This morning Gareth Jones, Editor of Revolution Magazine, asked if I’d like to bosh out an opinion piece on the five things that digital marketing people need to know about Why Facebook bought Friendfeed – it’s here ‘Revealed: why Facebook acquired FriendFeed’.
The five aspects of the deal I picked out for marketers to be aware of are:
1. ‘Real-time’ is the social media soup du jour
2. FriendFeed is a stepping-stone between Facebook and Twitter
3. Google and Facebook are fighting it out
4. Discovering content needs more than Google Search
5. Conversations happen around content
If you’re not familiar with FriendFeed so much, or want to think about what the deal means for the bigger picture, check out the piece. (This piece is for digital marketers so if you’re some kind of sick gnarly social media black-belt you probably don’t need it – you need other things, like daylight and poetry).
This social web thing. It’s hard to keep up, no? Sheesh :)
Will McInnes wrote this on 11.08.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Industry news, Marketing, Social media, Social networks box
Art to product to art
Somewhere along the line, music went from being an art to being a product.
Instead of making music to provoke others to feel, think or dance, or purely for the musician’s own expression and enjoyment, it became about selling as many records as possible. “Success” was — and still is — measured by how much money the musician brought in for their record label. Worse still, those deemed not profitable enough would be “dropped” from the label and considered a failure.
Slowly, though, the Web is helping music to become art again. While the mainstream music industry once again cries that “Home taping is killing music“, things are changing for musicians in a very positive way.
The Web, and particularly Social Media, are now often touted as routes to attracting label attention. For me, though, the really exciting part is that they are enabling musicians to distribute and promote their own music without any label intervention at all, freeing them from the involvement of traditional record labels and allowing them to decide their own musical paths and measures of success.
How things used to be
The recording and distribution of music used to be an extremely costly business. Recording required expensive equipment far out of the financial reach of an individual, while the resulting master recordings then had to be pressed to thousands of discs (or other media) and shipped to outlets throughout the relevant territory. Marketing in the press, radio and television was also a huge expense.
The vast amount of money needed for this process naturally had to come from somewhere, and that was where the record labels/distributors came in. Naturally, they wanted to make money from their investments, and were quite happy to compromise the rights, earnings and ideals of musicians in order to boost their own profits.
This wasn’t good for artists, nor music lovers. It was effectively up to a small number of very big, profit-led, companies to decide what music the general public could and couldn’t experience.
Then, in the mid-Nineties, affordable “multi-media” computers came along that provided enough power to process multi-channel audio. Soon after, Internet connections were widely adopted in people’s homes, giving musicians everywhere the tools to record, produce and distribute music from their living rooms and bedrooms.
Social Media and the Musician
A decade-or-so later, the Internet has become an integral part of our lives. We have fast, always-on home connections that most businesses could probably only have dreamed of ten years ago. The Web has grown out of trying to be a broadcast medium and now participation and sharing are an integral part of it, in the form of Social Media and Social Networks.
In recent years, Social Networks, particularly MySpace, have been heralded as great launch pads for up-and-coming artists. Due to their very nature, Social Networks enable musicians to quickly acquire new fans through “word-of-mouth”. They are also a brilliant way to keep up the interest of existing fans by supplying regular news updates, gig announcements and new audio.
While a great deal of the success stories that get reported are of artists that have either become or already are part of the mainstream music industry, they can still be used to good effect by musicians that are and wish to remain independent.
On the other side of the coin, many established acts are using the Web to keep distributing music after leaving their labels behind. Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are two high-profile acts that caught a lot of attention by releasing albums themselves on the Web after finishing contracts with major record labels. Not only that, but they adopted even more radical strategies, with a free release and ‘pay-what-you-want’ release respectively.
The tool set for independent musicians is better than ever, and with that comes increased opportunity to stay independent.
Making money, not selling out
So, without a record label to put CDs in shops, how can musicians make money from their music?
The most obvious way to make money without CDs is to sell download versions of your music. You can spend as much or as little as you want recording (or do it yourself) and use an online shopfront like ithinkmusic or your own website with a payment gateway like PayPal to take a small fee for the download, for example.
Downloads also have a stand-out advantage over their hard-copy counterparts, and that is availability. While CDs must be created and distributed in large quantities to be available to a wide number of people, a single uploaded file can be instantly available to anyone that wants it, worldwide.
Of course, there are plenty of people who prefer to have a physical product (me included). If you feel that the demand is there, you always have the option of producing CDs on top of selling downloads. Some artists are having success with self-produced CD-Rs, although print-on-demand services are also beginning to emerge. Just as Lulu produces one-off printed versions of books, TuneCore has partnered with Amazon’s on-demand CD printing and distribution service to produce on-demand versions of artists’ recordings.
It may even be possible to license your music to a label who have better access to production and distribution chains, without surrendering any of your rights.
Gigs and live shows can also be a revenue stream for independent artists. However, this can be difficult for those with a small following as there are inevitable hiring and running costs and you may decide that you are better off playing for established promoters for negligable pay or nothing at all, in order to gain increased exposure.
Merchandising (e.g. band tee-shirts) is also worth mentioning, although, again, you have the initial costs of production and then distribution that will vary depending on the quantities produced.
Changing the tune
The Web and Social Media are putting musicians (and other artists and creators) back in control. Stadium shows and Inter-Continental recording sessions may still be the preserve or the major labels, but if you have humbler ambitions and are already creating what you want to create, you no longer need to rely on the investment of the Men in Suits before anyone will know about it.
You can send your message out to the World, and whether your work is a success or failure, or even if there can be such a thing, is up to you. You never know — you might even make a few quid along the way.
Image is Camberwell Digeridoo by Flickr user scribex.
Barry wrote this on – 6 comments
It's filed in the Social media, Social networks box
I’m a designer. Initially I designed the way interactive products (like CD ROMs, kiosks and later websites) looked. Then I started focusing on how they worked – how they were experienced by the people who used them, and how that reflected on the business or brand providing the product.
Doing this properly required me to really get under the skin of my clients’ businesses – their products, their internal processes, their ethos. As more and more of our clients recognise the need to be more social – in the way they communicate and in the tools they use to do so – it’s become clear that in order to fully respond to the feedback these new communication loops encourage, most businesses need to redesign themselves internally.
This calls into question the general understanding of the remit of social ‘media’. As David Armano wrote in a recent blog post over on HarvardBusiness.org:
“Media” limits our view of the movement, and brings with it the baggage of decades of advertising. Marketers are only too happy to view the social web as a new array of channels to market their goods in some shape or fashion. That’s because it’s a model they’ve used since the beginning.
He (and the majority of the commenters on that post) believes that:
It may be time to approach social business by design. This means moving beyond our current definition of “social media” as a PR tool and thinking of it as something that can evolve the way we work, communicate, interact and collaborate at a core business level.
This is certainly borne out by our experience as we help clients find their way in the social realm. It isn’t simply a matter of starting a Twitter account – for businesses to really engage with their customers they need a sound strategic approach to enable them to embrace the feedback culture that Will outlined recently. This can be a challenging process, one that needs to be recognised and afforded importance from the highest levels of the management team.
In effect organisations need to redesign themselves strategically and functionally to make the most of the new opportunities afforded by the socialisation of customer (and employee) relationships.
Helping our clients successfully make this transition is my new design challenge – and the reason I’m sporting a shiny new job title :)
* thanks to Flickr user brownphoto for the image
Jenni wrote this on 07.08.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Business, NixonMcInnes, Strategy box
We’re looking for a new team member. It’s a vital hire for the NixonMcInnes team.
To find out more and apply, find out more on the Wired Sussex advert.
Key excerpts:
The purpose of the role is to:
- Enable the biggest organisations in the UK to embrace and change with the digital age
- Profitably deliver measurable business value to clients by consistently solving their problems and helping them learn
- Nurture and grow our relationships with a small number of those major brand clients
‘A day in the life of this role’
Note: the particular ‘clients’ here are fictitious, but the scenarios themselves are lifted straight from real-life.
Amongst other things, let’s pretend you look after two major client relationships.
The first relationship is for a very large organisation that touches the lives of millions of the general public every week. The topic matter is interesting and important. The client has a reasonable budget allocated to social media through our agency. What you need to do is work out how to employ that budget to get significant impact and real measurable results against clear goals.
To do that you sit at an inter-agency meeting amongst a community of smart, established marketers of different flavours: media agency people, search marketers, PR people, advertising people. You need your own expertise and listening skills to gather the relevant information from this forum and as well as the communication skills and knowledge to create the context for a successful working relationship between NixonMcInnes and the client and their agencies. To do that you probably need to be smart, likeable, credible, normal, authentic, streetwise, creative and nice. For that meeting to be successful you need to be prepared, to make a valuable contribution and to come back to base and brief and influence colleagues such that they hit the ground running. You need to operate at the speed of a busy agency – somewhere between fast and very fast.
The other relationship is a client just starting out their journey with ‘social media’. They are an international car company. The key client and a few others see the light but there is a normal amount of scepticism internally. They need to change – people write stuff that matters about the brand, useful stuff, really relevant stuff, but no-one at the client’s end is really paying attention. Right now, when it comes to online buzz they don’t understand what to do or how to do it. They are unsure about how to measure ROI and where to start.
Your challenge is to help with this – all of it – to take them on that journey, to gently nurture, cajole and encourage the brand to develop better relationships with the people and communities online.
To do that, you need to:
- Figure out what the internal culture and politics are
- Decide how and where to start
- Plan the strategy and suggest how to execute it
- Understand how to sell it and how the client wants to buy it
- Collectively work out how to resource it and report on it
- Make it happen and then change tack and evolve as it becomes clearer what works and what doesn’t
To begin with they only want to buy in bits and pieces. You have to deliver and also sell-in the bigger relationship that enables us both to get the real results they seek. It’s a big job, this!
You may also need to train people at the client, to analyse performance information to spot trends and insights, to conjure up creative ideas that engage with the target audience and deliver the desired results for the client and the client’s bosses boss. It is fun, rewarding and hard work.
Skills Range: We are open-minded to the benefits that someone from a PR, online marketing, agency planning, market research, or other related discipline can bring.
Salary: 27,000 – 40,000 +
The NixonMcInnes way
We have a refreshing and unique company culture based on a number of guiding principles:
- Freedom: To work the hours that suit you; wear what you want; change and improve things.
- Transparency: Open book accounting so everyone knows what everyone else earns and how much profit is made; open communication and distaste for secrets.
- Participation: Flat company hierarchy; voting on key company decisions; regular guest seat at company board meetings.
- Personal development: Culture of personal development; constant informal feedback, coaching and mentoring; a training budget; books and subscriptions; conferences; a chance to shape your career within a successful, growing company with a wide range of personal and professional growth opportunities.
- Rewards: excellent salary; performance and company profit-related bonuses. 24 days holiday per year plus bank holidays. We like a nice team lunch on the company regularly too.
- Fun: Life’s too short to focus only on money. The team are clear that the company exists to do important, enjoyable work with interesting clients. We are however hugely ambitious in this.
To find out more and apply, find out more on the Wired Sussex advert.
Will McInnes wrote this on – what do you think?
It's filed in the Brighton, NixonMcInnes, Recruitment box
UK banks really have not got to grips with usability and good visual design. There have been one or two nice looking banking shopfronts online but when it comes to functionality and interfaces, it’s all very late 80s. Gordon Gecko could walk back on to Wall Street and the branding would be sadly famliar.
I want banks to add value — to help me manage my finances more effectively. It’s also in their interests for me to be flush. I want data and graphs and representations of spending patterns.
Jenni and myself often have philosophical chats about brand, the social web and how to enable ours lives more so here is a free idea for all you banks — tagging.
Imagine if you could tag all your bank transactions. All my food for the week is tagged with, erm, food — imaginative I know. At the end of the month I can get a breakdown on how much I spend at the supermarché. Other online bank account holders who have also tagged their transactions with food get added to the mix to show me what I’m spending compared to Elvis Presley and such like. Banking needn’t be boring.
Enable me to build a profile about my life: the size of my family unit, how many rooms wehave, who supplies my electricity. Capture data for my benefit (not yours–though it really is win-win). Allow bank customers to see what they are spending compared to others in their town, in their industry, their demographoic, their world. Show us how you can save us money and make us money without harming ourselves or each other. Now that’s responsible banking.
Joshua wrote this on 06.08.09 – 8 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
Last year, the super-smart, potty-mouthed Marta Kagan published what became probably the most popular presentation on social media. Along with pretty much everyone else in our industry, we duly posted it here on our blog.
A year later, Marta has updated the presentation with a whole load of new facts and figures, making the indisputable case for why businesses cannot ignore social media any longer.
If you still have any doubts in your mind about why social media is important (surely not!) or you need to convince the doubters in your organisation, then this is for you.
Click here to view the presentation. (excuse me for not embedding it – something went wibbly with the WordPress template.)
Tom wrote this on 04.08.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Social media box
