spells mediocrity. Example: BoingBoing.net, Anti-example: G4TV.

12. If your dayjob is in the creative field or is interesting to a lot of people at any level, suggest to your company that you blog about the work of your company, publicly disclosing the name of the company. If and when you leave, you will take the personal brand you have built with you, and now you have more value in the market. Use your position to lead innovation in your area. Examples (most are now freelance consultants or entrepreneurs): Micki Krimmel (formerly of Revver), Tara Hunt (formerly of Riya), Chris Messina (formerly of Flock), Jeremiah Owyang (formerly of Podtech.net and Hitachi Data Systems, coined the term “Web Strategy/Strategist” as far as I am concerned), Robert Scoble (formerly of Microsoft), Niall Kennedy (formerly of Technorati and Microsoft), Tantek Çelik (formerly of Technorati, Microsoft, and Apple).

13. Be ready and willing to embrace an opportunity, market, strategy, audience, or demographic that you had not planned on or did not expect unless you are certain it will make you miserable. This means you don’t have to plan to far ahead because there is no way you will know what is going to happen. Examples: Slide.com, RockYou.com, iLike.com who all jumped on the chance to make the first Facebook F8 apps and found success. Anti-example: Friendster who deleted fake profiles people were really having fun with (circa 2003) which drove users to MySpace.

14. Unless he or she is a social media superstar, never follow a lawyers advice against any of these guidelines. If this happens, the lawyer is thinking too much about his or her short term financial gain and not about your long term successes. Anti-example: RIAA, MPAA.

(digg please)

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1,683 views

The FaceBook App Strategy

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on July 31, 2007
in Innovation, New Marketing, Social Web and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

On July 28th Kareem Mayan hosted and organized LA’s first FaceBook Developers Garage at Mahlo’s HQ in Santa Monica, Ca., courtesy of JC. About 50 developers, hackers, strategist, marketers, and entrepreneurs attended. The event is part of FaceBook’s app developer meetup strategy. They plan to organize meeting in several other cities such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, London, Chicago and San Diego. It was a BarCamp style event where people could give presentation, and sponsors provided free soda, snacks, beer keg, and pizza.

FaceBook’s own developer evangelist Meagan Marks came down from Palo Alto to open the day’s event by giving a general presentation on the F8 platform. She gave an overview of the platform by talking about the growth rate of the most popular and fastest growing applications such as TopFriends, Happy Hour, SuperWall, and iLike. Megan’s presentation was great, and many wanted to have access to the ppt, but she said she could not release some of the data. In discussing this later with some of the attendees, this seemed like a strange answer since some of this data (such as most popular, fastest installation rate, etc) is tracked and available in the Appsaholic app (created by SocialMedia.com, more on them later) . But I am sure there was a good reason. She will probably make it available eventually.

A FaceBook app is accessed through the FaceBook site but must be hosted on a developer’s own server. Calls are made from the F8 platform to the app through an API. A developer can make their app in whatever web framework he or she is familiar with such as Java, .Net, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, etc. If your app gets really popular, you will need to have access to more servers in a very short amount of time.

FaceBook App as a User Acquisition Strategy
New startups are emerging to do nothing but create FaceBook apps for clients. Existing web design firms and ad agencies will also have custom apps as their new offerings. But, what may be getting the most attention in the larger web 2.0 space is number of existing web properties that are getting into the FaceBook app space to help leverage their sites’ core offerings. One example was an app by Renkoo.com (a web 2.0 style Evite.com) called BoozeMail. It allows you to “send a drink” (a picture of one of many drinks along with a message) to a friend. Interestingly, the Booze Mail is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 platform. The idea is to get users to use Renokoo to organize a real-life get-together with your friends to go drinking, and then ideally for other social gatherings. Another example is my acquaintance Otis’s social network around books, Goodreads.com. It exists as a separate site entirely, but has its own FaceBook app which simply shares data between both versions of the app. You can either add the app as a non-existing GoodReads.com user (in which case it creates you as such), or you can tie in your existing GoodReads.com account into the FaceBook version of the app.

Another strategy is paid cross promotion of apps. If you have a successful app, you can charge other app developers to feature a link for their app on the popular app’s “canvas page” (landing page for a FaceBook app). Two app developers could also partner up and promote each other’s app with no money changing hands.

Three key FaceBook App Ingredients
The main idea here is to make an app that is viral, engaging, and useful.
-Viral in that you, as a developer, try to entice your user’s friends to add the app. Some apps are invite only as part of the nature of the app. Other allows users to invite their friends. The strategy is to use copy such as “see if your friend’s movie taste is compatible,” or “share your (whatever) with your friend” and NOT something like “install the (name of app) app” which does not entice or tell about any benefits.

-Engaging in that the apps are fun to use because they help create meaningful interactions with real friends. With web based games of the past, for example, you were not always playing with your friends (with the exception of the games built into AIM or YIM). Now, with the open F8 platform, you could play games with friends asynchronously where you could not in a chat client based game, and anyone with the programming chops can make the games/apps.

-Useful in that it adds some sort of social functionality to your life. These types of apps are ones that users are going to have installed long term. The Zombie game might be fun at first and interesting as a proof-of-concept viral app, but something like a social calendar or movie recommendation based on friends’ taste is a little more useful.

FaceBook apps feature a way to link Google Analytics account so developers can track the app’s traffic. FaceBook will be building in the ability to find out what links are being used to acquire new users to your app.

FaceBook may charge developers sometime in the future, especially if and app is using a lot of FaceBook’s own resources. But the FaceBook team would rather contact the developer and help the developer try to figure out how to better optimize the developer’s code before they would charge or disable the app altogether.

Deep Meta Access
Remember when MySpace reached its tipping point, many users were afraid that MySapce would take advantage of everything MySpace knew about a user and then do something like send highly targeted ads to that user’s profile? Well, they never did it. But, this capability is now in the hands of any FaceBook app developer who has users. The users data that is available for use in apps is similar to the data you can see on a friend’s profile. All of this basic info is necessary to allow app to do interesting things.

Paid Surveys
Did you know that you can create targeted polls by gender, age, location, and/or interest, and get the results for $0.25 each? This is great for any type of marketing research, including: “What app should I make and what features should it have?”

Design Strategy
It seems like the type of design strategy that the 37Signals blog likes to talks about is going to be studied and valued with even more rigor (similar to the way SEO right now), especially with the proliferation of FaceBook apps. Should the app send a notification or an e-mail? What to include and not include in the mini-feed? What is annoying and what is useful info? These are all questions you need to ask yourself when developing an app. Most developers might figure it out as they go along. Some developers clone their app and tweak some things such as the app name, the copy (description of the app on the canvas page), or the order of the pages they present to the user during or after the install to figure out which one has quicker user uptake. Create the right “click bait” to increase user uptake.

The Dark Side of App Design Strategy
The power of the social network app strategy also has a dark side. Tap into people’s egos. An app’s copy in the mini feed can read “Joe knows more than you about X. Do you think you know more? Take this quiz.” The link to the quiz installs the app. Apps can rank friends against each other in the silliest and stupidest of contests, and the drive to try and beat one’s friends emerges. An app can display a badge of rank on a user’s profile or points acquired.

Emerging Ad Networks
The FaceBook app platform is creating an entire cottage industry of FaceBook app ad networks. Userplane.com is one such ad network. They are a Flash based chat and presence platform which has an API that is free to tap into. Some independent developers have used Userplane’s platform to create a FaceBook app called Chizzat. Chizzat serves ads from Userplane’s inventory or any other ad network’s inventory. However, if a developer just wanted to use Userplane’s chat API, Userplane’s does not require that developer to send a cut of revenue acquired by any other means to Userplane! But, they make it really easy for a developer’s application such as Chizzat to become a Userplane ad publisher. AOL acquired Userplane last year. They have such a large ad inventory that they do not even require you (as a publisher) to use the chat platform to have them as an ad customer. Userplane is a little different than the other ad platform since they can charge for the time the user spends on the screen rather on a CPM basis. There are Flash-based game apps in FaceBooks such Texas Hold’em where the user will stay on one screen for hours at a time. They can also cycle through banner ads. SocialMedia.com is another ad network. They created the Appsaholic app as a way to track app stats so they can better target, price, and understand the ads they serve on apps. Another FaceBook ad network is Lookery.com (which is the new project of Eric Scott from MyBlogLog). Lastly, FaceBook has its own ad platform called FBexchange. The amazing thing is that FaceBook does not require a cut of the ad profit you might make as a 3rd party ad network or publisher(not at this time, anyway)!

The FaceBook Application Platform makes the idea of the entire internet and web apps new again. This time, just add the power of identity and the social network to any and all ideas that have been tried (that succeeded or failed) in the past. The meetup was very informative and fun. We all made some great contacts and had some great conversations about the FaceBook platform. And of course, friended each other on FaceBook to keep these conversations flowing. Thanks to Kareem, Megan, Jason, Amit, and the anonymous sponsors. The FaceBook platform is a big deal. There are so many opportunities out there, it’s not even funny.

Update:
Pete Mauro’s ppt from his presentation on marketing FaceBook apps and other related resources.

Update:
Two similar posts with some great tips.
Jeramiah Owyang: What the web strategits should know about Facebook

Dave McClure: Seven Steps to graphing your Facebook strategy


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217 views

LA Times kills article suggesting that newspapers and record labels innovate

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on July 25, 2007
in Disruptive Business Models in Content, Innovation and New Marketing
. 0 Comments

TechDirt points to the killed article that was leaked and will be reposted all over the net by the end of the day. The author of the killed article, Patrick Goldstein, was inspired by Prince’s strategy in giving away his new CD for free with a newspaper in the UK. Apparently they did not want to LA’s entrenched yet dying business model of selling plastic discs. You would think that the closing of Tower Records was a big enough sign that things need to change. Maybe when Amoeba goes under? I would hate to see that happen. This further prove that big media cannot always be trusted and independent media such as LA Observed has value in that it does not have to answer to special interests.

Giving music away doesn’t mean it has lost its value, just that its value is no longer moored to the price of a CD. Like it or not, the CD is dying, as is the culture of newsprint. People want their music — and their news — in new ways. It’s time we embraced change instead of always worrying if some brash new idea — like giving away music — would tarnish our sober minded image. When businesses are faced with radical change, they are usually forced to ask — is it a threat or an opportunity? Guess which choice is the right answer.

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How I discovered most of the books I have read for the past year and a half

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on May 31, 2007
in Books, I heard it on a podcast and New Marketing
. 1 Comment

I started reading blogs and listening to podcasts around February 2005. I started blogging myself around August 2005. I started buying books like crazy about a year and a couple months after that, starting in 2006. (However, my first Audible.com purchase was in 2004 with It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow that I just happened to see on Audible’s site). I will attempt to list most of the post and podcast episodes that turned me on to all of the books I purchased and read/listened to (hard copy, Audible.com, and sometimes both) in the last year and a half. When I look at the business, marketing, and economics section at a book store I see two different types of books: those that I know from mentions in blogs and podcasts (and a couple becuase of best sellers hype), and those that I have not heard of becuase they have not been recommended by these trusted sources.

The first book in what as become a long series of books about the changing media and business strategy landscape was that I took an interest in was Naked Conversations around the time hit the shelves in January 2006. I found out about it because by I been following Steve Ruble at MicroPersuasions which I discovered from TechCunch, which I found from a Google search around the first couple weeks that it (TechCunch) launched. I had gotten to know who Robert Scoble was around March 2005. I had heard so much about this book from blogs building up to its release date, and I was curious to read about what they had to say. I think is was after this time that I found Shel Israel’s blog. If had committed to subscribing to a feed and reading posts everyday, it was easy to make the transition to buying blog author’s book or a book recommended by a trusted blogger.

Sometimes I tend to notice books in pairs. The World Is Flat and Freakonomics are one pair that comes to mind. Not only were they mentioned on a lot of blogs, but they were also best sellers. I can’t say it was any one particular post or blogger that got me interested in these two, but the buzz was enough. I bought TWIF Expanded Edition on CD. I bought the Freakonomics from Audible.com an received the hard copy as a gift.

The same with The Tipping Point and Blink. These I paired because they are by the same author, Malcolm Gladwell who I took an interest in after hearing a couple of his talks on ITConversations: Human Nature from Pop!Tech 2004 and his SXSW 2005 Keynote. He did one of these talks he did for free. As a result of this talk, he went on to become one of the most in-demand speakers for tradeshows, conferences, and corporate presentations in the pas couple years, not to mention selling books to those who want to hear more about his ideas on how ideas spread(The Tipping Point) and how people make decisions (Blink).

Naked Conversations mentioned many times that The Cluetrain Manifesto was its catalyst, so I had to check that one out, not to mention Tara Hunt’s repeated references to it. This lead me to discover Doc Searls (one of the authors of Cluetrain) and his blogs.

When I discovered that Steve Rubel was doing a podcast back around November 2005 called Across the Sound, I just had to check it out. That is when I discovered Joseph Jaffe and his book Life After the 30-Second Spot. Rubel did the podcast for about 5 or 10 episodes with Jaffe and then he decided to spend time with other projects.

From Jaffe, I was turned on to Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists, and then to John Moore author of (check out the TribalKnowledg blog and the 47 Tribal Truths). John Moore’s blog is where I first read about Mavericks at Work from this post and I picked up the hard copy and Audible.com versions soon after.

Eric Mattson of the Marketing Monger Podcast turned me on to Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah is one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of marketing and social media, so when Jeremiah suggested The Starfish and the Spider, I just had to check it out. Jeremiah pointed to Ben Casnocha’s blog where he has reviewed many business books. Jeremiah also pointed to Jennifer Jones’s interview with Seth Godin on his book Small is the New Big a couple months after I read it. One of the many podcast and blog mentions of this book was the Joseph Jaffe’s interview with Seth. This book is a collection of blog posts and columns Seth wrote for magazines on the changing face of advertising, marketing, and strategy.

Blue Ocean Strategy is another book that I cannot say there was one place I saw it that lead me to believe it would be a good read. I have the hard copy as well as an Audible.com download.

Besides all of the blog hype that had been building up for a year around Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, one moment where I definitely could not wait to get the book was after hearing his talk on IT Conversations titled The Economics of the Long Tail. The Long Tail and The Wisdom of Crowds are another set of books that I pair together in my mind, maybe because I read (listened) to them around the same time. What really got me turned on to The Wisdom of Crowds was James Surowiecki’s talk at SXSW 2006. I do not have the hard copies of either of these, just the Audible.com downloads.

When I first blogged about books I found through blogs and podcasts, Todd at 800CEORead blog linked to it. That was the first time I had heard of the 800CEORead blog. When I went to read other posts at this great blog, I noticed a post about a book that talked about the different strategies of XM and Sirius. It was Get Back in the Box by Douglas Rushkoff. I found this title intriguing since recent conventional wisdom was to think “outside of the box.” When Rushkoff popped up again in and episode of Boing Boing’s Get Illuminated podcast, I knew there must be something to him and his book so I bought it and could not stop reading it. I think this is definitely my favorite out of all of my recent reads. It is about how some companies have wandered so far outside of their core competencies that they are no longer doing what they did best. This had some of the most diverse ideas out of all of my recent reads. Another book mention on the BoingBoing’s Get Immuminated podcast is Stven E. Landsburg More Sex is Safer Sex:The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. I am also interested in David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert because of these two BoingBoing posts.

IT Conversations has been the source of many book purchases and whishlist additions (as mentioned above). Moira Gunn’s show TechNation (featured on IT Conversation) if a great place for me to hear book recommendations as interviews with the authors, most of which are right up my alley. Her interviewed Gerd Leonhard, author of The Future of Music prompted me to find that I was able to download the first 5 chapters as a podcast at the books blog. This prompted me to add it to my Amazon wishlist and it was ten purchased for me as a gift. I downloaded Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath from Audible.com minutes after hearing Moira interview Chip. In her interview with Peter Navarro on The Coming China Wars (ITC interview part 1 and ITC interview part 2). I added it to my Audible.com wishlist. Next was an interview Robert Sutton on his book The No Asshole Rule along with a review on Guy Kawasaki’s blog along with an interactive self test. I purchased this book at Audible.com. Next, Moira interviewed Nassim Taleb on his book The Black Swan which sounds fascinating, so I added to my Amazon wishlist. On Open Source Conversations (an IT Conversations Channel) I was turned on to Scott Rosneberg’s talk on his book Dreaming in Code about how designing and programming the perfect software application can a nightmare. Phil Windley interviewed Howard Moskowitz about his book Selling Blue Elephants on how to manipulate the senses with the right product design. I added it to my Amazon wishlist. Another talk heard on ITC was by Richard Florida at Pop!Tech 2004, author of Rise of The Creative Class. I added it to my wishlist and it was purchased for me as a gift. My last audiobook purchases was The End of Faith by Sam Harris because of his talk at Pop!Tech 2005 on It Conversations.

Brian Oberkirch’s podcast is another cool source for book recommendations. First was an interview with Michael Ryanor about this book The Strategy Paradox. Guy Kawasaki interviewed him as well. On the SXSW 2007 podcast I was awestruck by Tim Ferriss talk on his outlook on life regarding how to beat the 9-5 system and get your life back, The Four Hour Work Week. He was then interviews on Brian’s podcast a couple days later. I downloaded the Audible.com version that same day and then bought the hardcopy book a couple of days later. Going back to Guy Kawasaki, he recommended Elegant Solution by Matthew May which I am reading currently.

The ChangeThis Manifesto is the site to find out about books that dissect the massive changes going on in culture, media, and business strategy. They have short, free PDFs, some of which are by authors of newly released books that either sum-up the book or focus on one key point of the book. Almost every author that writes a ChangeThis Manifesto is one who’s books’ subject is right up my alley. One of the most popular is Rajesh Shetty’s 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself where he suggests Let’s Get Real or Lets Not Play by Mahan Khalsa, a great book on negotiating sales. I have both the Audible.com and hard copy versions.

Thanks to this episode of The Negotiation Tip of the Week podcast, I was turned-on to Beyond Reason by Daniel Shapiro and Roger Fisher, featuring an interview with Shapiro.

After writing a post about Seth Godin, a representative from Allworth Press left a blog comment about a book on a similar topic, Brandjam by Marc Gobé. I managed to get them to send me a copy. I have not yet read it, but the ideas are pretty solid. It features a lot of examples of stuff people are talking about in the marketing blogosphere, and documents some great examples of things like user generated content and “design is the new marketing/advertising,” but he was not on my radar otherwise becuase he was not leveraging social media in the way the rest of these authors are. The book does have plenty of Technorati mentions but there is no blog at his company site dga.com. Maybe he does not need the blog mentions as much as the others?

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Nine Inch Nails using viral marketing for its new album, Year Zero

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on March 7, 2007
in Disruptive Business Models in Content and New Marketing
. 2 Comments

NINNine Inch Nails’s new album, “Year Zero“ has a really interesting marketing campaign/alternate reality game, partly in response the last album’s poor marketing. It is great to see Trent Reznor’s creativity (with the help of 42 Entertainment) being put into marketing and engaging his fans. I am a longtime NIN fan, as well as a fan of viral marketing, community marketing, and new marketing, so it is with great pleasure that I deconstruct and present the tactics being used to engage NIN fans.

Reznor’s lyrics are usually about self loathing, god, sex, and death. Apparently Trent’s new frustration is with the Bush Administration’s policies (on the war, privacy, free speech, and personal liberties), something that many NIN fans who are disenfranchised with the mainstream can relate to. Politics is definitely a new area for him. He has created an alternate reality dystopian future 15 years out. The first clue was found by visiting a URL which was assembled by combining letters of a different color on a 2007 NIN tour shirt, leading to iamtryingtobelieve.com. This site lead to clues about various other websites that have been set up to represent various players in this alternate world such as a military group enforcing Christianity, a totalitarian church, a version of the NSA wiretapping organization, resistance artist (as in using are to show defiance), conspiracy theorist, and a drug company. Phone numbers have been scattered within songs (via spectral imaging), and through these websites. When you call one of the phone numbers, you can hear recorded messages of the various characters in the alternate world. New clues are uncovered almost every week.

In a bold move again traditional record company rhetoric, the NIN marketing strategist left USB drives in the bathrooms of 3 NIN concerts in Europe, each containing a song from the forthcoming album, as well as cryptic jpg images. All of the clues and are being assembled together on various NIN fan websites, especially NINWiki.com. The mp3s are freely distributed on p2p and on these sites, and you can listen to them on NIN’s MySpace page.

All I can say is: wow! This is fun and smart in so many ways. It is a way to deliver an experience to NIN fans outside of the usual CD sales, merchandising, and concerts. I think similar things have been tried with movies and other products, but these did not have a preexisting fan base that would be ready and willing to be engaged in the game. Other ways NIN has stood out in the past has been by code-naming each official release with a “halo number,” virally releasing banned music videos which spread via VHS copying, going outside of Ticketmaster to sell concert tickets because of outrageous service charges scalpers, and allowing fans to remix the single “The Hands That Feeds” by providing all of the separated tracks in ProTool and GarageBand. The album comes out April 17, 2007.

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After Taking over Boston, Mooninites Invade Ebay

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on February 2, 2007
in New Marketing
. 1 Comment

ignignoktLast night, I only saw a couple ATHF Ignignokt and Err LED signs going for about $300. Now there are dozens, going for up to $2000. The more budget minded can commemorate Boston’s PD’s city officials’ ignorance with Lite-Brites.

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Brian Oberkirch’s conversation with Jeremiah Owyang

Published
by
Nick Dynice
on January 3, 2007
in I heard it on a podcast, New Marketing and Social Web
. 0 Comments

Check out this conversation with my two favorite guys in the social media space, Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang. They bring up all of the great points about using social media in a corporate setting. Jeremiah is going to be interviewed by Jennifer Jones on Podtech.net and you can submit your questions to him here.
Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang


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