360DigitalInfluence

Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re walking down the street or driving in your car and the perfect song comes on?  The beat matches your mood, the lyrics apply perfectly to your own life, and you start boppin’ along?  For me, that’s why music is great – because it connects to something in your own life and resonates with your mood, your mindset, the situation – whatever, really.  Those songs become your life’s own soundtrack, and it’s crazy to me that you weren’t always able to listen to the perfect music track at the perfect time.

The concept of setting music to experiences is not very new - before movies and television shows incorporated soundtracks, there were plays, musicals, and operas.  We’ve been setting life experiences to music and vice versa for hundreds of years.   It’s just that now we can control when we bring that concept into our own personal lives at a level that did not quite exist before.  And, in the wonderful way that social media is ultimately an expression of vanity, we can make our every day experiences into art by soundtracking them as if they were movies.

This usually isn’t a unique process.  There are hundreds of thousands of millions of songs in the world, and one of them can usually fit an experience pretty well.  But, what about, for certain situations, where one song just can’t cut it? - When only pieces of certain songs will do?  That, my friends, is the beauty of music mashups.  continue reading

In 2008 I worked for a political research and strategic consulting firm that specialized in political polling and campaign strategy, as well as helping political candidates, parties, and ballot initiatives succeed all around the country and across the world.  So, you can imagine, I was fascinated when I heard that Facebook had accurately predicted many of this past week’s election results.  On Wednesday I saw a Tweet by Facebook’s head of Consumer Marketing, Randi Zuckerberg, which said, “In 20 of last night’s hot races, we accurately predicted 16 based on Facebook candidate “like” comparisons.”  I was very impressed by that information and have grown even more so as other data on this topic has come out.   

According to The U.S. Politics on Facebook note “Social Media Participation Trumps Money,” a campaign’s social media participation is “just as significant or even more significant a predictor of a candidate’s success than money spent.”  This is huge news since money spent has been one of the biggest indicators of a candidate’s success for years.  Of the 118 races that were tracked in the Senate and House, 65% of the election winners had more Facebook “Likes” than their opponents.  Even more remarkable was that of these 77 winners 42 raised less money than their opponents.  And, if these metrics weren’t enough to convince you of the importance of social media participation, the note goes on to say that “there was no correlation between the partisanship of the district and partisanship of ‘likes.’ Candidates were able to overcome their district’s partisan handicap in growing social media presence.”   Regardless of your party affiliation, or how happy you are over the election results, that statement is pretty amazing.  Can social media participation be working towards creating a truly independent voting atmosphere?  My answer would be potentially - hopefully.  It seems to me like voters have become more engaged in the election process and their candidates.  This increased engagement probably increases voter knowledge, and allows them to pick their candidates by more than just their party affiliation.  What do you think?

Last week I was lucky enough to interview former Ambassador Robert Weisberg* on how social media has affected the Foreign Service. Ambassador Weisberg has a particularly interesting perspective due to his 26 year career in the Foreign Service, and his current position as Ethics Officer for Nokia Siemens Networks.  Over Ambassador Weisberg’s career as a U.S. Diplomat he was stationed at 12 very different posts, ranging from the most technologically connected country in the world, Finland, to one of the least, The Republic of the Congo. He was kind enough to explain his views and experience with me.

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iTunes Ping

iTunes Ping, or Ping, launched this September to so much fanfare that I was reminded of last year’s Google Wave launch. However, like Google Wave iTunes Ping is an interesting concept that is proving difficult to execute.

Ping, not to be confused with the social network manager Ping.fm, is a software-based music oriented social networking service that is deployed and operated by Apple, and allows users to follow and interact with friends and artists. Ping was released as part of iTunes 10 and can only be used on the music player. The service launched in 23 countries and has gained over 1 million members so far.

When Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announced Ping he explained the service as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes…[except that] it is not Facebook. It is not Twitter. It is something else we’ve come up with. It’s all about music.” This is definitely true, and Ping’s list of features includes the ability to see follow friends and artists to see what music they like and what concerts they are going to. Users can also post reviews of music, the songs they’ve purchased, and see custom song and album charts based on their own networks. Artists can also post videos and photos for fans to enjoy as well. According to Apple’s Ping announcement, Ping is based around the idea of social music discovery. Social music discovery is great, and I loving using tools that facilitate it, however I’m not too sure that that’s actually what Ping does.

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The Wilderness Downtown by The Arcade Fire

With each new piece of technology that comes out we inevitably start hearing about the impending “death” of the music industry. First video was supposed to kill the radio star, and then individual MP3s should have wiped out the album as a cohesive unit. File sharing was supposed to put artists and record labels out of business, and music videos were going to lose their pop culture cachet when MTV ceased playing them. And, all of these gloom-and-doom warnings would have been great to prepare us, except that none of it’s come to pass; video didn’t kill the radio star – it just reinvented the whole concept of one.

While the music industry has been notoriously resistant to change, albums, record labels, artist and, most recently, videos have survived thanks to figuring out new ways to reinvent themselves. Music videos changed the way that people related to songs and opened up a whole new way of promoting musicians. Individual MP3s reinvented the way that artists created albums by forcing them to make sure that each song was good enough to stand on its own. And, instead of putting record labels and artists out of business studies have shown that file sharing dramatically increases music consumption, with even illegal downloaders paying to support the artists they like. And now, the music video is surviving in a post-TRL world by reinventing itself through social media.

Since MTV changed its name from Music Television and stopped playing music videos in 2008, artists have repeatedly tried to revive the music video. Lady Gaga tried to popularize videos by creating an extended version for her song, “Telephone.” Beyonce also attempted to popularize them in her “Single Ladies” music video, and she seemed to have some success when it spawned hundreds of amateur versions online. Beyonce’s engagement with her fans was accidental but it worked to popularize the video so that it’s achieved status as a pop culture reference. However, while Beyonce reaped the benefits of social media and user engagement, she did little to actually court it and the format of the music video itself remained largely unchanged.

Enter, The Arcade Fire and the new video/interactive musical experience “The Wilderness Downtown” for their song “We Used to Wait.” The indie darlings clearly understand their fans’ need to engage since “The Wilderness Downtown” is essentially a music video that has been reinvented to include the viewer/participant from the get-go. The HTML5 experience starts with users going go the “The Wilderness Downtown” page on a Google Chrome browser (Google worked on the project with the band and writer/director Chris Milk) and entering your childhood address. Then, if Google Maps has enough footage of your home, you are pulled into a highly personalized multi-browser music video. As The Arcade Fire nostalgically sings about how quickly life changes, a hooded figure (you) is shown running around your childhood neighborhood. During the experience, you’re given the opportunity to write a postcard to your younger self and whatever you write or draw grows branches. Trees pop up out of nowhere and your postcard and neighborhood literally become “the wilderness downtown.” Then, after the movie ends, the experience continues as you can replay your film, share it and your postcard with others, or even respond to other people’s postcards. So far, The Arcade Fire’s “The Wilderness Downtown” is currently at number sixteen on the Billboard music chart and has generated a ton of buzz.

The Arcade Fire’s reinvention of the music video via an interactive social media experience is certainly outside the box and groundbreaking when it comes to the music industry and is a great example of how I believe technology will better allow artists to create a closer and more engaging relationship with their fans. In my opinion, the biggest threat to the music industry is not new technologies or illegal downloads, but rather the industry’s resistance to change and their hesitance toward really owning their digital space. Hopefully The Arcade Fire’s critical and commercial successes in these endeavors will prompt more of the industry to start thinking about using new technologies to engage fans more creatively in the future – if not, then the industry really will become obsolete.