Radiohead King of Limbs - Marketing and Design

This post is about marketing and web page design - the takeaways are:

• If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
• If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
• Set expectations and then over deliver

Marketing (Part 1)

Radiohead are notorious for their lack of communication, they have the best signal to noise ratio of any band I know.  This means that when they do communicate, people comment on it.

The band announced the release of their new album with a simple blog post on their website on Monday.  I don't regularly visit Radiohead's website, but I found out about the record’s existence from a news aggregator on Tuesday.

Marketing (Part 2)

I read eleven music related aggregators and I receive three of them in email format, the rest are RSS feeds. I scan their headlines every morning and if something catches my eye I dig deeper.

Pretty much every one carried the story about Radiohead's new album and in every format I was able to click through to the band's website.  Once I had verified the information and pre-ordered the record, I then tweeted to my network about it.  Over the next two days I saw people in my own network going through the same experience and tweeting and blogging about the record to their network.

Design (Part 1)

When I arrived on the King of Limbs website I immediately knew that I was dealing with the band:

Band name (brand) is big and easily identified – the text is simple and straightforward and the graphic immediately funnels your attention to the purchase process.  Note how there is no menu navigation – there is only one way off this page and you choose it by identifying which market you are – brilliant!

Design (Part 2)

There are two products on offer – the higher margin one is presented first, but again – look how clean and simple the language is.  Look at the relative size between the title and the text and the information delivered.  There are only two visible buttons on this page – the pre order and order button – there is no doubt what the purpose of this page is.

Although menu navigation does make an appearance it is super simple – no drop down menus, no multiple options, simple and clean.  The rest of the purchase flow is just as easy – there are no “up sells”, no additional offers and no superfluous requests for information.

Marketing (Part 3)

When Radiohead announced the new album on the 14th, they said it would be available on Saturday 19th.

When I woke up this morning and looked at my network on Twitter I saw that people were already listening to the album.

http://twitter.com/thebluesage/status/38611832986025984

I immediately went to the site and saw that they had released a day early, I downloaded the album, started listening and immediately told my network the news.

By exceeding the expectations that they themselves had set, they delighted me and made me feel good about the whole experience.

Takeaways

If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you

If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it

Set expectations and then over deliver

Simple huh!

Social Media – If it hasn’t changed you – You’re doing it wrong

2007 doesn’t seem too long ago does it?

The fairly unanimous business argument back then was that Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, even blogging - was a narcissistic waste of time with no measureable return on investment.  Jump forward three years to half a billion people on Facebook and Twitter at 175 million strong, the sound of businesses scrambling to get up to speed is almost deafening.

It’s about Change

What most businesses we speak to don’t initially get is that the culture of society has fundamentally changed.  The way that people receive information has radically shifted in the last twenty years and that change has accelerated in the last 5.

It’s about Marketing

Businesses adapt their processes as new technologies come along – the arrival of economically viable robotics fundamentally changed the manufacturing industry.  Does it not make sense then that the arrival of practically zero cost distribution would change the marketing world?  If you are trying to incorporate Social Media marketing as if it was another process that you need to fit into your already busy schedule then you will fail

It’s about Now

There are no lead times in Social Media; content is published immediately and reacted upon within seconds.  It’s not about spending days working on copy for an ad that will be published once and read by millions, it’s about publishing a hundred times to a hundred different people with different copy every time and then reacting to their direct responses.

It’s about Bullshit

Western culture is so immersed in media that we are all experts.  We’ve had marketing speak rammed down our throats for so long that any whiff of corporate messaging is quickly relegated to the spam bin and your brand is weakened.  To sustain a Social Media campaign you have to be yourself, you have to know your product and service inside out, the person operating the Twitter account, the Facebook wall, writing the blog posts, has to know and love your company, anything less and your customers will call you on it.

It’s about Time

For those business owners who know every inch of their company and every employee personally – a Social Media marketing campaign should change your life!  If you have a dedicated marketing resource in house, how they spend their working week should look radically different now than it did three years ago.    Think about those robots on the assembly line and how manufacturing companies were able to grow faster and more efficiently once they managed the change.

It’s about You

This is all so very new and from what we can see there are no cookie cutter solutions.  There are tools that make this easier, there are protocols and best practices that can enhance your actions, but ultimately it comes down to you and your business.  If you’re ready to join this brave new world, call us, we’d be happy to talk with you.

Image Credit: Car Manufacturing Robotic Arms by razvan.orendovici on Flickr

Your Customers are using Social Media right now, you should be too.

Networks like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are great places for you to talk about your business and create relationships. 

Unlike traditional campaigns, effective Social Media marketing requires interaction; it is the ability to respond to individual people that makes the whole thing Social.  This means that although some elements of a Social Media campaign can be outsourced, by far the best way to manage Social Media marketing is in-house.

Kilted Chaos works with you to develop an overall online marketing strategy that starts with your website and identifies what parts of the social media world are going to deliver the best results.

Contact us to see how Social Media can benefit your business

Facebook Fatigue

Thought we’d take a few minutes to update on the marketing of @DrasticJo and reflect on a recent Facebook campaign. Jo has an album coming out in November and we’re tasked with finding the people who would like it and developing a relationship with them so that they will buy it.

Tommy Silverman recently made the case in Wired magazine that 80% of the music out there currently is crap – that the signal to noise ratio is so bad that it’s practically impossible for the good acts to break. Clearly one’s definition of good is purely subjective – but it does mean that the value of a personal recommendation becomes even greater.

As part of Jo’s campaign we built out a new Facebook page and wanted to let her friends know about it. We hijacked her personal account – put in a new profile image and sent a message out to all 500+ of her friends asking them to sign up for the mailing list and become a fan of the new page - You can see a copy of the message we sent here

The result: 25 new likes on the fan page and 1 new email address. Even better – one of her friends commented on her wall that they felt the message was Spam. Not exactly what we were going for.

The takeaway for us is that unless the message is personally tailored to each individual recipient – then it gets classified as band spam. Sure we could have spiced up the text – added more of a giveaway – thrown in a video etc, but I don’t think it would have made much difference. We were banking on Facebook friends having a deeper connection and being willing to help – but ultimately it felt like a MySpace campaign and is not something we’ll be repeating.

That’s not to say that we’ll be giving up though – we still believe that it is better to deepen the existing relationships than it is to develop more shallow connections. The value of a true fan throughout an artist’s lifetime cannot be underestimated, it’s apparent that we need to invest more in them at this stage than just a cut and paste form message.

We’ll let you know how well the next approach works out.

Turning Fickle Fans into Friends

Just got off the weekly skype call with one of our artists – Drastic Jo – she has a release scheduled for November 13 and we’re busy developing the direct to fan marketing plan.

Typically one of the most important parts of such a plan is the acquisition stage – this is where you set up the digital platform in order to reap as many email addresses, Twitter followers, Facebook and MySpace friends as possible. Figures show that the more people you have on your “lists’ the more dough you make.

However, over recent months there has been a lot of discussion around the importance of developing a deeper relationship between the artist and their existing fans. Having been out and about this week, it was interesting to hear one established management firm state that “Fans suck – it’s all about Friends” – and he wasn’t talking about the digital ones.

With the exploding number of bands and tracks now being marketed to the same audience – an artist not only has to grow new fans and convert them to friends, she has to look after her existing friends in order not to lose them to a competing artist.

Current Direct to Fan marketing is still based around a traditional release date – it makes sense on many different levels; having a specific event and a date allows both artist and fan to focus on each other at the same time. How then does the artist engage the fan and deepen that relationship outside the period of a specific release?

There’s a longer post brewing here – but here’s the short version.

Up until recently the people behind the music were strange mysterious creatures – beings that had this amazing ability to create stuff that changed our lives and made us feel. We assumed that ‘cos we liked their music we would like them – prior to the last decade the only exposure we had to artists were either on stage or through corporate controlled media channels.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder - though we had their music in our heads every day – the artists themselves were distant figures and we loved them. Compare that to nowadays: bands are encouraged to Twitter their every move – it’s hard to distinguish between your favorite artist and your favorite social media douche.

As the dust settles on the new music marketing revolution one thing is clear – artist’s lives are no more interesting than yours – and considerably less interesting than your immediate friends. If absence made the heart grow fonder then familiarity clearly breeds contempt – just ask John Mayer.

The only reason I am interested in an artist is because they create music – or in Jo’s case not just music but killer art as well. Once I’m beyond the initial rush of having complete access to who they are, the only time I want them to push out to me is when they have something new.

We think artists and bands need to think about how they release their music. We think a combination of specific release date combined with a monthly release of individual tracks allows for dedicated acquisition planning as well as looking after and deepening the relationship with existing fans.

Things have changed – no shit – but things are changing faster than the experts can write about it. A fan will move onto the next new thing – the next free download – the next photo opp or scandal. A friend will stay with you, will open your email, will come to a show and bring a friend. If your marketing plan purely deals with getting fans, you might want to hang on to your day job.

Photo Credit: The Explosion in the Alchemist’s Laboratory, Justus Gustav van Bentum - Chemical Heritage Foundation, Flickr

Myxer - Free Ringtones & More

There are many ways to get ringtones out to your fans but by far the easiest way is to hook up with Myxer.    You can upload tracks, images even your videos and use the platform to get the content distributed straight into the hands of your most ardent followers.  Check them out here:

I first came across Myxer a couple of years back when I was on the Kelli gig and looking for a ringtone solution.  It was late 2007 and Twitter was just starting to kick off, nobody real got it – least of all the team I was working with, but I found it to be an incredible way to access information.

Having gone through the traditional Google search for ringtone providers I ran an early Twitter search for anybody tweeting about ringtones and came across @sass. Jeff Sass is one of the nicest guys you can meet – he’s been working in entertainment and tech for most of his life and for the last 3 years has been the VP of Business Development at Myxer.  A few swapped tweets and phone calls later Kelli was the featured Country artist of the day and we shifted several thousand ringtone downloads before the tour bus even rolled.

What I like about Myxer is that for a big company they are very focused on the Indie artist - if they can help you out they will.  Mobile still has a way to go in terms of over the air track downloads and general usability – but it’s coming.  Companies like Myxer can get you into the game for free and if you’re not there – you’re missing out.

Jeff writes an insightful blog on all things industry and tech over at sassholes – check it out - there’s plenty of good information can help you to reach your fans in better and smarter ways – and who doesn’t need that?