Internet Marketing Blog

An Ode To Digg (And Its Supporting Online Campaign)

Kina Grannis loves to Digg.

  Two Weeks For Kina 
  Originally uploaded by kasuya

She loves to Digg so much, in fact, that she's written a very clever and catchy song about her Digg love. Clearly, Kina's not alone.

But she's taken it another step by entering her song, Gotta Digg, in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl music video contest. The grand prize winner gets their music video aired during the Super Bowl and gets a recording contract with Interscope Records.

[UPDATE: Two kind readers have helpfully pointed out (see the comments below) that Grannis entered another song to the contest, not Gotta Digg.

I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Gotta Digg, but the fact that she composed that song for her online campaign only makes the campaign itself all the more brilliant!]

Kina's clearly got some marketing savvy in her corner because she's running a pretty sophisticated online campaign to solicit votes for her video.

In addition to asking for votes at her official web site (which is very professionally done, by the way), she has a separate web site for the contest itself: TwoWeeksForKina.com. It is this site that she promotes from her YouTube account and her MySpace page, where she has 2,820 friends and her Facebook page, where she has 850 friends.

She's hosting her contest campaign photos at her Flickr account , where, as of this writing, her 93 contest campaign photos have been viewed more than 900 times. Her only slip at Flickr is that she's wearing a Michael Vick jersey. Oops.

Naturally, her video has been submitted to Digg five times and, as of this writing, has been Dugg 10,734 times.

As of this writing, since Grannis uploaded her Gotta Digg music video to her YouTube account on December 23, the video has been viewed 124,234 times, boasts four out of five stars from 1,438 raters, has been marked as a favorite video by 729 YouTube users, and received 462 comments.

Those numbers are not surprising because the video is number 3 on YouTube's Top Rated Video this week, is the 11th Most Viewed music video this week, and the 42nd Most Responded to video today.

As of this writing, Google Blog Search lists 267 blog posts citing "gotta digg," most of them posted within the past 24 hours. That's pretty remarkable, considering the time period is Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Technorati, meanwhile, lists only 18 posts within it's universe of registered blogs, but among those are highly influential blogs like TechCrunch,  Neatorama, and Buzz Machine. These posts are likely to inspire many more posts about the video down the long tail.

Kina Grannis is either one Internet savvy kid or she's got some very smart online marketers working on her behalf. Regardless, I would not be surprised at all to see her win the contest.

Oh, yeah; here's the video:

Music Marketing Through Blogs, or How I Tuned Out & Discovered New Bands

05.26.06 @ The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA
Originally uploaded by voxtrot

I was trolling Upcoming.org last night to see what shows were coming up and it occurred to me just how important MP3 blogs have become for marketing music and bands.

As a frustrated musician, I love music. As those of us who are passionate about our music can attest, there are few things better than discovering new musicians and bands. And though I don't get to as much as I'd like, I love to see bands live.

Back in the day when I played in bands and had a ton of time on my hands, I'd devour newly discovered  bands, listen to as much of their music as possible, memorize the lyrics to their songs, watch for their videos on MTV (yeah, that was back when MTV actually aired music videos).

There were three primary ways you'd learn about new bands back then: 1) friends, 2) radio, and 3) MTV. Nowadays, I find new music through MP3 blogs.

I've tuned out of music radio because I have no patience for the commercials. With the exception of stuff like talk radio-sports or otherwise--and live events, I just don't listen to radio. When I do listen to the radio for music, I listen to The Current, Minnesota Public Radio's ad-free modern music station. But even The Current has annoying pledge drives to give me a reason not to listen.

When I want music, I turn to my trusty iPod and that gets filled from the MP3 blogs to which I subscribe. Some of my favorites:

• Stereogum
• IndieFeed
• I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
• An Aquarium Drunkard
• The Yellow Stereo
• Large Hearted Boy
• The rest of my bookmarked MP3 blogs

So I learn about new bands not from traditional sources but from my favorite MP3 sites, MP3 search engines like Hype Machine and elbo.ws, and music sharing sites like last.fm. I think I'm becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Plus, I spread my love these bands among my friends and coworkers. They laugh because I have a "new favorite band" every week.

Back in the day, when I wanted to go see a band, I'd go to the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star Tribune, our local newspaper, or I'd get a copy of our free weekly alternative newspaper, The City Pages. Or I'd hear about upcoming concerts on the radio.

Now I go to Upcoming.org, or, occasionally, the web site of a nightclub that has live music like First Avenue or The Fine Line. I'd rather pay ten to twenty bucks for a far superior performance in a nightclub for a relatively unknown band than $200 to $350 for an inferior concert by an international superstar in a cavernous auditorium.

But for MP3 blogs, though, I would not have recognized three-fourths of the bands with upcoming gigs that were listed on Upcoming.org.

In addition to MySpace and YouTube, MP3 blogs have been a boon to music marketing, especially for the unsigned musicians and bands.

I may have only downloaded the one or two promotional MP3 songs that Voxtrot or Spoon released online for blog fodder, for example, but now I know who they are and am more likely to buy a CD or go to a concert. Were it not for the MP3 blogs, their names would not have jumped out at me on Upcoming.org.

From a music lover's point of view, too, MP3 blogs have made a vast amount of music far more widely available than ever before. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of great music out there.

And that is what we Internet marketers do in fact call, "A very good thing."

Read More: Music Marketing

Online Videos - Demographics

If you haven't yet noticed, online video has really taken off this year and it has everything to do with the success of Apple's video iPod. Once Apple introduced the product and announced that NBC would offer TV shows for download to the iPod at $1.99 a pop, the floodgates opened.

In January Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that more than the company had sold more than 8 million videos through iTunes between October 12 and December 31, 2005. Apple sold 14 million iPods in Q4 of 2005; that's more in one quarter than in all the years before 2005 combined. They ended the calendar year with 32 million iPods sold.

Suddenly, it seems, video is everywhere online. New video sites have popped up and we're looking anew at some online video veterans. The reason for this renassaince is two fold: We crossed the 50% threshold this year of American online broadband adoption and streaming video technology has gotten better. It just works. No more buffering or stuttering video; no more frozen frames; no more waiting; no more overly compressed pictures. By and large, online video  works as you'd expect video to work and it looks good!

At video search engines such as YouTube, Revver and Singingfish, at such longstanding online video sites like IFILM  and AtomFilms, and at Google, Yahoo, and MSN.com, visitors can watch streaming video and in some instances they can download video to their iPods or PSPs or grab code to paste the video into their blogs or web sites. At sites like YouTube and IFILM you can even upload your own video to share and Google and Revver even allows you to charge for downloads.

These sites are opening a distribution channel for a great deal of untapped creative potential and, in Google's case, giving it a marketplace. Though, as this New York Times piece points out, the quality is sometimes spotty. Their sharing features are driving a new form of viral marketing.

Count me as a converted skeptic of the viability of video on the tiny screen. I couldn't fathom that anyone would watch a feature-length film on such a tiny screen. Until I bought a Playstation Portable, that is, and watched one myself. The quality is nothing short of stunning.

If you have video assets in your organization, you should give serious thought to exploiting these new distribution channels.

Online Video Use & Demographics

In December 2005, ComScore released data from a survey of 1.5 million American consumers they conducted in August 2005 on behalf of StreamingMedia.com.

The survey found that the 35 to 54 year old age group accounted for more than 45% of all online videos watched in August 2005.  That age group is 12% more likely than the average Internet user to watch video online.

The survey also found:

• More than 100 million people use online digital media (either streams or downloads) in the United States in a month, representing nearly 60% of the American online population.
• Video use crosses all dayparts and demographics; the primtime and daytime dayparts are particularly strong.
• Nearly two-thirds of all American Internet users in August 2005 streamed audio or video through a portal and nearly 50% did so from an entertainment site.
• More than 17% of Amerrican Internet users streamed digital media from a music site.
• 15% streamed contnent from a retail site.

In October 2005, ComScore released results of their Media Metrix Online Video Ratings which they conducted in June 2005. In June, more than 94 million Americans (56% of the American online population). From April to June 2005, the average online American viewed 73 minutes of streaming video per month.

The June 2005 study also found:

• Male surfers account for 61% of all video streamers
• Men and women spend practically the same amount of time watching online video (72.4 minutes per month for men and 70.6 minutes for women).
• The 18-34 year old male American views 84 minutes of online video per month.
• For June 2005, the daytime daypart (10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) had the most streaming activity with 18 streams per viewer.
• The Late Night daypart (1 a.m. to 7 a.m.) was the second most active time of the day with 17 streams per viewer.
• The Late Fringe daypart (11 p.m. to 1 a.m. had 15 streams per viewer.

Online Video Sites

• Google Video - Video search engine
• Yahoo! Video - Video search engine
• MSN Video  - Video search engine
• AOL Video  - Video search engine
• Singingfish  - Video search engine
• Truveo - Video search engine
• blinkx.tv - Video search engine
• YouTube -  Video sharing  site
• Revver  -  Video sharing site
• Vimeo - Video sharing site
• Ourmedia - Video sharing site
• Stupidvideos.com - Video sharing site
• Video Bomb - Video sharing site
• IFILM - Indie film site
• AtomFilms - Indie film site

Technorati tags: ipod | video ipod | online video | internet video | streaming video | video search engines | internet video use | online video use | internet video demographics | online video demographics | viral marketing

Speedcasting

It is often the simplest ideas that are the most brilliant.

So it is with Minnesota Public Radio's "speedcasts." Speedcasts are, logically enough, simply podcasts speeded up just fast enough so that they are understandable yet cut down the amount of listening time significantly. To the tune of squashing a 53 minute program into 29 minutes.

Thank you! You've just saved me about a half an hour of my life.

Clearly, speedcasts will only really work with the talk show format. Unless you're just plain odd, you're probably not going to enjoy listening music or drama on steroids. But if you're listening purely for the information and you're as impatient as I am, you'll love speedcasts.

They are sort of funny to listen to at first but after a little while you get used to the fast pace and you tend not to even notice it before long.

Currenlty, MPR only speedcasts the Midmorning program with Kerri Miller. Subscribe to any of MPR's podcasts on their podcast page.

Subscribe to Midmorning speedcasts:

• Midmorning Speedcast Hour 1
• Midmorning Speedcast Hour 2

Product Placement In Madden NFL 06

In 1994, the neo-punk band Green Day broke onto the popular music scene with their album Dookie, several songs from which enjoyed quite a bit of airtime on radio stations nationwide. Since then, the band has not enjoyed simliar commecial success until last year's run-away success, American Idiot. That success could very well be due in no small part to their decision to debut the title track on Electronic Arts' franchise video game, Madden NFL 2005.

EA has sold more than 43 million units of the video game worldwide, 6 million of which were the 2005 version. No wonder, then, that the game's popularity, especially among 18-to-34-year-old males, has become a high-profile platform from which to introduce new music and new bands.

Madden NFL 06 is no exception. this year's version includes established acts such as the Foo Fighters and Godsmack as well as serveral songs that are exclusive releases for the game. See the full soundtrack at Madden06.com.

According to an NFL Network show, The Making of Madden (watch part 1 and part 2, Steve Schnur, EA's Vice President of Music, says that approximately 2,500 to 3,000 bands are considered for Electronic Arts titles and that the bands are coming to them from all over the world, lobbying to be included in their games. "At the end of the day, I hear band after band after band from years past say they go to show after show and kids come up to them and say, 'Dude, the first time I heard you was in Madden,'" Schnur continued. David Draiman of the band Distrubed, says "Every band out there needs to start considering what video games and the whole format can do for them."

The fact that video games are played over and over again, make them the ideal substitute for the radio airplay they displace.