Doing Words

iTunes Festival could be a triumph… of email marketing

// July 1st, 2011 // 0 Comments // Content, Marketing, Music

In my email inbox this morning was an invitation from Apple to watch a live music festival in London starting tonight, my time. The festival has been running since 2007 but it’s been gradually morphing from focusing on attending the live event towards leveraging Apple’s extraordinary distribution pipeline to deliver to a worldwide audience. This year I think they’ve cracked it.

Via a dedicated free live event app you’ll be able to watch the three nights of performances from 62 artists, live or on-demand, free. And we’re not talking B-list bands here either, there’s Paul Simon, Moby, Duran Duran and Coldplay (yes, I’m that old).

As in previous years, tickets will also be available to attend the festival if you’re in the UK, and they’ll be available only to contest winners.

Could this be bigger — and more profitable — than Glastonbury?

From today you can buy the latest album from each artist performing from iTunes Store or from the app and I’m guessing that’s part of the reason why artist management agree to the concept.

The other reason, and the reason why the festival is most interesting, is the email marketing opportunity. Here’s why:

How many people do you know these days who own an iPod, an iPad or an iPhone? Lots, right? It’s not a static number either, it’s still growing fast.

If they’ve ever used iTunes Store to buy music, TV, movies or apps, Apple has their email address, and unless they’ve opted out, their permission to send them weekly emails about content for sale in iTunes Store.

No big deal, right? Every online retailer and content publisher has an email database. But this is an email database unlike any other, since it now represents arguably the biggest and fastest-growing entertainment content marketing database the entertainment industry has ever seen. There’s an iPod Touch, iPad or iPhone in the bag of nearly every person on the train with you, in the pocket of nearly everyone jogging in the morning. There might be as many Android phones out there as iPhones, or Kindles as iPads, but add up iPhones, iPods and iPads? Big number.

The music industry created the commercial radio industry to market new content to consumers, but never knew who those consumers were, what they listened to, and where they were at. Then, MTV added a little granularity for marketers, was able to provide some logbook data on audience size, viewing habits and geo location.

Today, businesses as diverse as Amazon, CDBaby, MySpace and Facebook have a database of content customers they can market to via email, but with nothing like the detailed purchase and consumption data Apple has access to. And not only does Apple have the biggest database of entertainment content consumers, they also own the whole stack, from bringing major labels and artists together for an event, to reaching an enormous global market of music consumers via email, to actually selling and delivering and tracking the consumption of the end content.

Analysts studying Apple’s market performance look at profit per device shipped, app sales volume, and PC and handset market share. Does anybody know what the open rates are on emails from iTunes Store? What their click-thru rates are? Perhaps Apple’s biggest untapped and unvalued asset is the ability to reach more of the world’s music fans than any other media publisher?

iTunes: what a truly global retailer looks like (yes, even in Kazakhstan)

iTunes Festival is a big endeavour, and while Apple is the king of hardware, it doesn’t yet have enough entertainment content culture in its DNA, so along the way there have been mistakes made, goals reached for but unmet, and lessons learned.

But Apple is also the king of execution — it learns perhaps better than any other major brand. This year you can watch the whole event from your iDevice of choice instead of on YouTube, and for the first time, you can watch in HD on a TV equipped with an AppleTV using AirPlay.

The world’s number one retailer of music is on the cusp of becoming the next MTV and the next Glastonbury, all rolled into one. Like, wow.

Social media won’t achieve every goal: an example…

// May 29th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Green, Media relations, Social Media

Yolanda is a smart person (MBA candidate and chemical engineer — I’m impressed) and since I got to do the social media work for TEDxSydney on the weekend, I now consider myself a real social media expert (yes, I’m that vain and deluded). So I’m offering free social media advice (hey, at least I’m not charging for it, I’m not that deluded… though I’d like to be…)

Here’s Yolanda’s question:

Feeling like a gen x, needing some social media lessons…

I have been following LinkedIn for 6 months, just got a facebook page two weeks ago (yes, hard to believe…when did I become a luddite…). Phase 1 – my neighbours and I produced a short film entry to the Origin Sustainability Drive competition, so proved that we could take an idea into reality (check it out on link). Phase 2 – We need at least 2000 votes for the $10K people’s choice award, but sitting at just 65. We have formed an alliance with the community not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation (we would donate half if we win). We have interviewed for an article that will appear in The AGE next week. But how do we use social media? It is much harder than I imagined!! (I am studying an MBA, so super keen to develop these new world skills!) Will appreciate your help and advice.

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Social media guidelines: procedures

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

Post 2 in a series about my work as social media director for TEDxSydney.com, this one about how to do the actual work. Hope it helps you craft your own social media procedures.

Has someone already tweeted this?

We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.

Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account

It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:

@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)

Use your initials on Twitter

It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.

However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.

Use an URL shortener with tracking

Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.

Social media guidelines: overview from TEDxSydney

// May 26th, 2011 // 0 Comments // My work, Social Media, TEDxSydney

This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.

TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.

Why are we using social media?

• Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
• Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
• Feedback channel, customer satisfaction barometer;
• News and information distribution; and
• Brand reinforcement

When representing our organisation online, be:

• Informative
• Engaging
• Exciting
• Courteous
• Witty
• Humble
• Accurate
• Timely

Remember

• We have our brand (and those of our partners, sponsors, customers and suppliers) to protect
• Nothing is ever truly deleted from the web

You’re not selling software, you’re selling emotional engagement

// April 12th, 2011 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Branding, Startup

Those of us who are parents will know the pulling power of a good bait-and-switch campaign whenever we drive past McDonalds with the kids in the car.

Those blasted McHappy Meals usually go half-eaten so it’s not the few moments of fat, salt and sugar that makes them irresistable, it’s the movie tie-in, limited-time collectible nature of the bloody near-worthless-will-break-before-your-car-leaves-the-carpark toy included with the meal.

Believe it or not, what works for selling fast food also works for selling enterprise software products.

Mike Cannon-Brookes is a fellow mentor/investor in Startmate.com.au and also the co-founder of one of the most successful Australian software companies of this generation.

When Mike recently spoke at a Sydstart event in Sydney, he said he realised some time ago that Atlassian’s most effective marketing strategy was not to sell software, but to sell very witty, cool t-shirts that developers will kill to get their hands on. “We sell great t-shirts that you have to buy a software licence to get,” he said.

Most of the Sydstart audience thought he was joking, and he was funny, sure, but he was serious. By selling t-shirts individuals want and bundling them with software corporations need, Mike has been practicing the ‘good’ kind of bait-and-switch — the kind that creates a desire so powerful for one thing, you end up buying another just to get it.

Why bait-and-switch? Well, there’s nothing funny or exclusive about selling software that helps developers track bugs and publish internal wikis. So getting customers passionate about Atlassian and its products would be tough, if the company restricted itself to just marketing software.

But after trialling all sorts of give-aways and branded items, Mike and his team hit upon the ideal marketing medium for Atlassian: short runs of exclusive, clever and usually very funny t-shirts.

It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of clever t-shirts in developer culture, but if you are a developer, you likely have a problem expressing yourself in conversation, and a great t-shirt message makes a great warning signal, much like the yellow and black stripes on a poison dart frog, except, well, less cold and slimy. Usually.

A great developer t-shirt will include a message, graphic, or both that will leave passers-by in no doubt that they haven’t watched enough cult sci-fi movies, played enough cult XBOX games, listened to enough undiscovered bands, or compiled enough great code to really understand the person wearing this t-shirt. One of my favourites of all-time just had the message, “Of course you realise I could replace you with a shell script?”

You see, a shell script is… Oh, never mind.

T-shirts are also great because they make the fashion decision for you — wear a business shirt to work and you need to decide between stripes or plain, tie or no tie, etc. A t-shirt is a t-shirt and a developer can pull one out, tug it on and be one pair of jeans and one pair of shoes away from being ready for work. That’s how stereotypical developers roll.

Atlassian’s newest promotion, playing off the popularity of the iOS/Android game Angry Birds is wonderful marketing. See how it plays off a current meme, borrows from exactly the kind of landing page design that nearly every web business other than Atlassian uses these days, and most important of all, stacks on the developer in-jokes that only they will truly understand (or will believe that’s the case).

The key to good bait-and-switch marketing (and all subculture marketing) is to make your audience feel like you are peers in the same subculture, and this promotion achieves that beautifully. There’s even what I think is a clever stab at Mike and his fellow co-founder Scott under “The Founder” (at least, I think it is, after all I’m not truly a member of the Atlassian customer subculture). You can’t be peers with Mike and Scott unless they are brought down a couple of pegs.

Finally, this may look like a promotion for what might be the lowest-selling iPad game of the year, but it isn’t. It isn’t even an ad for Atlassian software (see their products, or any of their features, or benefits, mentioned anywhere on the page? No.)

Instead, it’s an opportunity to buy a witty/cool t-shirt or plush toy. A  t-shirt or plush toy that, had you not read this, you would not be cool enough to understand. Which would make developers wearing the t-shirt very happy, and more likely to feel that Atlassian was a brand that understands them.

If I were Mike, I’d make sure I had very limited stock of this merchandise, and I’d make it clear that if you’ve missed out, there will be no reprints. You’ll just have to pay closer attention to Atlassian, act faster next time, spend less time considering the purchase decision rationally and get used to making emotional decisions about Atlassian products.

Because Mike’s clever enough to know he’s not selling software, he’s selling emotional engagement, in XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL.

From Zurb: Lessons from marketing Verify

// December 8th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Conversion, Marketing

I got to know Dmitry Dragilev, the frenetically productive marketing guy at Zurb after giving the company some feedback about an early version of their conversion testing tool for online marketers, Verify.

Dmitry’s gone to extraordinarily lengths to detail every lesson learned from setting up to launch, launch and post-launch marketing activity in this very detailed post: Lessons from marketing Verify. If you’re a startup marketer and you have 30mins at lunch today to read it, this is well worth your time.

How do you do a great product video?

// November 17th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Branding, Communication, Conversion, Social Media, Video

Lately, all my roads seem to lead not to Rome but to video; online streaming video, for education, business, advertising and starting-up web startups. The Universe is trying to tell me something. I’m spending a lot of time considering what makes a great product video — the sort of video that launches a new product on the homepage of a web business.

Such videos are hard to get right: they need to rapidly attract and hold your attention like a television commercial but that conflicts with their need to be informative, to address features as well as benefits. They need to give you a sense for the structure of the story they tell from the beginning, so you can decide whether you’ll watch the whole thing, without being so structured that the story navigation interrupts the story telling.

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How do ideas spread via social media?

// October 28th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Marketing, Social Media

Seth Godin lists 20 reasons why people might want to spread your message. very few of them involve anything that traditional advertising offers its audience:

See Seth’s 20 other reasons why ideas spread here.

Top 100 most influential Australian political voices on Twitter

// October 19th, 2010 // 0 Comments // As featured in..., Communication, Me, Social Media

Yesterday, Australian blogging consultant Alister Cameron published a list of the “Top 100 Most Influential Australians Talking Politics On Twitter“. Actually, it was two lists: one of people who’d been calculated to be influential during the recent Australian Federal elections (using the Twitter hashtag #ausvotes at the end of their tweets) and another of the most influential people taking part in the weekly Twitter audience for the ABC TV show, QandA (using the hashtag #qanda).

I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate

The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).

The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.

More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.

Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.

For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.

Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours

Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.

But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.

In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.

Apple: awesome hardware but terrible at eCRM

// September 10th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Customer relationships, Music

I sell the odd bit of music on iTunes through my hobby record label Littoral Records and I’m frequently amazed at how poorly Apple manages its online relationships with music labels.

The team at iTunes Connect frequently send out emails announcing new features or changes, and the email includes not a single link that might give you one-click access to that feature, not one trackable URL that give the Connect team some idea of who’s responding to their email relationship management.

Wow.

An email update from iTunes Connect. And no link to click on.