We’d like to thank Chris from Back Booth for helping us abate venue costs and printing out our flyers, as well. Big thanks also goes out to Double Donut Productions and Zero Dark Cinema for their contributions. We’d also really like to thank our sponsors for this event. Without them it would have been impossible to make the donations we’ll now be able to make. Show ‘em the love, people. Kontor Business Support, Volcanoes, Mochi, and The Black Olive. I know there’s people we missed and you know who you are, we value your talents and your generosity.

Thanks all for listening to our jabber and putting up with our online noise pollution leading up to this event. It has really been a labor of love for us and we would all really appreciate seeing you out there supporting MercyCorps, Yele Haiti, and Doctor’s Without Borders. 

-Kyle, Jesse, Eric, Sarah, Matthew, Quinlan, Janaé, all the artists, and our show sponsors.

Too many believe ALL publicity is good publicity.  That saturation is the key to success.  How many of you have had a band or company that you admired and followed but the minute they started cluttering your inbox, even if they were getting better and having cool things happen to them, you lost “that feeling” and desire to “want to know”.  I know this has happened to me on SEVERAL occasions and with several different types of artists and media and a lot of it is due to the feeling of “just being a part of a email list” and no longer feeling the excitement of possible personal interaction w/ your artist or special interest that you once looked up to.  This is the case and reason for several failing businesses in general.  It is a universal feeling to “want to feel involved” and to have the “desire to make a difference” and it’s very hard for ANYONE to just sit back and keep supporting when you feel like your personal support effort is doing NOTHING to make the other party any more or any less successful and/or make them give any more or any less of a SHIT!  More on the pros and cons of general marketing and business promotion later…

Back to the music and concert bizz… Ever hear of hard core fans abandoning an act when it becomes popular?  Same thing.  It’s cool to see your old fave in the press once or twice.  If they appear every single day, online, on the cover of multiple publications, you’re turned off and abandon them.

Just like big time arena artists (that FINALLY made it to that status), people come once, and then, if the act can even make it to tour again, they play the theatres and bigger venues and those don’t even sell out.

“It’s no longer about casual users, it’s about fans” says Bob Lefsetz.

It’s too hard to reach everybody today.  And you piss off those who truly care.

“I got the message.  Don’t beat me over the head with it.  Don’t send me another e-mail with the same damn content.  Fans pay attention.  They caught it the first time”.

Bob Lefsetz: So, start with getting fans.

The top forty acts usually don’t have any.  At best, listeners are fans of the song.  And they’re searching for another great song, not to hear another song by you!

For the artists and bands in the industry today:  Feed your audience great material, that they can pull when they want to.  Don’t make them sign up for your e-mail list to get some reward, they’re just going to be pissed off at you when you keep dunning them in the future.  Let people sign up at their option.  Otherwise, they’ll use fake names and you’ll end up with a shit list anyway.

You’re now in a relationship with your listener.  Before you abuse him, think of how you’d treat a spouse, or a friend.  That’s how you have to treat a fan today.

~SARAH

While all you managers out there are fielding offers for next year’s festivals, start thinking NOW about what you can do to maximize your outreach to these massive audiences. 

One of the biggest problems for every act is building your base from 0-5000. And it used to be, you’d be allllll alone (or have to spend an arm & a leg) to build a following. 

But think about this — a festival isn’t just another gig, it’s a marketing opportunity, a huge vehicle you can use to build your following. As festival season approaches, get your strategy together to figure out how to get part of that crowd to join your team. Used to be, if you’re slated on the small tent at noon, you were screwed, but at least you were happy to be invited to the party. These days, there’s no reason for attendees to miss you if they didn’t catch your official performance. 

Check with the promoter to see what is & is not allowed, but tap into that crowd to make them aware of you, to sign up to your email list, your Facebook fan page, your Twitter feed. Offer content for the festival’s site, leading up to the event – videos, live chats, contest goodies, which all help get your name out there. 

Give up a pair of your tickets as a prize to encourage folks to retweet you. Tweet your fans to meet you the night before at a hotel barbecue. Have an onsite scavenger hunt – put your posse next to the lemon icee stand at noon, next to the corndog stand at 2pm, next to the churro cart at 4pm for fans to pick up some kind of band goodies. 

Hell, managers and promoters should work together to shake things up this festival season, pull a few pages out of the Phish playbook and really surprise fans with cool treats above and beyond the scheduled chaos — host an impromptu acoustic set in the parking lot for kids waiting to get onto the grounds. Have bigger acts do a surprise set on the tiny tent at noon just to freak people out. Wake up campers in the middle of the night by playing from the back of a golf cart. Twitter all this stuff however you can –- that is, if you can even get any reception on the grounds (promoters — pleeeease work with your cell providers to boost reception!). 

Allow yourself to be YouTubed / Flickr’d / tagged walking around the grounds passing out tamales in a bear suit.

Baby bands, you have no followers. You’ve been invited to play a venue that fits 50,000 people a day. If you’re staying backstage all day drinking beers with your pals, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Bigger bands, the playing field is so level that there ain’t even a 6 foot stage with a 3 foot barricade dividing you and your fans anymore. The walls are down; give your fans something cool to talk about. 

Source: Music Tip Sheet (www.newmusictipsheet.com) by Steve Perry

This doesn’t bother me anymore.

The Lovely Bones was a great film though. The movie was captivating and inspiring, but a part of me will never understand the protagonist, Suzie Salmon. I’ll never know what it was like to be a 14 year old girl who only wants love and the truth after her murder. I just can’t relate.

Theaters can really get you these days. The only positive aspect about Regal Cinemas is the film that you are going to see. The company decided several months ago to terminate their student admission price of a climbing $8.50 on Fridays and Saturdays. Their strategic selection of days to eliminate were perfect, as they’re the only days some students can make it to the theater.  Two adult tickets please for The Lovely Bones at 11:30PM. $10 adult admission tickets? Sure.

This explains why Cameron’s 1998 film, Titanic, is going to be kicked out of its #1 grossing box office worldwide spot of $1.8 billion by his newest film, Avatar, which is already at $1.4 billion in under a month’s time since it’s December 18th release.

However, there’s a major flaw to this system: Titanic didn’t have several different mediums to watch the film in with high price brackets that “compliment” the Regal experience. An adult admission at Regal Cinemas for the IMAX experience is $15. Children are at $12. The average ticket price in 1998 was $4.69. Regal was probably at $6.  What if films had a popular vote count versus box office gross? It would be neat to know that over 10 million people went to go see Avatar over the last several weeks.

These are paying numbers. Btjunkie.org has over 119,000 seeders to download the film illegally as a bit torrent file.

If anything, I’m just glad people are still paying for art. There’s obviously a demand for quality entertainment. But what if we gave that experience to customers at the cheapest price while still maintaining to make a dollar? It’s worth it to me in the long run.

Source: Avatar vs. Titanic (http://movies.rediff.com/report/2010/jan/11/can-avatar-sink-the-titanic.htm)
Source: Regal Cinemas (http://www.regmovies.com)
Source: Exhibitor Admission Prices (http://www.leesmovieinfo.net/Adjuster.php)
Source: Box Office Gross (http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm)
Source: Btjunkie.org (http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Avatar-2009-PROPER-TS-XviD-MAXSPEED/419636684b463ca2aa2f9347b18e9f6b1a9090bdb073)

“Just Got to Be” Music Video

Also, check out this live performance.  Bad Ass.

“I Got Mine” Letterman 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/media/28paywall.html

What you can do is make a search engine pay for the privilege of crawling your site. You CAN do it. But it’s STUPID.

Rupert, Viacom, and all the other content owners will not learn. will. not. learn.

We as New Marketers tend to dismiss any fear of an unmeasurable ROI with hot terms like “brand building” and “product awareness” in association with “community building” and “brand ambassadors.” Now I’m not one to downplay the significance of those intangible benefits, but in this argument, I fall on the side of these fearful corporations. New Marketing and specifically Social Media is still relatively unreliable, unregulated, and more often than not: unmeasurable.

That is the scariest thing to a CMO, Marketing Director, or Product Manager. Traditional advertising is measurable, predictable, and reliable. It may have a poor turnover percentage, but it’s there, black and white, clear as crystal. This is contradictory to the fact that we know Social Media in general is more like courting and less like hunting. It’s a longer process with a potential for better results, but with no measurable statistics to prove it.

So what are we to do as New Marketers? Even though the TiVos and the Hulus are changing the TV game and the big blogs are changing the Newspaper and Magazine game, once the final nail is in the coffin of traditional media, we will be no more reliable and predictable than we are today, unless we make some major changes.

In short, we need to define an ROI. Companies are starting to do it for themselves. Dell sees the value, claiming it has made $3 Million in sales from twitter over the past two years. So where is the ROI? Clickthrough is a good place to start, but how do you assign a value to “community building.” You can’t. But you can define an opt-in audience in terms of ROI.

My father was EVP and COO for an international Magazine for a decade and would assign a gross ROI to every single reader in terms of the increase in ad sales that reader provided them. For companies that are online and sell ads, that’s a good starting point, but it’s one we’ve been on for a while. How do you assign a value to a fan, a follower, a retweet, an @reply, a wall post, versus an actual visit to a website? The value is tough to assign, but in order to really make a difference in the way Social Media is viewed by Traditional companies, we must begin to measure it on a tangible scale, even if the scale is measured in months, not days.

So I say this to my fellow New Marketers, we need to work together to bring about case studies in ROI and begin the process of proving ROI on a scale that is easy to understand and is comprehensive. It is possible, because Dell, Naked Pizza, and others have measured their own, it’s time now to bring that measurement to a larger audience and begin to utilize ROI as a sales point and as a measurement of our own effectiveness.

I want to hear your thoughts: How can we begin to measure ROI in a tangible way?