How to get Britney’s and Jonas Brothers attention?
My first thought for promoting the Playlist Power app is “If I can only get our app noticed by a major artist or even get noticed on a major artist’s fan page, we might get hundreds or thousands of new app users!” How do I do that? Britney and the Jonas brothers have nothing better to do than read all their messages from fans, notice mine, and think “Yeah … that sounds like fun, I’ll add the Playlist Power app and spend the next few hours sending my playlists to friends.” Right. That’s not going to happen. Think. What’s our best draw for a new user? How about that cute “thumbs up” bunny character Geri designed for Playlist Power?
(Character design by Geri Wittig)
Hippity MySpace Avatar spokesperson account for the “Playlist Power”
1. Figure out a name for the spokesperson character. Hippity Hopmop.
2. Get a new email account so I can create a MySpace page and separately track Hippity’s message activity.
3. Create Hippity Hopmop’s MySpace account
4. Create profile information so any new friends can learn about the Playlist Power app.
5. Start adding major recording artist’s as friends.
6. Post forum messages.
Please make me a “top friend” !
Ok, so now I have the cute Hippity avatar that … maybe, just maybe … I might get the major artist’s attention. So in my “Friend invitations” I add a few sentences about the Playlist Power app and how “if you add me as a ‘top friend’, your fans can discover how to share their playlists ‘with your songs in them’ with other friends. Viral marketing!
No response. In fact, some artist’s automatically add new friends. That message I added won’t even get read.
Ok, let’s try a label
I add Jive Records as a friend. Jive Records is Britney Spear’s label. Also, Backstreet Boys, Buddy Guy, Jordin Sparks, Justin Timberlake, NSync, Nick Carter, Outkast, Pink, R. Kelly, Usher, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and many other artist’s I’m not familiar with (my musical tastes are a bit more eclectic … definitely not mainstream). It was an “automatic add” as Jive records immediately showed up as a friend. When I tried to send Jive Records a playlist to rate with Playlist Power, I got back a response “Jive Records is either not a friend, currently not accepting messages from apps, blocked this specific app, or does not have HTML enabled for comments. The requested message or comment from this application will not be delivered.” MySpace shows Jive Records last login is 1/13/2009 (more than a month ago). They are not checking messages.
I also attemped to add these record labels and CAA as friends:
- Virgin Records
- Sony/BMG
- Capitol Records
- Universal Music Group
- Warner Music Group
- Creative Artists Agency
One week later, none have accepted my invitation to be a friend.
Noise Pop artists
Changing my strategy to up-and-coming indie artists, I noticed there was a Noise Pop Festival happening in San Francisco. Looking at the lineup, there were links to most of the performing artist’s MySpace pages. It took quite awhile, but I managed to invite most of them to be Hippity’s friend. I was also probably one of the few people to hear 15 of the bands play a song simultaneously by opening each of the MySpace pages in it’s own tab. 15 browser tabs playing music all at once is quite a cacophony of sound. It reminded me of Seattle Artist Bret Marion’s A Spectacle of Concerns Soundtrack (about midway through). But I digress. By the time I finished adding all the Noise Pop artists I found myself distracted from making “marketing progress” with the pleasant diversion of trying to create a playlist with one of each artists songs. Then I tried creating smaller playlists and sending out a few playlists to be rated by my new friends. While I now have many recording artist friends, none of the playlists I sent out with the Playlist Power app returned with a rating. I am however getting invites to be friends from other musicians, so there is something of a viral nature going on here.
How about a real person at a record label?
Maybe I can just get to a real person at a record label? Larry Rudolph is listed as Britney Spear’s friend. OK. With my experience so far, my guess is that no industry heavyweight is going to care to hear my Playlist Power app viral marketing pitch from a MySpace friend invitation. I’ll try a LinkedIn trick I figured out. If the person you want to send a message to is not in your network of contacts, try joining a LinkedIn group they might belong to. However, a LinkedIn search of Larry Rudolph gave me:
- Larry Rudolph -VMware & MIT. Researcher
- Larry Rudolph – VP Business Development at Kuna Foodservice
- Larry Rudolph – Project Management at US Steel
- Larry Rudolph – Three Rivers Dental Group
Ok. Let’s stop for a minute and think. Britney Spears has a huge fan base. She has 36721 friends on MySpace. If even 1% of that number “really wanted to meet Britney” or thought they had what it takes to be a star as big as Britney, if I were Larry Rudolph, I’d probably be as far removed from any internet networking database as I could get. If Larry has a LinkedIn account at all, it’s probably under an alias that he only gives to close friends. Something like ‘Rudolph Laurence – Three Rivers Dental Group’ just to be safe. But wait a minute. Maybe joining some LinkedIn groups is not such a bad idea even if I abandon my quest to connect with Larry Rudolph. Some of those LinkedIn groups are pretty big.
Full Disclosure
Before I go further, I must divulge the urgency from which my marketing actions result. One of the prizes of the WeekendApps is from MySpace and it is a week of heavy rotation promotion for two of the applications developed at Weekend Apps (winners to be chosen by MySpace). We figure that sheer uptake from MySpace users may be a considering factor. Our app Playlist Power was 1st to launch and, on day one, had gained an impressive 300 new users in just a few hours. But Fluffy Puffy Cloud Pets was right on our heels. 24 hours after launch, Playlist Power has 1300 users but Fluffy Puffy Cloud is closing fast. I guess its really hard to resist “Showin’ your carin’ side!” by adopting and nurturing a virtual cloud pet. By day 2, that darned Fluffy Puffy Cloud has passed us up. Now you can see why I was determined to find a way to get MySpace users to add our Playlist Power app by the hundreds.
