I’ve been a bit behind on blogging the last couple weeks. Thanks again to everyone for your great comments on my Entertainment as a Service post. And for those interested, there’s a follow-up post about what I think this will mean for conventional media companies over on my personal blog.
The main reason I’ve been slacking on the blogging is because we’re getting very close to the private beta of the Snowball Factory’s first product, appropriately called awe.sm. And the reason I won’t be telling you more about awe.sm this week is because I’m at SXSW courtesy of my friend and the Snowball Factory’s first ever customer, Happyjoel — who of course *won* his trip here in a contest.
To celebrate the launch of awe.sm alpha customer Famery, the Snowball Factory is sponsoring a SXSW after-hours party tomorrow night at a top secret location.
And here are some photos to show you just how fun we are to party with:
P.S. In reality, this is more just me and my friends being bummed about the lack of places to party late-night in Austin coupled with the fact that Joel has a really big hotel room. So, we decided to buy a bunch of booze and invite people to party with us after the bars close. And being the scrappy entrepreneur that I am, I decided to see if we could turn it into a little publicity stunt for our new product. It’s still gonna rawk though, and you totally want to come!
I just got back from a really fun (and delicious) lunch with Peter of Pantless Knights, who is in LA working on a hilarious new video, and one of the main things we discussed was the idea of Entertainment-as-a-Service. The term is a reference to the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is a business model generally contrasted with the conventional packaged or ’shrinkwrap’ software model. Essentially, SaaS is a subscription business and packaged software is a retail business.
The entertainment industry is a retail business. Books, movies, tv shows, music are almost universally sold as one-off purchases. But, those things are just the packaging and the people selling them to you are just middle-men. The business of entertainment (not to be confused with the entertainment *industry*) is fundamentally a marketplace of attention between fans and content creators — fans have a finite supply of attention for which content creators are competing. So, then what is the entertainment industry? To use a very relevant analogy, it is the collection of intermediary businesses (i.e. publishers, studios, networks, labels) that have been acting like investment bankers, taking the raw materials of talent and creativity and packaging them up in a form they know how to sell (i.e. retail) and commanding a big slice of profit along the way. Entertainment doesn’t want to be a retail business, and that is the fundamental essence of the disruption the Internet has unleashed on the entertainment industry.
[Clarification: For the sake of this discussion, I'm using the term 'content creator' to represent those who add unique creative talent to the production process. As my dad pointed out, content creation is rarely a solo effort (most notably in film production, which can involve hundreds of individual contributors) to which studios, networks, labels, and publishers often contribute substantial value. But as those contributions are opaque and thus interchangeable as far as the consumer is concerned, I am excluding those who make them from the class I refer to as 'content creators' in this post. Otherwise said, even though the sound engineer plays a crucial role in creating the album, no one buys it based on *who* the sound engineer was.]
When you think about what elements of the entertainment business technology has really undermined, it’s nothing more than the packaging — the time slots and release dates and viewing windows and region codes that are artificial constructs of these middle-men trying to slice-and-dice the content into as many tranches as possible to squeeze out every last cent of profit. Just like the investment bankers and their CDOs fragmented and obscured the connections between investors and their investments, so have the studios, networks, publishers, and labels introduced complexity into the connections between content creators and their audiences. While that complexity, and the companies who created it, may have been a necessity in an era of technologically inferior marketing and distribution systems, they are simply market inefficiencies in the Internet age.
The business model of packaged software invites feature bloat, because it’s upgrade driven and you need to continually find ways to justify why Thingamajig 2009 Pro Edition™ is so much better than Thingamajig 2008 Pro Edition™. Software as a Service businesses have a much different (and arguably greater) challenge, they need to continue to create value for their customers month after month….So, you end up with a much more customer-centric product…and a vendor who is truly interested in addressing your customer needs.
The first priority of a retail business is to maximize sales, building brand loyalty and repeat business may be means to that end but they always take a back-seat to whatever else will drive more sales. Whereas in a subscription business, customer retention (and thus customer satisfaction) is always top priority, even above new customer acquisition. So if a studio believes they can get a lot of people to see a crappy movie by spending more on marketing and less on quality, they will (and do, again, and again, and again…). Because all you’re buying from them is the packaging, they know you aren’t really paying attention to whether it’s a Fox or Warner Brothers or Paramount film (do you buy your cereal based on who made the box it comes in?). But, a director would rather disown a bad film than endorse the studio releasing something that doesn’t meet his standards and his fans’ expectations. This is because the director knows that his relationship with his fans is a subscription business, and if he disappoints them he will be unable to continue exchanging his content for their attention in the future. The studios understand this too — they don’t give Tom Cruise $25M (plus a cut of the gross) per movie because his acting skills bring $25M of quality to the screen, they do it because he has more than $25M in ticket, DVD, and merchandise sales worth of fans.
Entertainment is naturally a subscription business, and the Internet returns it to its natural state. The content creators who thrive online are those who understand this and focus on the ongoing satisfaction of their customers (see Ze Frank, Michael Buckley, Chris Leavins). The level of customer satisfaction these creators deliver is really only possible on the Internet because they can go direct-to-consumer without need of the middle-men and their packaging. These creators publish in all forms — video, photos, blogging, micro-blogging, music. They do not see themselves constrained by the legacy dividing lines of the entertainment industry, their goal is to entertain their audience by any and all means available. There is no distinction for them between primary and ancillary content, they are 360° entertainment brands. The other thing that has made these creators so successful online is their direct interaction with their customers. The best your most engaged fans can do offline is give you their personal attention (and the money that comes with it) and try to recruit others to do so as well. But online, they can interact with you and become part of the show. Empowering your customers is the surest way to make them even more engaged. As I wrote in another recent post on my personal blog:
Bringing your customers into the product development process has the dual benefits of helping you build better and more customer-centric products and making your customers your most passionate sales people (because after all, it’s their product too).
So, the Internet enables these creators to spend more time listening to their fans and creating new content they’ll enjoy while outsourcing the marketing to the community for free. This is the exact opposite of the offline retail model in which the studio takes money out of production budgets to put it into marketing campaigns. The ability to establish deeper relationships with their fans also allows online content creators to attain higher average attention per customer (ARPU) than is possible in the retail world, thereby making it easier to build more value by going deeper with a smaller audience.
To be clear, I’m not trying to say the only business model for content on the Internet is a recurring subscription fee. The ’subscription business’ to which I’m referring is more the theoretical exchange of value between content creators and their fans, which can and will take many forms — including selling packaged goods. I’m also not saying that the online entertainment market is solely the domain of Internet-only content creators. In fact, I believe the Internet is most powerful as an entertainment marketplace when the quality and reputation of a historically offline content creator is freed of the constraints of the legacy packaged goods business model. Take for example Josh Freese, who gets extra points for using this freedom precisely to illustrate the absurdity of the conventional retail approach.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, the code below will not work for you. Instead, go here to get the plugin.
Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I’d estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter. For me, more than Digg or Hacker News or anything else, Techmeme is my social news source.
As such, it was big news to me when Techmeme announced this past Wednesday that they’re now accepting “tips” via Twitter. So much so that I was hoping (and even not so subtly suggesting) some of my Twitter “friends” would submit one of the blog posts I wrote since the feature was announced. But, then I realized most of my friends didn’t know they could do this — and even if they did, the syntax is irregular (why “tip @techmeme” instead of just “@techmeme”?) and the whole process is a bit complicated.
So, it occurred to me we should have a “Digg It” equivalent embeddable call-to-action for Techmeme submission. Since no one else seemed to have made one yet, I took a stab:
As you can tell, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m just a lowly product monkey, and this isn’t meant to be anything more than my version of a working feature spec.
That said, here’s the code:
<div class="techmeme-suggest-button">
<p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small">
<a style="text-decoration: none" title="Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter" href="javascript:var d=document,f='http://twitter.com/home/',l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p='?status=tip%20@Techmeme%20',q=e(l.href)+'%20'+e(d.title);1;try{if(!/^(.*\.)?twitter\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z){a=function(){if(!window.open(f+p+q,'twitter'))l.href=f+p+q};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)">Suggest to <sub><img src="http://thesnowballfactory.com/images/techmemechicklet_16.png" border="0" alt="" /></sub></a><a style="text-decoration: none" title="What's this?" href="http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips" target="_blank"><sup>?</sup></a>
</p>
</div>
If you want to use it, just copy and paste it into the bottom of your blog posts (make sure you’re editing in HTML mode). You can change the size and font of the text by editing <p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small"> (for example, try font-family: serif or font-size: medium). You can also change the size of the Techmeme favicon by switching out techmemechicklet_16.png for techmemechicklet_24.png (24px) or techmemechicklet_32.png (32px).
Lord knows it’s *ugly* (both the code and the design). So, real developers and designers I invite you to please improve upon it. All I ask is for you to post a link to your better version in the comments below, so we can all use it (and I can stop using my crappy one ).
Update: This blog is hosted on WordPress.com. And I was pretty surprised when I was originally able to embed the javascript for the buttons and it didn’t get stripped out, because I thought you weren’t allowed to run any scripts on WP.com. Well, it turns out you aren’t but they just don’t check for it when you post. At some point in the last 11hrs, the javascript powering the buttons in this post got stripped out (thereby breaking them, to which Russ alerted me). To make them work again, I’ve now just hardcoded the URL’s for them. The example javascript should still work for you (as long as your blog isn’t on WP.com), and you can see the javascript version in action at the bottom of this post on my (self-hosted) personal blog.
Update 2: The post just made the front page of Techmeme thanks to a mention from Gabe and a tip from Rahmin. If that’s not meta, I don’t know what is . And, it’s super cool to get some love from Gabe — I’m a huge fan of what he and the team have done over at Techmeme.
Update 3: As my buddy Mark just figured out, even self-hosted WordPress chokes on javascript in the body of the post. The only reason I didn’t notice this on my self-hosted WP blog is because I have the (very handy) Exec-PHP plugin installed, which apparently not only executes php in your posts but also js. The elegant solution (other than you also installing Exec-PHP on your self-hosted WP blog) would be to do a php version or maybe even a WP plug-in or template tag. But, frankly I can’t be bothered . So, I might just make a bookmarklet that generates static HTML for a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button based on whatever page you’re on, so you can copy and paste it into any post on any publishing platform that supports HTML.
One can (and many do) spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying to cultivate the largest Twitter following possible, and those two posts are good starting points for anyone to whom that sounds interesting. But if you’re like me, you don’t have an infinite amount of time to spend pursuing the diminishing marginal returns of incremental followers. This post is for those of us seeking to get the most bang for our proverbial Twitter buck, the 80% of the value for 20% of the effort. Below I’ll lay out some best practices (many lifted from the above referenced posts) and tools I’ve found disproportionately useful.
Best Practices:
Get a good username – Twitter is different from a lot of services in this area for 2 reasons: 1) usernames play a vital role in Twitter’s social interactions (as opposed to most other services where they’re basically just a login ID); and 2) they allow you to change your username at will. For example, my original Twitter username was jonathanhstrauss and when @replies came about my friends used to complain about having to type all those characters to respond to me. In order to take full advantage of the value of retweets (RTs) and @replies, try to keep your username as short and easy to spell as possible (i.e. try to avoid particularly esoteric homonym spellings). Keep in mind that many users will be typing your username into their mobile phones, and you won’t get any benefit from their RT or @reply love if they misspell it. Also, try to make your username as interesting/self-explanatory as possible. Think of it as your billboard to potential followers who may see it in a RT or @reply with no context other than that tweet — try to give them as many reasons as possible to click through and learn more about you.
Fill in your profile page! – This is a total no-brainer. If your Twitter username is a billboard (or banner ad), think of your profile (http://twitter.com/username) as the landing page for that ad. First of all, make sure that between your username and your real name they can figure out who you are, and put the most informative URL possible in as your website. My opinion on the Bio field is that witty and interesting is more valuable than informative (how informative can you really be in 160 characters). Think of the Bio as a way to convey your personality (or brand identity) in haiku. Upload a profile picture of a decent size, Twitter allows people to click through the thumbnail to see a larger version which is another great (and very powerful) opportunity to express your personality/brand identity. Tweak your design a little bit, even if it’s just choosing one of the pre-made themes. I’m not saying you need to create a custom background (though some are pretty cool), but just spend a few minutes messing around with the colors to get a visual vibe that matches your personality/brand (also, never underestimate the subconscious impact of just having a page that is visually different from everyone else’s — it will help you stand out, literally).
Check your @replies – Another no-brainer complicated by Twitter’s UI design. A surprising number of people are unaware that you can click the @Replies tab right below Home (or go to http://twitter.com/replies) to see all the public messages written to you (i.e. starting with @your_username) even if you don’t follow their senders. These people are *talking to you*, you should at least listen to what they’re saying and maybe even talk back.
Find your niche – While the best chance to get “viral” exposure is to have the users with the most followers mention your username in one of their tweets (generally as a RT or @reply), it’s only as good as the probability they’ll actually do so. For example, I could spend an hour trying to get Robert Scoble to mention me to his 52,000+ followers, which isn’t particularly likely to happen, or I could spend that same hour trying to engage people in my area of interest/expertise, and thus much more likely to respond, who have several hundred followers. To find these topical conversations you can use http://search.twitter.com to look for terms related to your interests, or seek out vertical-specific tools and communities (like StockTwits for finance). You can also browse people asking for help on LazyTweet (or by searching for ‘lazyweb’ on Twitter Search), answering questions in your area of expertise is a great way to build a *relevant* follower base.
Pimp it hard – Advertise that you’re on Twitter on all your other profiles across the web. The people who know you are most likely to follow you, and a lot more people than you’d expect are on Twitter nowadays. Arguably, the value of an engaged Twitter follower is high enough to justify a pretty high theoretical CPM when you’re thinking about how prominently to feature your Twitter badge on your site. There’s also a Twitter Facebook App you can add to your profile or Page (though it currently only supports one Twitter account per Facebook user, so you can’t do both) that will display your latest tweet in a box on your page. It also has an option to post your latest tweet as your Facebook status, this is *not* recommended for people who tweet more than once an hour — it will piss your Facebook friends off something fierce.
Tools:
BrightKit – Is a great tool for anyone who has a personal Twitter account and one or more work ones (e.g. in addition to @jhstrauss, I also manage @snowballyeti and @awesm). Not only does BrightKit give you a single login from which you can send tweets and view @replies, but it also allows you to schedule tweets to be sent at a specified time in the future. While they do offer a proprietary URL shortener (ow.ly) integrated in their post UI, I recommend making the extra effort to use bit.ly (see below).
bit.ly – When you’re limited to 140 characters, each one counts. So, URL shorteners (like TinyURL) are especially valuable to anyone who shares links on Twitter. Bit.ly is a URL shortener with statistics, which enables you to check how many people actually clicked on that link you tweeted yesterday. Make sure to register so you get unique bit.ly URLs (logged-out users all get the same bit.ly URL for a given destination URL, making stats meaningless) and can save all the pages you shorten. And as a bonus, you can integrate with multiple Twitter accounts to tweet straight from bit.ly (though you can only tweet to one account at a time).
TwitterFeed – I love TwitterFeed because of how simple in purpose and extensible it is. You basically just give it an RSS feed to monitor and a Twitter account to which to tweet new feed items. But, it also offers every option I’ve ever wanted — from which items to tweet (based on filters) to frequency of tweets to what they should say to what URL shortener to use (and it now supports bit.ly login so I can track my TwitterFeed URLs through my bit.ly account ). The one major drawback of this service is its reliance on OpenID — trying to sign-up/in is not for the faint of heart. But once you’re in, it’s totally worth it.
switchAbit – Like TwitterFeed, but more generalized (and without the pain in the ass of OpenID). SwitchAbit supports 9 services (including Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Flickr) as well as RSS feeds as both sources and destinations. It gives you a cool UI for building ’switches’ to route content between sources and destinations and supports multiple sources and destinations per switch. It also handles keyword based filters (though it’s impossible to find in the UI) and uses bit.ly as the default URL shortener (but you can’t associate it with your bit.ly account for tracking). The main reason I prefer TwitterFeed over switchAbit for Twitter is that switchAbit gives you no ability to configure the content of the resulting tweets. But if you’re trying to route content to several destinations, switchAbit is a solid solution.
SocialToo – I know this app is supposed to have more features, but all I use it for is to auto-follow Twitter users who follow my work accounts. Other than posting tweets or viewing @replies (both covered by BrightKit above) the only remaining reason I need to login to Twitter is to follow people. While it’s good practice, even for a brand account, to regularly find relevant users to follow (see Find your niche above), you don’t always want to wait that long to follow back people who just followed you. SocialToo solves that issue without me needing to log-in to a different Twitter account every time I get a follow notification email. It also tracks who unfollows you and provides a daily email digest of follow and unfollow actions including your last tweet before that action.
TwitterCounter – While I’m not a big believer in Twitter follower stats (I’m much more interested in seeing measurement of meaningful actions, like clicks on bit.ly URLs I tweet), TwitterCounter seems like the most straightforward and useful solution for those who want to track such things over time. IMHO, the riot of Twitter rank and influence apps out there are nothing more than viral gimmicks. Knowing how influential I am on Twitter relative to Jeremiah Owyang is worthless to me since no one can quantify the value of my Twitter influence or his.
Zentact – This last one is kind of an outlier because it’s not a Twitter tool per se, but a networking tool that uses Twitter as a communications channel (the other is email). Ironically, I think it is also the tool with the most potential to create value for you on Twitter. Zentact aims to strengthen your connections by alerting you to content of mutual interest to you and people in your address book. It then allows you to reach out to those contacts by sharing that interesting web page with them via email or Twitter. These are exactly the type of tweets that build a strong base of *relevant* followers (see Find your niche above), which is the most difficult and crucial part of growing your influence on Twitter. Zentact is currently in private beta, but I’ll get you an invite if you ask for one in the comments.
The most important thing to remember is that Twitter (like all social media) is a conversation, and no tools or best practices are going to change that. You must understand (and respect) the fundamental dynamics of the system before any of what we just covered will do you any real good. Deb Schultz has a great quote to help illustrate where the line should be drawn for marketing in social media: ”if you are invited to a dinner party and you show up and start selling Tupperware, there is a good chance you will not be invited back.” I couldn’t agree more, but the converse is also true — if you’re a great conversationalist, you’ll not only get invited to the host’s next dinner party but maybe some of the guests’ too. Treat Twitter like a dinner party, and you’ll do just fine (with or without everything else above).
Update: I just wrote a post on my personal blog called A Twitter Marketing Success Story about a great experience I had as the target of marketers on Twitter. I highly recommend it as an example of how to use Twitter as a marketing tool for good
Last week, our friend (and first client) Joel Moss Levinson, aka Happyjoel, appeared in a CBS Evening News with Katie Couric segment called Cashing In on YouTube (watch it below). For Joel, this follows an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a profile in the New York Times, and (our personal favorite) being named an AccessHollywood.com Rising Star. As you can see in the clip below, the majority of this coverage has been driven by the novelty of Joel’s success. He’s a guy who subsists entirely by making amusing music videos for products for which he has no personal affinity — what news producer wouldn’t love this story?!
For us though, the real story isn’t the wackiness of Joel’s success but rather how he has achieved it. Of course, having the ability to come up with witty lyrics about how awesome watermelons are and the time and energy to scour the interwebs for brands looking to crowd-source their marketing are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. Michael Buckley, the other online video personality covered in the CBS News segment, told the NY Times “I was spending 40 hours a week on YouTube for over a year before I made a dime.” Like Michael, Joel does a lot more than just what you see on screen. Arguably, making the videos is the easy part (at least for someone like Joel) — the real challenge has been building and cultivating the loyal fan-base (or as Joel calls it, his “contest voting army”) that has made him such a newsworthy phenomenon.
Each of these relationship channels has different strengths and weaknesses, and we have achieved a good measure of success using them in concert through best practices and a substantial time commitment. But, the system is far from perfect. In addition to the redundant work required to build and maintain relationships through all these various channels, it is very difficult to identify and de-duplicate the individuals across them, and it is basically impossible to have a cohesive view of what is going on in your fan universe.
While 800 lbs brands like Britney Spears or 50 Cent have enough clout to ask their fans to sign up for new services, the rest of us need to find effective ways to reach our potential fans where they already live online. YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and other popular social media services provide access to their huge existing audiences, but the relationships you build through them have to be on their terms. We’ve learned from experience in the trenches with clients like Joel and Handsome Donkey, and we’re hard at work on a solution that gives independent online media brands the best of both worlds: access to existing social media audiences with greater control over the fan relationships it generates. So, stay tuned!
Ahoy hoy! Welcome to the Snowball Factory blog (aka SnowBlog), which is dedicated to helping creators of interesting online content learn how to connect with the people who will love it.
The name is a nod to Umair Haque, who now writes for HBS and popularized the concept of the Snowball Effect applied to content on his blog a couple of years ago. The basic idea is that in a world in which you can watch anything you want (like, say on the interwebs), you’re going to want to watch the content that’s most interesting to *you* — and that the most effective way to find out about this interesting content is from like-minded people as opposed to from an impersonal marketing campaign. Thus, Umair argues the abundance of content enabled by the Internet creates the conditions in which the ‘Snowball’ can be more powerful than the ‘Blockbuster.’
There are enough examples of online videos “going viral” and making their creators rich and famous (or at least Internet famous) that we now know Umair’s theory can work in practice. But although these examples of viral success exist, no one really knows how to systematically reproduce them (ya know, like a “Factory” might ).
These successful proofs of concept, if you will, have spawned a phenomenal increase in quality online entertainment content, which in turn has drawn an even larger audience to the medium. But, it has also made standing out from the crowd and reaching the *right* audience more important than ever, which is where word-of-mouth Snowball-style marketing comes in. While the sheer amount of content out there makes it harder than ever to stumble onto a “hit” in the conventional media sense, the number of people discussing and sharing that content makes it easier more possible than ever for engaged content creators to build real relationships with passionate fans and empower those fans to become evangelists to their friends.
Social media services like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have become a promotional platform of sorts (the Social Web) that provides infrastructure for content creators to establish meaningful connections with the largest number of their potential fans at no cost (other than time and effort).
But, the truth is not many people have the time or inclination to be trolling the interwebs to learn about the latest social media g33kery. That’s where we come in — this blog will try to educate content producers on the promotional tools that exist across the Social Web, answer common questions on how they work, and teach best practices for using them most effectively. We’ll also take questions from the audience. So, feel free to send your vexations to asktheyeti[at]thesnowballfactory[dot]com.
).
One can (and many do) spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying to cultivate the largest Twitter following possible, and those two posts are good starting points for anyone to whom that sounds interesting. But if you’re like me, you don’t have an infinite amount of time to spend pursuing the diminishing marginal returns of incremental followers. This post is for those of us seeking to get the most bang for our proverbial Twitter buck, the 80% of the value for 20% of the effort. Below I’ll lay out some best practices (many lifted from the above referenced posts) and tools I’ve found disproportionately useful.
