1. You should send a press release to all music related websites
2. You should show the videos to your  friends and ask them to reshare it with their friends
3. You should make a riffle regarding the video

Before I start with my thoughts. In this blog article I will explain some fundamental concepts of online marketing. This is not only interesting for musicians but for any brand! The concepts of branding will be questioned hard.

The aked question is very fundamental for online (music) marketing

The oberservation of this musician is quite right and holds true for many musicians but also for other products. Actually it is a nice application of the Pareto Principle (8.9% of bands make up 91.1% of plays on Last.fm). And the problem exists not only on the web. Once you start a new thing with a lot of enthusiasm you will most certainly get to realize that no one really cares despite the fact that your product / music is good and your receive some nice feedback. I looked at some of the social media response for this particular artist and found out that he really is in the lucky position to receive a lot of great feedback and see that quite a lot people cared. Still it is  hard for him to increase his reach and inform people about this very product id est introducing the music to them.

Problem of overcoming the boarders of one’s own social circle

The entire problem breaks down to overcoming one’s own social circle. If you understand that the entire world is a network (it is really hard to fully understand all the implications of this) you understand that the big problem in (online) marketing is the following:
You have your ego network – or let’s call it social circle of people – that you can reach with an idea. You will realize within your  social circle some ties are better and some are worse. Some ties are so great that they might even help you out (for example because they are your record label or promoter or booker or die hard fans). But in the end they can be all combined as one person in the network that has a (somewhat bigger) social circle. And the social circle will look like the following pictures which I took from Marc Smith Blogpost about social networks in the news (A tutor of mine at Webscie summer school 2011)

In this series of pictures you can actually see how weak your social circle is (and again for a music band the circle might be bigger at all but the entire picture will look similar:

Even though you can reach anyone in our worldwide friendship network with only 6 people in between your social circle will only reach a view ten thousand people! So the question is: “how to get the other 7 billion?”
To make this even more clear: As a b(r)and you might “know” an amazing number of let us say 3500 fans (mabe you reach even more) and become a “rather” central node in the social graph of people and brands. But let uns see why this is not of any help!

1. you know 3500 fans
2. Those fans already have 410’000 (almost half a million) people in their ego networks which probably makes the use of Facebook so tempting. 
3. Your fans friends altogether know 51 mio people. 
4. Finally these people that you already know over three hops will know the entire rest of the world e.g. the other 7 bn people 

Do you really think your music / product / message / idea is so great that your friends will tell their friends who will tell their friends who will tell the others? That is really all it takes! 4 hops. Sorry to disappoint you. This is almost impossible to achieve!

The classic answer before the viral web was born: Advertising

Well the problem existed a long time before the web was born. People already have figured out the solution: You ask someone who has a huge reach to tell his audience about your new idea! Less sophisticated we can summerize this idea in one word: “advertising” you go to any media pay them some money and they will talk about you. This worked amazingly well in earlier days. There wasn’t that much media and if you had your product in some media you could be certain that you had at least a brand awareness. But there is a limitation of advertising…

A Problem of advertising and some advantages and disadvantages of online advertising

Of course once you run advertising campaigns your will receive some attention. No matter how good or bad your product is. That was the principle during the Dot com Bubble  where many start ups spent way too much advertising dollars and money to built reach instead of focusing on a great product. This is the reason why every ad campaign should carefully measure several things (fortunately in online marketing this is easier than anything else!):

• Conversionrate – as the percentage of people that convert to (fans, custormers, emailadresses,… basically whatever goal you have for the campaign)
• Bounce rate – as the amount of people that clicked your ad but left your page / product right away
• The price you pay per click (or per 1 thousand impressions)
• The value to you for a new fan (customer).

Once you know these numbers you can easily calculate weather an ad campaign is usefull for you or not! And you can calculate those numbers easily. The first three are given or measured during the ad campaign. If you don’t know how to do this. Contact me. The last one has its own paragraph.

What is the value of one new fan?

For the value of a new fan you could do the following. Count the number of fans you have (e.g. size of news letter / facebook fans …) and then look at your last year revenue (sum up: merch + concerts + sold music) devide this number by the number of fans and you see how much revenue one fan produces in one year. I know it is only a rough estimation but I wonder how many bands have calculated this number! Look at other products and markets.Everyone who is in the business of direct marketing maintains a customer data base which is a solid asset to the business. Groupon for example gives away 6 Euro for every new Customer someone finds. (This means that Groupon thinks a new Contact is worth at least 6 Euro.) 
As a musician you should know this number. Assume a new Fan is worth 6 Euro to you this would mean that knowing 5 thousand fans is worth as much as the production of an entire record. Could this be true? Actually I will try to start some calculations together with my Collegues from In Legend soon and try to calculate how much we should spend to gain a new fan!

Problem of aggressive marketing vs spreading of new information

On the web the problem is that people have so much choice that advertisting only helps to some degree. With Google adwords for example you only pay for clicks. So you definately obtain the attention. On the other side people drift away very quickly and their span of attention is very small. Another drawback is that many things on the web are free. Even though advertisting for music on the web is so much cheaper than offline advertising it is not standard to make use of advertisting on the web. Recordlabels and promoters so far refuse to invest money for it. That is sad because there is a lot of potential in online advertising (especially once you measure your conversion and bounce rates as well as the click through rates.)
Luckily those rates can be measured before you run an ad campaign. Investing money to increase reach should therefore never be done to a complete new product. A complete new product should be tested first. You meassure the feedback. Once you realize that people are happy you are save paying money to increasing your reach. For example in in legends case the youtube pandemonium video received much better feedback than vortex video and so far the soul apart video seems to receive the best feedback overall. By user ratings / average daily views as well as user comments. So you better go out an make advertising with your best performing content. Will you care that this is not your newest piece of work or even the first video? Hell no! Advertising is always targeted to people that don’t know you. You can even show them a 10 year old video and they might not realize its age! Once they like you they can still discover your newer stuff. 
Attention the above suggestion drastically changes if you are a mature b(r)and. In that case of course your star products are already well known and you should use promotional power and your brand recognition to get out the new product. This leads to the next paragraph.

Do all these calculations depend on the maturity of the band?

The answer is clearly yes! A band that is mature will still need promotion and advertising but also a lot of messages spread from almost alone. Some other things are easier achieved (mag title stories and so on…) But the obvious message is the following. The cost of advertising and your conversion rate will most probably stay constant and remain independent of the bands maturity. Metallica has to pay the same price for youtube ads as In Legend has to. But the fan is worth more if a band is not mature yet. A fan from the first record might go to many tours and buy a lot of products and also help spreading the word in a viral manner. For a mature band chances are pretty high that people who see the ad already know the brand but already decided not to like the band. So even though a young band has not much money and can not be sure that the product is already sufficiently good (which will lead to a drop in conversionrate i.e. more expensive ads or higher acquisition cost per new fan) ads make much more sense if the band is totally unknown. Be couragous invest some money and bootstrap your product! You are also courageous by going on the stage. So please also enter the web stage and built your reach! I know it’s less fun than rocking the audience in a life concert but the effect should be pretty much the same.

Other non advertising impact factors to overcome the boarders of one’s social circle

Since advertising is very expensive and probably not sustainable one can wonder if there are other ways to overcome the boarders of your social circle. I would say there are. The best way to do so in my pure empirical experience is transparicy, openess, the trust in other people and the interactive communication with them. Take me as an example. When I went to china I had basically no one to talk to about my interests. Now I started blogging sharing my ideas and – some people already called me crazy – parts of my intellectual propertie. Guess what! By doing so I was able to find more and more people with similar interests from all around the globe that I would never have met in my own social circle giving my valuable feedback to my ideas. My Reading club on distributed graph data bases is just a recent example of this added value from transparency.
So as a band here are some things you could and should do besides advertising your star products (and yes it is not the mainstream and might take some courage to do so!):

1. Interact with your fans. Treat them with respect. Not just by telling them but by really showing them. Don’t be so “kind” to share only news about you. That’s not interacting that’s publishing! Join the discussion on current topics (in music, news, …) or respond to what your fans say! Find out if it is relevant and stay in a conversation. I know it is hard since fans can become annoying and as a person it is already hard where a band has much more fame and more people and ideas to take care of. 
2. And please don’t be fake interactive by asking questions like “Heya Legends..
   A new week has begun, what is your sound for depressing mondays and what gets your through the week???” Asking questions especially if they don’t really carry a meaning is not interactive. That is just embarissing. That’s the reason why this kind of questions don’t take your marketing anywhere.
3. Integrate your fans! That is the by far most promesing strategy. As a band with already 3’500 fans there is so much diversity, creativity and so on that you will be able to achieve extra ordinary things. I am sure fans of you will have access to recording studios will have access to cheap videos maybe there are webdesigner and photographers. If you interact with your fans in a very smart way you don’t even have to ask them if there is a REPLACE BY WHATEVER YOU NEED. You will just know who is it. This leads me to 4th
4. Use the upcoming social network google+. First of all it is very obvious that it will kill Facebook on the long term (probably even on the short term) but more important it supports you to follow your fans since you can put them into circles. So all photographs go in one circle. All reviews go in another circle, all bloggers in the next circle, all technicians, all bookers, all concert organizers and so on. Streetteamer go in one circle. Follow those people they like your music and could be valuable for you.   
5. Speaking of streetteam: I once talked to a record label coworker. She told me in her experience the single best promotion tool for a band is a streetteam. Unfortunately I have seen many streetteams also did not receive the respect they deserved from band mambers. A band’s streetteam has an incredible impact. I once wondered how a poster of my favourite band came to be placed on a train station of a minor German city. It was much later that I realized that this must have been streetteam members… On the web by being interactive you can build your own global streetteam with almost no cost – besides time! Treat your streetteam. Have a streetteam meeting at least once a year and have all bandmembers come and have a great party with them. You can also make virtual meetings.
6. last but not least: Do all the things your promoter suggested at the very top of my post. Those are the core homework choires. 

For the last lines. Have fun making music and enjoy the most recent video of my band

• $10 bn revenue / quartal ==> more than $100 mio. / day!!!
• 90 Mio Google+ users
• over 60% of plus users engage daily with it and over 80% weekly!
• 350 Mio active Gmail users
• Youtube makes $5 bn revenue
• 700’000 android devices installed daily
• 250 Mio. Android devices in total!
• 11 bn downloads from the android market
• chrome is growing (sadly no numbers) But in an interesting (on its own) blog post of reddit you can see 42% of reddit users use chrome (which might not be representative)
• Google apps has 5000 new businesses signing up per day (among them: harvard, berkley, states (like wyoming), and a major bank bbva >100’000 employees) ,…)
• 1 mio. Google+ pages have been created by brands (it is mentioned that there exists a sales team (I knew it all the time (-: )

Larry points out again:
Like I always said: “Emerging highest quality products can generate huge new businesses for Google on the long term. Just like search. And we have a ton of experience monetizing those products over time!”
But have a look for yourself and listen to the annual report!

Motivation: Compare theoretical reach and cost of youtube ads vs print media

• The current situation in youtube is the following. Right now you pay 1 Cent per person watching your video / listening to your piece of music after he by himself has choosen to click on it by seeing an interesting title and description.
• In print media on the other side you pay 500 Euro for a quater page of advertising. At least that is the number that I know from Metal Hammer which is read by 40’000 people. This means you pay 1.25 Cent per Impression! 

You think this sonds like a similar price to you? WRONG! That is much more expensive! Let me tell you why:
Not only 1.25 Cent is more than 1 Cent. But recall that an impression in a magazine full of advertising is not seen by many people. Also we know that even the people who see it don’t take an action and buy your CD or search for you on the web. On youtube again every Click means that a person spends at least 4 minutes with your music and you have the chance to score some points. Think of your self! Do you become fan of a band just because of a silly ad in a magazine or after watching a cool video and listening to a great song?
I have to admidt thogh that there is the positive fact that ads in magazines give rise to stories in mags which have a huge conversionrate and a reach that probably goes far beyond the audience of the mag. Well on the other hand sharing a Youtube video with you friends also has a huge reach that goes beyond the  audience you payed for.
So we conlude Youtube Promoted videos is the much more superior, efficiant and much cheaper way to reach new fans!

what is going on on youtube and what do you have to watch out for?

Let me first explain the difference between Conversion rate and Clickthrough Rate (which is called viewthrough rate = VTR in the context of youtube):
View through rate:  In the dashboard of your youtube ad campaign google tells you about your VTR and says the higher the VTR the better. Well that is technically true but there is one little thing missing. A high VTR is helpfull for Google/Youtube. You don’t have to care. VTR means how many times does Google have to show your video as a promoted video untill someone sees it and you have to pay. so if your VTR is 1% it means that after 100 display ads you have one person watching the video and you have payed youtube once. Let’s assume the rate is 2%. Well then with the same amount of impressions youtube has earned the double amount of money. You should not care about this rate. As long as you get the viewers you payed for everything is cool
Conversion Rate: A metric that should be of your interest though is the Conversion rate. Unfortunately this is hard to track and google does not really help you on this. It tells you how many of the people your reached turn into fans / recommend the video / sign up to your newsletter / buy an album to make it short take any action. You are interested in a high conversion rate since it gets you the maximum out of the viewers you payed for.
This rate is probably increased by choosing good keywords and being really honest in the ad text about what to expect. Despite what youtube is saying you’d rather have a lower VTR and increase your Conversionrate!
Ads within the video. As soon as you have your video in a promoted campain you can controll the ads that are displayed within your video. This enables you to display something in the video with a link to an external website which is impossible otherwise! The funny thing is if the campaign is paused due to the fact that your google adsense account is runnin out of cash those display ads are still visible. I will write an entire article about this nice little trick!

My personal Experience

I have the feeling that on my first test on youtube I did not get a high conversion rate. Only 0.8% clicked on the download this video for free link! (but most of them actually registered to the site an downloaded it)
I was lazy and made a campaign with 150 different keywords (which I choose as popular metal related words from metalcon (mostly band names)). all ad’s had the same ad with the same title and text. For example I bought the keyword: “hard rock” well our music is not really hard rock. Since we also used this word in the ad text I guess a lot of people have been disapointed and did not convert.
Since youtube seems to favor ads with a high VTR (this happens if add text and the keyword you pitch for) are similar (because users think the video is of interest to them) we recieved 40% of our views on hard rock which is as I said not even a good keyword at all.
Next time I will group keywords together in smaller groups and make ads particularly for these groups in this way I push VTR which is good for youtube but I also find fans on keywords that will convert better and I can drop off the campaigns for keywords like hardrock…
Overall I have to say that I bougth 1000 clicks per day for 10 Euro a day for a German audiance. Which was nice overall. I spend 80 Euro for 8 thousand views which gave our video a nice little push. 

Summary of my Experiences

• I think Youtube ads are very cost efficiant and are a great tool for musicians. It is a product where advertising really makes sense / not like a tv commercial for diappers or some other FMCG…) It is especially good for small musicians that need to introduce their music to many people.
• Right now ads on youtube are totally undervalued (which will most certainly change over time). I cannot imagine that in 5 years from now youtube ads will still be that cheap.
• However youtube has the problem that high quality advertising material is rare. so maybe the price might stay low for a pretty long time.
• Youtube ads can probably be even more efficiant if good keywords are selected!
• If it was my decission for a band as small as in legend I would buy advertising on youtube for thousand till two thousand euros.
• I would not need to depend on any label or promo company or any other person to reach a very large audience at a rather cheap price! I would have real people who spend time getting to know my music!

in other words we again see a situation in which the web can help people to solve a problem. A new comer can reach out to hundres of thousands of people at very low cost and independent of other people!
So tell me what is your experience with youtube ads?
 

Advertising on the rest of the web is still much more profitable than advertising on social networks.

If Facebook continues to attract advertisers, they could easily create an ad program that is similar to Google Adsense. Many Facebook-users provide the network with detailed information about their interests. Thus, Facebook will be able to deliver highly personalized advertising to any user on any website. They don’t even have to care about the websites content. Even if the user would not have a Facebook-account, Facebook could still be able to predict the topics of interest for users of a website and again deliver highly personalized ads that do not necessarily have to correspond to the content of the website. I strongly believe that this is the real thread coming from Facebook to Google and this is what Google is afraid of!
What is your oppinion? Why do you think Google had to enter the social networking market?

1. I am reading Eli Parisers book about the filterbubble. I don’t want to review it until I am done which happens hopefully somewhen soon. But it has a connection to the other thing I am doing
2. I am promoting my Band’s first album ballads n bullets that just came out

I was able to convince my band that money invested in Google Adwords and Facebook is probably a better deal than spending money in print campaigns. Online is much more efficiant to reach our target group and introduce them to our music. So far so good! But sometimes you discover the worst or boldest things while doing something.

Some Background

As we all know facebook is filtering your social newsstream. Recently we did an update and send a reminder to all our fans on facebook (2000) and reminded them about the upcoming release. We got 2500 Impressions and received 100 clicks resulting in 6 sales. Not so cool!
Right now – just by my experience of watching impressions in facebook and several websites und seeing how much traffic comes from facebook to our homepage I am about to belief that Facebook counts ten impressions to your status update if one user visits his facebook news stream 10 times and was therby ten times able to see your news update.
Apperantly it seems that I am not mistaking with my guess. Have a look at Tim Wilson’s post on how Impressions are counted on Facebook:
http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2010/01/27/facebook-measurement-impressions-from-status-updates/
Let us think again what it means to have 2500 Impressions of a status update. Could it be possible that these 2500 impressions have been generated only by a couple of users – let us say less than 200?

See how bold facebook is!

While booking ads facebook is offering me a deal that made me sit down and look twice! I am now able to buy visibility of my own status updates in the social news stream. If I pay for each click my status update receives Facebook will not only show the update to all of our fans. But they will also show the highly filtered interactions of them to their friends!
To make buying advertising even more attractive Facebook is telling me that our friend of a friend network has about 206’000 users that could be reached with the status updates of my band. Up till today my status updates only reached a visibility of 5500 impressions. The 206’000 that facebook offers me is only 40 times as much. Assuming that every user produces only one impression and we know that a user produces many more impressions.
A factor of 40 or higher is an amazingly huge number. Probably the number every marketing person has in mind when he decides that everyone has to be on facebook now!
Isn’t that insane! Facebooks user experience suggests us to be there because we get think that we get this incredible high reach. but the reality is that we get nothing but our premium customers if we don’t pay facebook. Facebook should pay me that I produce such a great content on facebook!

What should I say? It is a curse!

Everyone jumps on the facebook train with the totally wrong expectations. No not everyone and all of their friends see your advertising and status updates!
Of course if something really sepcial happens facebook really makes you viral but most the time you have no advanage by using facebook in comparison to other marketing methods. Especially the only one that is winning always is facebook. I have hardly seen any brand in the world that was printed and promoted on so many flyer / poster / and mags and even tv commercials. Amazingly facebook did not even pay one Cent to appear on all these media. Everyone pushes their own facebook channel – hoping to become viral – instead of pushing their own brand and thinking about how to really bring out the brand and do marketing or thinking about how to make a great product.

Everyone seems to expect miracles from Facebook

Hello everybody! Think about it! The world wide GNP won’t grow just because everyone is now using facebook! It is only facebook that is growing!
By the way I was warning everyone about the fact that you should focus on your website and not on facebook in one of my articles about the perfect band website. It is just to risky to relay on facebook. First it was great. now it is big and policies are changed over and over again!

What is the idea?

Recently I was searching for a book a friend recommended to me. I wasn’t sure weather I wanted to buy or not. So I did what anyone would probably do. I left the store keeping in mind that I could later decide weather I want to spend the money. Today – about one week later – I was searching for something completely different browsing on a website and realized the advertising of the exact same book by a store I visited before. Interestingly the web shop was a German one and the ad was displayed on an English speaking American website. That was kind of scary. So what happened here? I was looking at the source code and figured out that Criteo (not Google!) is running the Ad server behind it. A quick scan on their homepage lead to the following video:

I think the idea is very clear. The problem with this issue as usual is privacy so let’s dig into it.

privacy concerns of Criteo

As we saw on the video the whole system works – as we could have guessed – by setting a cookie.

“A cookie, also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie, is a piece of text stored on a user’s computer by their web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information, which may be encrypted for information privacy and data security purposes. The cookie is sent as a field in the header of the HTTP response by a web server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. As text, cookies are not executable. Because they are not executed, they cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses. However, due to the browser mechanism to set and read cookies, they can be used as spyware (see zombie cookie and evercookie for more details). Anti-spyware products may warn users about some cookies because cookies can be used to track computer activity—a privacy concern, later causing possible malware.”
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

So the whole discussion can be reduced to the cookie discussion. Well any website uses cookies to enhance the websites usability. This does not mean that I think there is no problem. but please be realistic. If you browse a web shop the shop – at least if it is a professional one – will save information about your browsing behavior. Even though you can be recognized by the cookie the whole process is still very anonymous. Once you delete the cookie (and Criteo gives you the explicit possibility on their website) retargeted ad’s cannot reach you because you won’t be recognized. The only thing Criteo will probably still save about you is your browsing behavior on that very shop you visited in the first place. This data is not linked to your name or anything that could identify you.
The privacy of this service is much higher or better than Facebook. So if you are using Facebook without fear you shouldn’t be afraid of Criteo’s retargeting advertising system.

How will this change the online ad market?

Google could easily install a similar ad system. There are probably several good reasons not to do it.

• Adsense is running very good and Google has the competitive advantage of being market leader.
• Customers have to be on your web shop first before you can retarget the product.
• Due to the more efficient advertising conversion rates will probably rise. If the cost for the advertisement stays constant the publisher (Google and their publishers network) would loose on its profit margin.

The last one is exactly where I see a competitive threat to the Googleconomy. The advertising is more efficient. If I was an advertiser. i would most certainly give it a try. The problem with this system is that it is hard to use with new products.
The whole discussion leads to the question why doesn’t Amazon install a similar system? They have a huge knowledge about customers interest and a wide network of publishers in their partner program. It would be easy to deliver highly targeted ads and improve the user experience and conversion rates of their affiliate program. I guess Amazon is concerned about privacy. Also Amazon is the market leader. So obviously they are not doing to many mistakes.
What is your oppinion about this startup and their product?