Music subscription service Grooveshark has really started to rally for indie artists of late. First, it launched a channel for emerging artists with Indaba, and now it’s partnering with label services company Rocket Science to help up-and-coming artists get ahead.
The idea is to help unsigned musicians build out their careers to an alternative fashion — outside the confines of the traditional label system. Grooveshark and Rocket Science are kicking off the program with Austin band, Quiet Company, who came to the music subscription service’s attention due to their growing popularity on the platform.
The band is debuting a new single and video this week (see above), and announcing a new album, We Are All Where We Belong, so the time is right for this kind of marketing push. Rocket Science will be helping the band with career intricacies like touring, licensing and promotion, but the band will retain all rights to its music and neither Grooveshark nor Rocket Science will have a monetary stake in the music.
“We had a label for our first record, and this last time that we talked to a label, we realized that we’re never going to fit on any label,” says the band’s lead signer, Taylor Muse. “We just don’t have the lifestyle for it. But this is perfect for us. It gives us the things that the label would give us, without all the needless stuff that comes with a label. I don’t see the need for one.”
“From Rocket Science’s perspective, we feel that every artist should be utilizing a unique strategy to identify their audience and monetize their art,” says Ben Watson, Rocket Science’s marketing coordinator. “We want to prove that these new tools and platforms are enabling artists to create their own path to success without relying on the industry’s usual strategy.”
As of yet, Grooveshark and Rocket Science don’t know when or how the next band will be chosen, but they plan on continuing the project after Quiet Company.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, João Pedro, uai!
More About: grooveshark, MARKETING, music, rocket-science
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Jeff Ente is the director of Who’s Blogging What, a weekly e-newsletter that tracks over 1,100 social media, web marketing and user experience blogs to keep readers informed about key developments in their field and highlight useful but hard to find posts. Mashable readers can subscribe for free here.
Algorithms aren’t going away anytime soon now that websites have a better way to directly describe their content to major search engines. Earlier this month, Google, Bing and Yahoo came together to announce support for Schema.org, a semantic markup protocol with its own vocabulary that could provide websites with valuable search exposure. Nothing will change overnight, but Schema.org is important enough to bring the three search giants together. Websites would be wise to study the basics and come up with a plan to give the engines what they want.
Schema.org attempts to close a loophole in the information transfer from website data to presentation as search results. As they note on their homepage: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data.”
Simply put, Schema.org hopes to create a uniform method of putting the structure back into the HTML where the spiders can read it. The implications go beyond just knowing if a keyword like “bass” refers to a fish, a musical instrument or a brand of shoes. The real value is that websites can provide supporting data that will be valuable to the end user, and they can do so in a way that most search engines can read and pass along.
Schema.org was born out of conflict between competing standards. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the semantic standard accepted by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Facebook Open Graph is based on a variant of RDF which was one reason that RDF seemed poised to emerge as the dominant standard.
Until this month. Schema.org went with a competing standard called microdata which is part of HTML5.
Microdata, true to its name, embeds itself deeply into the HTML. Simplicity was a key attribute used by the search engines to explain their preference for microdata, but simplicity is a relative term. Here is a basic example of how microdata works:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person">
<span itemprop="name">Abraham Lincoln</span> was born on
<span itemprop="birthDate">Feb. 12, 1809</span>.
He became known as <span itemprop="nickname">Honest Abe</span> and later served as <span itemprop="jobTitle">President of the United States</span>.
Tragically, he was assassinated and died on <span itemprop="deathDate">April 15, 1865</span>.
</div>
A machine fluent in Microdata would rely on three main attributes to understand the content:
Meanwhile, a person would only see:
“Abraham Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809. He became known as Honest Abe and later served as President of the United States. Tragically, he was assassinated and died on April 15, 1865.”
Fast forward to the web economy of 2011 and restaurants can use the same technology to specify item properties such as acceptsReservations, menu, openingHours, priceRange, address and telephone.
A user can compare menus from nearby inexpensive Japanese restaurants that accept reservations and are open late. Schema.org’s vocabulary already describes a large number of businesses, from dentists to tattoo parlors to auto parts stores.
Structured data in search results is not new. The significance of Schema.org is that it is now going to be available on a mass scale. In other words, semantic markup in HTML pages is going prime time.
Google has so far led the way with structured data presentation in the form of “rich snippets,” which certain sites have been using to enhance their search listings with things like ratings, reviews and pricing. Google began the program in May 2009 and added support for microdata in March 2010.
A well known example of a customized structured search presentation is Google Recipe View. Do you want to make your own mango ice cream, under 100 calories, in 15 minutes? Recipe View can tell you how.
Google, Bing and Yahoo have reassured everyone that they will continue to support the other standards besides microdata, but Schema.org still feels like an imposed solution. Some semantic specialists are asking why the engines are telling websites to adapt to specific standards when perhaps it should be the other way around.
Another concern is that since Schema.org can be abused, it will be abused. That translates into some added work and expense as content management systems move to adapt.
Schema.org might also tempt search engines to directly answer questions on the results page. This will eliminate the need to actually visit the site that helped to provide the information. Publishing the local weather or currency conversion rate on a travel site won’t drive much traffic because search engines provide those answers directly. Schema.org means that this practice will only expand.
Not everyone is overly concerned about this change. “If websites feel ‘robbed’ of traffic because basic information is provided directly in the search results, one has to ask just how valuable those websites were to begin with,” notes Aaron Bradley who has blogged about Schema.org as the SEO Skeptic.
“The websites with the most to lose are those which capitalize on long-tail search traffic with very precise but very thin content,” Bradley says. “Websites with accessible, well-presented information and — critically — mechanisms that allow conversations between marketers and consumers to take place will continue to fare well in search.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, claudiobaba
More About: bing, business, Google, MARKETING, Schema, schema.org, Search, SEM, SEO, Yahoo
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Jamie Beckland is a Digital and Social Media Strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.
Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.
The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else.
Marketers created that buy-in by bucketing people into generations. When you lump 78 million people into one group called “Baby Boomers,” it’s much easier to sell them stuff, especially when consumers accepted their generational classification.
But now, that entire system has broken down. The year that someone was born will not tell you how likely he is to buy your product.
Fragmentation is now the norm because the pace of change is accelerating. Generations have been getting smaller because there are fewer unifying characteristics of young people today than ever before:
With the recent rise of the social web, people self-select into groups so small, so fragmented, and so temporal, that no overarching top-down approach could be successful at driving marketing performance.
Marketers have responded by adding more demographic information to the mix, but even that is a losing battle. I worked with one client who was introducing a technology product, and had identified a target market of “connected consumers.” Connected consumers were 34-55, had a household income over $120k, and read technology publications regularly. This target market represented 14 million consumers.
They were targeting 14 million consumers to sell 50,000 units — that means they were hoping for 3.5 sales for every 1,000 people with whom they connected through their marketing.
What if, instead, you could get 500 sales from every 1,000 people you marketed to?
It’s possible through psychographic profiling. Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle. Amazon.com has long been a leader in this space, through innovations like “recommended products” and “users like me also bought.” Its algorithms have learned to predict its users, and what they are interested in. And now, there are a number of tools that any business can use to leverage psychographics.
Here’s how a psychographic profile might look different from a traditional marketing profile target for a childcare provider:
Psychographics provide much more useful information about users. There are multiple data sources making this possible today. Social profile data, behavioral data and customer lifecycle data can now finally be leveraged to contact people who are ready to buy.
Profile data from social networks consist of all the fields users grant permission for brands to use on their behalf. Most things that users track on social networks can be leveraged to create a closer relationship with a customer. Fields like relationship status, alma mater, interests and occupation can all be managed through social profile data management tools.
Social profile data is the critical cornerstone of psychographic insights. The level of nuance and insight provided by social data, when compared to standard demographics, is the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel or a butter knife. Previously unimaginable questions are now routine:
In addition, companies such as GraphEffect are measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates. This type of qualitative analysis can move users into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with your brand.
Retargeting advertising messages is gaining popularity among marketers, but its very success has jeopardized its effectiveness. Ads that follow users around the web have been implemented — usually poorly. Every ad network quickly incorporated the ability to place cookies in users’ browsers, and display specific ads to them any time they visit a site that’s part of their networks.
The next generation of ad targeting will focus more on telling the customer a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers. That means ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a customer moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event.
Site content and product recommendations will also be informed by clickstream analysis. Companies such as RichRelevance, Certona, Baynote and Monetate all offer the ability to personalize information to specific visitors based on their behavior. Leveraging those alongside a payload of social profile data can turbocharge those services from the first moment a new user visits a site.
Social profile data can also be used to predict customer lifecycle. Imagine knowing not only if a customer has children, but the exact ages of those children. In addition, key indicator purchases, like buying diapers for the first time, indicate a customer entering a new lifecycle. Other key indicators, like shipping address changes, first purchases of furniture, or first purchases of substantially higher-value goods can all indicate the start of a new customer mentality and behavior pattern.
These patterns are predictable, so you know the future behavior of high school seniors by looking at the current behavior of college freshmen. By using demographics alone, all high school graduates would be marketed to identically. Using psychographics, we know who is likely to be interested in specific product or content recommendations at a specific time — such as when they actually start their first day of college.
This vision is starting to gain traction among serious marketers. At the 2009 Internet Strategy Forum, Xerox’s VP of Interactive Marketing, Duane Schulz, said that a 1% clickthrough rate was a huge failure — even though it is 10 times the industry average. In his mind, a successful campaign would never waste 99% of its impressions. Using psychographic data, you don’t have to waste any impressions.
We have seen a similar upheaval in marketing before. In the 1960s, marketers who embraced the power of television, broad-based insights into psychology and demographic data created world-class brands and billions of dollars in value. At that time, if you didn’t advertise on TV, you lost. Today’s new tools offer a similar choice: Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, porcorex
More About: advertising, business, data, demographics, MARKETING, social media
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The web-based email, chat and message boards that came online in the ’90s were poised to revolutionize interpersonal communication. Then companies tried to monetize the Internet.
“The dot com boom failed because people didn’t want to buy shit online. They were just talking to each other,” said Douglas Rushkoff in a recent keynote speech at the WebVisions conference in Portland. “Content was never king. Contact was always king.”
Today, the dorm room experiments of the digital generation have become billion dollar corporations. We’ve finally figured out how to monetize social interaction, and Rushkoff, an award-winning author and media theorist who writes and speaks regularly on these topics, has reservations.
He holds no grudge against technology itself, but rather our widespread programming illiteracy — that is, our fundamental ignorance of how these web platforms operate, share our information, and profit from our online relationships. Whereas the social web was once a Wild West of BBS chatter, so many of us now experience it through discreet corporate channels like Google and Facebook — platforms that may not always have our best interests (or the interests of healthy online discourse) at heart. Rushkoff poses the question: Are we ceding mankind’s last best hope of free and open information to marketers and corporations?
At the end of the day, is marketing around content (be that a TV show or a status update) really any different now than it was 50 years ago? Or have we entered into a kind of hypercapitalism that overlooks the web’s greatest promise in favor of the next investment-baiting app? We spoke to Rushkoff about the current state of web culture and his crusade to encourage programming literacy.
You argue that users are not the true customers of social networks like Facebook. What are the ramifications of this?
Well, on the very simplest level I’m concerned about most people’s total lack of awareness. We move through online spaces with little knowledge of what they are for. I think when we walk into a store in the real world, most of us are aware that the rent is being paid by a person or company that wants to sell us goods. I think we have awareness (I could be overestimating us here, but I really don’t think I am) that when we cross the threshold from the street into the store, that we have moved from a public place into a private place. We understand that the job of the person working in the Gap is to sell us clothes.
But we don’t apply this same very basic logic to online spaces. The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers.
Do we get something in return? Sure. We get a certain kind of communications tool. We get a way of describing who we are to the rest of the world — in the terms that the marketers are paying for us to use. It’s not some weird conspiracy or anything. It’s just business. But if we’re not aware of the business, of what the tool is for, of the fact that Facebook’s job is to sell our social graphs to companies, and to get us experiencing ourselves in terms of our social graphs, then we are much more susceptible to changing the way we think of ourselves and our relationships. We are more likely to use our Facebook profile as a mirror, chalking up its deficiencies to the technology itself. We don’t consider that the ways in which Facebook screws with the way we see ourselves is its function, rather than some random artifact of social networking.
Is this different from TV networks selling commercials against popular shows that they deliver over the airwaves for free?
In many ways, not at all. And I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call “TV shows” are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on “free” TV are shows that help sell products. That’s why most mainstream TV sucks. And it’s why pay-TV like HBO and Showtime, and even some of the cable channels that have subscriber-based revenue sources, are capable of producing such better content. In those cases, we viewers are the customers.
But imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by Big Pharma. You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
When (if ever) are these free technologies worth trading a bit of privacy for?
You don’t have any privacy to trade, anyway. You think they don’t already know everything? The only thing standing between you and total surveillance is the fact that they don’t yet have the processing capability to mine their data effectively.
And computers just create a bigger trail. Digital technology allows the content of your phone calls and letters (emails) to be collected and stored. But data mining companies have had the goods on us for many decades. They used to use notecards in giant file drawers, and then employ factor analysis to model behaviors, discern likely customers, and help direct mail marketers save on postage. And that was using housing records, drivers licenses, medical records and credit card bills. Stuff that was public, but also things they bought.
The net just amplifies this ability. But it also makes the process more transparent to us. Yes, this has always been going on, but now in some ways we are becoming more aware of it.
In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
Well, it’s certainly worse to do it wittingly. I get a kick out of companies that offer us the ability to get a cash kickback for selling our social graphs. As if cutting us in on the value proposition makes it OK to turn our friendships into marketing contacts. They act as if it is a way of fighting back against corporate power, when it’s really just turning social behavior into corporate behavior. We get to be as dehumanizing and desocializing as our marketers. Revolution!
Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO. And after a while, you want to shut down your networks and make yourself less available because the bandwidth and time is being abused.
It’s kind of like a Tupperware party, where our social bonds are being exploited to sell plastic. Eventually, you stop answering that person’s calls because it means being subjected to the Tupperware sales.
You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy. They will be more like the people of those first five or six centuries after the alphabet, who just couldn’t or wouldn’t learn the 22-letter alphabet. It just seemed too hard to them. In their defense, though, books were really expensive and rare. They weren’t interacting with text every day, so it didn’t really matter that they couldn’t read it.
We are interacting with programs all the time, so I think there’s a legitimate argument in asking that people know something about those programs. If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
But if people can’t learn programming, I just want them to know what it is. That it exists. I want people to be able to read the programs and online environments in which they spend so much time. I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?” [It's] really simple stuff like that, which doesn’t occur to people if they think of the net as a natural space. It’s not. It is a created space.
I think people can understand this much.
You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
The way to change this is to rehumanize. People have to become aware that there are other humans here. Once they do that, they can create a new social contract that respects the humanity of the other people.
People have a natural desire to share, and the main reason we don’t do that today is because we’ve accepted the notion that things are scarce. We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources. Ironically, we are making things like air and water scarce largely because of an economic system that requires growth and hoarding and scarcity. We’ll get a physical environment that matches our economic ground rules, and that will be a real pity. It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
The job of changing these perceptions, though, is that of the programmers. We can build technologies and networks that are based on economic and social possibility rather than on maintaining the status quo. It’s a lot harder to get paid for building these sorts of things, which is why I’ve convened the Contact Summit this October, where I’ll be giving away $30,000 in awards to some of the best ideas, hooking people up with the best CEOs and inventors out there, from Dennis Crowley and Scott Heiferman to Clay Shirky and Bre Pettis — as well as artists and thinkers like RU Sirius, Astra Taylor, Arthur Brock, Caroline Woolard.
There are many many great people out there who have dedicated their lives to seeing the net restore the social fabric that top-down media, banking, and politics have destroyed. It’s just a matter of bringing them together and announcing that we’re all here to do the same thing.
I see two groups that present educational challenges ahead: digital natives who are more susceptible to marketing and faulty online information (as you have cited), and adults who are still trying to navigate a digital world they didn’t grow up in. How can we ensure these two groups are using the web responsibly?
We can’t! And they aren’t!
But rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
More About: business, corporations, Douglas Rushkoff, facebook, MARKETING, social graph, social media
For more Social Media coverage:
The web-based email, chat and message boards that came online in the ’90s were poised to revolutionize interpersonal communication. Then companies tried to monetize the Internet.
“The dot com boom failed because people didn’t want to buy shit online. They were just talking to each other,” said Douglas Rushkoff in a recent keynote speech at the WebVisions conference in Portland. “Content was never king. Contact was always king.”
Today, the dorm room experiments of the digital generation have become billion dollar corporations. We’ve finally figured out how to monetize social interaction, and Rushkoff, an award-winning author and media theorist who writes and speaks regularly on these topics, has reservations.
He holds no grudge against technology itself, but rather our widespread programming illiteracy — that is, our fundamental ignorance of how these web platforms operate, share our information, and profit from our online relationships. Whereas the social web was once a Wild West of BBS chatter, so many of us now experience it through discreet corporate channels like Google and Facebook — platforms that may not always have our best interests (or the interests of healthy online discourse) at heart. Rushkoff poses the question: Are we ceding mankind’s last best hope of free and open information to marketers and corporations?
At the end of the day, is marketing around content (be that a TV show or a status update) really any different now than it was 50 years ago? Or have we entered into a kind of hypercapitalism that overlooks the web’s greatest promise in favor of the next investment-baiting app? We spoke to Rushkoff about the current state of web culture and his crusade to encourage programming literacy.
You argue that users are not the true customers of social networks like Facebook. What are the ramifications of this?
Well, on the very simplest level I’m concerned about most people’s total lack of awareness. We move through online spaces with little knowledge of what they are for. I think when we walk into a store in the real world, most of us are aware that the rent is being paid by a person or company that wants to sell us goods. I think we have awareness (I could be overestimating us here, but I really don’t think I am) that when we cross the threshold from the street into the store, that we have moved from a public place into a private place. We understand that the job of the person working in the Gap is to sell us clothes.
But we don’t apply this same very basic logic to online spaces. The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers.
Do we get something in return? Sure. We get a certain kind of communications tool. We get a way of describing who we are to the rest of the world — in the terms that the marketers are paying for us to use. It’s not some weird conspiracy or anything. It’s just business. But if we’re not aware of the business, of what the tool is for, of the fact that Facebook’s job is to sell our social graphs to companies, and to get us experiencing ourselves in terms of our social graphs, then we are much more susceptible to changing the way we think of ourselves and our relationships. We are more likely to use our Facebook profile as a mirror, chalking up its deficiencies to the technology itself. We don’t consider that the ways in which Facebook screws with the way we see ourselves is its function, rather than some random artifact of social networking.
Is this different from TV networks selling commercials against popular shows that they deliver over the airwaves for free?
In many ways, not at all. And I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call “TV shows” are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on “free” TV are shows that help sell products. That’s why most mainstream TV sucks. And it’s why pay-TV like HBO and Showtime, and even some of the cable channels that have subscriber-based revenue sources, are capable of producing such better content. In those cases, we viewers are the customers.
But imagine what it would be like if you didn’t know that the evening news was funded primarily by Big Pharma. You would actually believe the stuff that they’re saying. You might even think those are the stories that matter.
When (if ever) are these free technologies worth trading a bit of privacy for?
You don’t have any privacy to trade, anyway. You think they don’t already know everything? The only thing standing between you and total surveillance is the fact that they don’t yet have the processing capability to mine their data effectively.
And computers just create a bigger trail. Digital technology allows the content of your phone calls and letters (emails) to be collected and stored. But data mining companies have had the goods on us for many decades. They used to use notecards in giant file drawers, and then employ factor analysis to model behaviors, discern likely customers, and help direct mail marketers save on postage. And that was using housing records, drivers licenses, medical records and credit card bills. Stuff that was public, but also things they bought.
The net just amplifies this ability. But it also makes the process more transparent to us. Yes, this has always been going on, but now in some ways we are becoming more aware of it.
In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
Well, it’s certainly worse to do it wittingly. I get a kick out of companies that offer us the ability to get a cash kickback for selling our social graphs. As if cutting us in on the value proposition makes it OK to turn our friendships into marketing contacts. They act as if it is a way of fighting back against corporate power, when it’s really just turning social behavior into corporate behavior. We get to be as dehumanizing and desocializing as our marketers. Revolution!
Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO. And after a while, you want to shut down your networks and make yourself less available because the bandwidth and time is being abused.
It’s kind of like a Tupperware party, where our social bonds are being exploited to sell plastic. Eventually, you stop answering that person’s calls because it means being subjected to the Tupperware sales.
You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy. They will be more like the people of those first five or six centuries after the alphabet, who just couldn’t or wouldn’t learn the 22-letter alphabet. It just seemed too hard to them. In their defense, though, books were really expensive and rare. They weren’t interacting with text every day, so it didn’t really matter that they couldn’t read it.
We are interacting with programs all the time, so I think there’s a legitimate argument in asking that people know something about those programs. If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
But if people can’t learn programming, I just want them to know what it is. That it exists. I want people to be able to read the programs and online environments in which they spend so much time. I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?” [It's] really simple stuff like that, which doesn’t occur to people if they think of the net as a natural space. It’s not. It is a created space.
I think people can understand this much.
You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
The way to change this is to rehumanize. People have to become aware that there are other humans here. Once they do that, they can create a new social contract that respects the humanity of the other people.
People have a natural desire to share, and the main reason we don’t do that today is because we’ve accepted the notion that things are scarce. We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources. Ironically, we are making things like air and water scarce largely because of an economic system that requires growth and hoarding and scarcity. We’ll get a physical environment that matches our economic ground rules, and that will be a real pity. It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
The job of changing these perceptions, though, is that of the programmers. We can build technologies and networks that are based on economic and social possibility rather than on maintaining the status quo. It’s a lot harder to get paid for building these sorts of things, which is why I’ve convened the Contact Summit this October, where I’ll be giving away $30,000 in awards to some of the best ideas, hooking people up with the best CEOs and inventors out there, from Dennis Crowley and Scott Heiferman to Clay Shirky and Bre Pettis — as well as artists and thinkers like RU Sirius, Astra Taylor, Arthur Brock, Caroline Woolard.
There are many many great people out there who have dedicated their lives to seeing the net restore the social fabric that top-down media, banking, and politics have destroyed. It’s just a matter of bringing them together and announcing that we’re all here to do the same thing.
I see two groups that present educational challenges ahead: digital natives who are more susceptible to marketing and faulty online information (as you have cited), and adults who are still trying to navigate a digital world they didn’t grow up in. How can we ensure these two groups are using the web responsibly?
We can’t! And they aren’t!
But rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
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Incubus has a new album coming out in July, and instead of doing the usual press tour, the band has decided to set up shop in its hometown of Los Angeles, hosting a livestream to get fans pumped for the new disc.
“Incubus HQ Live” kicks off Thursday and will run until July 6, with the band interacting with fans — in person and on camera — daily from roughly 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. You can check out the livestream above, or on the band’s website.
As of right now, Incubus isn’t exactly sure how its going to use the stream, according to guitarist Mike Einziger. “We haven’t really planned a lot of it,” he says. “We’re going to leave a lot of it up in the air. There are a few things that are going to be planned, like I’m the guitarist, so I’m going to do an guitar clinic with fans.”
The band also plans to perform live on the stream — the first performance of which will be tonight — answer fan questions sent in via social media, and conduct any interviews with the press from Incubus HQ. The band has also teamed up with video-sharing app Viddy (which is rapidly becoming a favorite among members of the music scene, like Panic at the Disco), asking fans to create 15-second videos inspired by upcoming album, If Not Now, When? [iTunes link]. The band even has their own Viddy production pack — or effects that users can apply — which includes the ability to soundtrack a video with their single “Adolescents.”
Although most bands are loathe to delve into the marketing side of an album release, Incubus conceived the livestream idea on its own, attempting to tailor the concept to its image. Einziger acknowledges that the promotional side of music “kind of sucks,” but looks upon the livestream as a chance to let fans know about the disc in the band’s own way.
“That’s the key for us — being able to let people know that we have an album coming out, but allow people to find out about it through the channels that we prefer,” says Einziger. “None of us are great at talking about our music, we’d rather just play it. [But] we want people to know that we have an album coming out…. If we don’t tell the story ourselves, maybe somebody else will tell it in the way that we don’t like.”
“I can only imagine what this would have been like with me, if I had this opportunity with some of the bands that I grew up listening to,” he adds. “I would have lost my mind.”
The band does feel a bit apprehensive going into the first day of the promotion. “We don’t know what we’re going to get. This could be the worst idea in the world,” Einziger says, his sentiment almost exactly mirroring Death Cab For Cutie bassist Nick Harmer’s apprehension before the band filmed a live music video for their song, “You Are A Tourist.”
What do you think of the livestream idea? Would you like to see other bands testing it out?
Image courtesy of Flickr, Carlos Varela
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On Twitter, Facebook, and dozens of other social sites, normal consumers often choose to keep tabs on the brands they love.
In fact, many brands have highly optimized their marketing and PR strategies to accommodate that behavior, even going to far as to do one-to-one CRM (that’s customer or consumer relationship management) through avenues such as Facebook and Twitter.
As social CRM specialists Get Satisfaction found, many consumers who follow brands online are only in it for the perks. Around 40% of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users in a recent study said they followed brands to get access to discounts and special deals.
Another common response in the same survey indicated that many consumers will follow a brand if they are current customers. And creating interesting, entertaining content online is another great way for brands to earn followers and fans on social services.
Check out this infographic from Get Satisfaction and design shop Column Five for more details on why and how ordinary folks follow brands online.
Click image to see full-size version.
[source: iStockphoto user Ridofranz.
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Late checkout: we all want it. Now anyone who checks in to Radisson Edwardian’s London and Manchester hotels on Facebook or Foursquare can get it.
The UK-based luxury branch of the Radisson hotel chain has kicked off a “Check In, Check Out Later” promotion targeted at its social media-savvy guests in celebration of Social Media Day.
Radisson Edwardian guests who check in on Facebook or Foursquare and show their phone at the front desk will be eligible for check out two hours later than regular hotel guests. The promotion is live now and will run through July 31.
“We’re constantly looking for ways to enrich the hotel experience for our guests and this was a great opportunity to once again connect an online interaction with an offline benefit,” says Radisson Edwardian ecommerce manager Amy Clarke. “Checking in on Facebook or Foursquare has been popular with our guests, so rewarding them with a couple of extra hours in bed seemed like a nice way to say thanks.”
The temporary promotion is reminiscent of the partnership forged between Foursquare and Starwood Hotels earlier this year. In that campaign, guests earned Starwood loyalty points for checking in on Foursquare.
More About: checkins, facebook, foursquare, MARKETING, Radisson
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Facebook Deals, an advertising product that lets businesses offer discounts to nearby Facebook users, is expanding its pilot program to three more cities: Charlotte, St. Louis and Minneapolis.
Businesses in those cities can sign up to participate now. Users will have access to Deals in the coming weeks.
Facebook Deals originally launched in San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego in late April.
Although Deals is frequently compared to Foursquare, the product is more akin to Groupon. It offers Facebook users vouchers for a range of goods or services ahead of — rather than at — the point of purchase.
Facebook is not yet disclosing any numbers. But it did note that early feedback from businesses has been largely positive, particularly for helping bring in new customers and increasing the number of Likes on their Pages.
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If you’ve tried to run a campaign on Facebook and were frustrated by its poor results, you’re not alone. Facebook‘s ads have a pretty poor performance record and its ads continue to be cheap, though plentiful.
The good news is that Facebook is working hard to improve its ads’ performance. The company continues to experiment with new ad formats and has lately cozied up to the ad community with Facebook Studio, a forum for new campaigns that features a directory of ad agencies.
The idea is that marketers can learn from each other as they try to navigate Facebook, which is terra incognita for everyone since it’s so new. In that spirit, here are five recent Facebook campaigns that offer some instructive examples on how the platform can be used to amplify a message or interact with consumers in a new way.
Bahrain Telecommunications Co., a.k.a. Batelco, isn’t going to give Apple a run for its money in the name-recognition department anytime soon, but for those interested in social media marketing, it’s the little brand that could. You may recall that Batelco’s “Infinity” video made the short list of favorite TED ads earlier this year, but the Facebook aspect of that campaign is just as notable.
Batelco aired two trailers for the video in movie theaters and online in September 2010. To spread the video even further, Batelco’s app included a prompt for users to activate their webcams and take pictures of themselves reacting to the video. The picture was then posted on Facebook (with the user’s permission). Next, the company and agency FP7/BAH disseminated information about the making of the video. Realizing that all the target customers were online, Batelco also set up kiosks in malls and airports letting consumers see the video. As a result of the exposure, Batelco gained more than 200,000 fans on Facebook. More than 70% of Bahrain’s Facebook community are fans.
The Upshot: Batelco bet heavily on a viral video and it paid off, partially because the video itself is so compelling, but also because it provided a means for people on Facebook to add something to the experience.
Flair, a Belgian women’s magazine, observed that women check out each other’s wardrobes in real life and figured that might be the case online as well. That reasoning prompted the creation of Fashiontag, an app that lets users identify their friends’ clothing in Facebook pics and ask a question about the item. The question also was posted on the friend’s wall.
Those conversations then ran on a Fashiontag Page on Facebook. The best ones ran in the magazine. According to Advertising Age, after the app launched on March 22, the magazine’s Facebook Page got a 35% bump in fans, to 23,000. Best of all, this was done on the cheap: The app only cost about $35,000 to create.
The Upshot: Flair created a genuinely useful app and one that tied in with its brand mission. As a result, the title not only got attention, but found a new way to interact with readers and create content.
Kraft introduced Comida Kraft, a recipe website targeted to Hispanic consumers, in 2001. Nine years later it launched a Comida Kraft Facebook Page as well. Kraft stepped things up in May 2011, by enlisting Mexican celebrity chef Alfredo Oropeza, which boosted the Page’s fans by 38%. But Oropeza isn’t just lending his name. In July, Kraft is planning three livestreamed video chats with the chef, during which participants can ask questions in real time. In November, Kraft is planning to give Latina moms who subscribe to Comida Kraft recipes by email — those who subscribe to the Comida Kraft Mobile Club will get free exclusive access to additional recipes and videos on their mobile phones.
The Upshot: Kraft, working with digital marketing agency 360i, has added new activities to engage its Facebook fans. The addition of a celebrity chef and exclusive access gives consumers a reason to become fans and gives fans special access.
The problem with a lot of branded Facebook Pages is there’s nothing to do there. Israeli juice company Prigat not only gave its fans something to do, it put them to work. Prigat set up an app that let fans activate an orange juice machine by smiling. (The company used face-recognition technology to recognize those smiles.)
It turns out, a lot of users were up to the challenge. More than 20,000 users uploaded photos of themselves, which led to 30,000 “likes,” (a 300% jump in growth). More than 40,000 oranges were also squeezed during the effort — the juice was given to charity.
The Upshot: Bridging the real and the online world can spark some interesting ideas. Asking users to smile also ensured that the program was fun.
Here’s the pitch: Don Draper and his team have a new assignment — an ad about you. But first they have to know a bit about you — what kind of car you drive, what’s your drink of choice, that kind of thing. Next, they need a picture of you. Then you get to see a few mockups of ads about you. When you settle on one you like, you post it to your site. The best ads will run in the Dutch magazine BLVD Man and on billboards in Amsterdam.
The campaign, from an agency called Greenberry, launched in June to promote the premiere of season 4 of Mad Men in the Netherlands. So there you have it: a promotion for a show about advertising that creates advertising about you that might actually run as a real ad somewhere. Is your head spinning yet?
The Upshot: This promotion stays true to the concept of the product it promotes, but involves consumers in the process as only Facebook can.
What other innovative Facebook campaigns have you seen? Let us know in the comments below.
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