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Music: Its Alive!

Indeed: my feed reader is, in fact, blowin’ up. The past 24 hours have been intense. The one thing I personally didnt see coming was the proliferation of music: buying, gifting, searching. Its all over the place.

Today, MySpace unveiled enhancements meant to appeal to consumers and content providers alike. Funny since we’ve all been reading articles that announce the continued sickly state of the MySpace platform.

Also announced yesterday, Facebook has launched a music gifting service which allows users to purchase and gift music to other users.

On top of all this, Google is rumored to have a music service of their own, allowing searches to yield downloadable purchased tracks. Tuesday, Apple began Tweeting about iTunes.

Although the music industry has been deemed dead for a very long time, it appears that by adding social and searchable attributes, music is now becoming integrated into everyday digital interactions a bit more easily. But, what does this mean for the industry itself? Will this help struggling companies or will it open up a whole new mess of problems between artists, rights owners and labels?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjkaplow/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Blogging: Dont Make It A Big Deal

Blogging and I have a long and sullied relationship. At first, like most newbs, I was very enamored with the thought of blogging often. I had a lot to say, right? Slowly, blogging became more of a burden than a hobby. After that, its a hop, skip and a jump to empty thoughts, pressure and a hatred of the medium. Feeling guilty is a sure way to build procrastination. Here’s three ways to make it ‘not a big deal’.

Start with Other Content Most of us read several RSS feeds, have events to promote or may have stumbled upon a fun new site or toy. Using the momentum of your thoughts on external content is a major blogging spring board. Not everything has to be new and fresh topically: whats fresh is the perspective you bring to it. Even if others have already touched on the subject, bring your own experiences and research to the table. Help others and be useful.

Short is Sweet Every post wont be your greatest life’s work. This is my biggest downfall: thinking that every post needs to be new, novel, best and biggest. If you never start, you’ll never gain momentum. Think of your blog as your space for brainstorming. Your place to take notes. Use the community to build on the post. Not everything needs to come from you: sometimes the best parts of a short blog post are the comments from readers who bring the idea to full tilt.

Respond Maybe you really were rocked by something someone said in Twitter. Perhaps another’s blog post really got you thinking. Why not craft your own lengthy response? Blogs are a place for individual commentary and creating and honing your thinking skills. Typing up your thoughts and posting them online provides you with an ongoing record of what topics interest you while helping you iron out your thoughts with feedback.

No matter what, keep going and dont feel bad for long absences. Think creatively and allow that instant interest in something to grow into a relevant post for your subject matter. Draw a little outside the lines and bring your personality to it. A good read is one that allows us to see into the blogger – not just the content.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/baking_in_pearls/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Millennials and Virgos: Excluding the Underserved and Unpopular

Here’s where my work in College Access and parental involvement kicks in. I just finished reading ‘Millennial Muddle: How Stereotyping Students Became an Industry’. I couldn’t help but feel a little vindicated. The following quote really resonated with me:

“Over the last decade, commentators have tended to slap the Millennial label on white, affluent teenagers who accomplish great things as they grow up in the suburbs, who confront anxiety when applying into super-selective colleges, and who multitask with ease as their helicopter parents hover reassuringly above them. The label tends not to appear in renderings of teenagers who happen to be minorities, or poor, or who have never won a spelling bee. Nor does the term often refer to students from big cities and small towns that are nothing like Fairfax County, Va {Where ‘Millennial’ research was conducted}. Or who lack technological know-how. Or who struggle to complete high school. Or who never even consider college. Or who commit crimes. Or who suffer from too little parent support. Or who drop out of college. Aren’t they Millennials, too?’

Seriously. Marketing to a Millennial is like marketing to a Virgo. How many students – strike that – how many of YOUR students fit this profile? Should any more effort be applied to a stereotype than to an individual? What ever happened to just communicating with the best possible content for your audience in the best way for that audience? Personally, I feel lumping a generation into one name sake is the opposite of good marketing – do your research. Find out about your target audience. Specifically. I’m all for segmentation, and the few insights into ‘kids today’ but not all of these attributes apply to all – or most – of ‘our’ students.

What about yours?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachelvacek/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Facebook: The Band-Aid for Your Website

Its become painfully obvious: Facebook has become a work around for static web sites. Whether theres no date in site for a much needed redesign or your current functionality has been outpaced by reality, creating a place to put content in Facebook has made it the great new world. Here’s five quick reasons why:

1. Dynamic Content Social media – especially Facebook – is known for its moving parts. It becomes a living entity, not just static content on a web page. If your web site doesnt currently offer this, you may feel compelled to move into the Facebook sphere to engage your audience as a quick fix.

2. Interactivity Comments, posts, links, pictures, video. You name it, you can probably add it to Facebook in some fashion. Allowing your fans to interact with you and each other in this way may be something that you’ll never see your corporate web site do, and maybe, thats a good thing. Or maybe, its not. Either way, Facebook becomes the repository for interactivity in many companies. Probably, because consumers are already there, and Facebook does it best.

3. RSS Functionality If your site doesnt have any plans to add RSS functions, Facebook takes care of this. You can feed news from any underutilized RSS feed (off site blogs, campus portal feeds, etc.) into Facebook. Any activity you take becomes a part of the fan’s ‘home’ feed. Care must be taken to not inundate the user, but can effectively become the active web presence on behalf of your company.

4. Quick Updates Maybe homepage real estate doesnt allow for quick updates or announcements. Facebook becomes the stand in, allowing companies, departments and other groups to publish quick, timely information directly to users.

5. Claiming Ignorance In many universities, there is no formal social media policy. This leaves everything open to interpretation and usually ignorance is bliss for the administration. Since Facebook is a third party, this alleviates any misconduct on behalf of the university – to a point. It seems to be an easy work around from the web site for this very reason: it takes very little start up energy, is popular, and does not require a committee or ITS hand holding.

Although Facebook is good for many things, a web site replacement it is not. It is a great lead generator, as is all social media, in taking users directly to key information without having to search through a clunky web site. But, at the end of the day, social media should be integrated into your informative and easily navigable web presence instead of just an inbound link creator.

The web is no longer push and company web sites need to become interactive to stay relevant.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/qf8/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

5 Reasons I Dont Believe ‘Branding is Dead’

My VP emailed us an article yesterday from Clickz, titled ‘A New Definition of Digital’. One of the bullet points was that Branding is Dead. My immediate reaction was ‘Psssht’. Here’s why:

#1 – Social is Branding: There are those companies and products who still arent playing in the social media field or those who play but arent yet big hitters. Becoming involved in the online community in and of its self is an act of Branding. It says a lot about your company – be it health care or cell service if you choose to engage in this way.

#2 – Proactive vs. Reactive: Of those involved in online communities, they provide a proactive interaction with consumers both current and prospective. Its one kind of company that reacts to blog posts or op eds and quite another that creates its own content. Beyond that is a company that allows users to create and share content. How powerful for a brand is that?

#3 – Good Products = Pride/Loyalty: By listening and engaging with customers, products are allowed a greater opportunity for discussion, leading to new product innovation and change. Without this, how will we know what our customers need/want? By listening and showcasing these listening skills for all to see in social media or dynamic web content, a brand becomes an entity not just a name. It becomes a feeling and a conversation, helping to foster pride and customer loyalty in the fact that feedback is taken seriously. Especially if that can be seen in product upgrades.

#4 – Search Optimization Over PPC: Yes, PPC may cut out useless clicks, but does it really yield as much as an optimized content page? We all know by know that PPC clicks to a web site dont yield nearly 1/3 of the traffic and engagement that organic traffic does. A company that knows this will be able to become reputable by appearing in search at higher points on a page or by being listed with high ranking competitors. All elevating the brand.

#5 – Evolution is the Opposite of Death: By adding these forward thinking types of engagement with consumers, especially those that promote content created about the brand, companies evolve with the changing times and consumer behaviors. By doing this, they allow their branding to become more elastic, thereby keeping them relevant and seen as a living organism, rather than a stale box.

Isnt that what branding really is meant to be anyway?