the dotmatrix project

A big ol’ shout of thanks goes out to Tara for this interview with Austin Hill of Akoha — simply described as “meaningful play” — which touches upon so many cultural aspects of social economics in day-to-day living outside of the realm of social networking.

Like at minute 2:30 in the video; I knew there had to be a reason why I enjoyed investing so much time and resources in building community!

But seriously, what Austin ends up speaking about — average people organizing and affecting change online — is something that Molly discussed with me over lunch this afternoon.

She was absolutely amazed at how Kathy Clark and I were able to make such a positive impact in the meat space with the Save Live Music in Winston-Salem Facebook group, while something as important as the International Civil Rights Museum sits collecting dust after so many years of funding and community support.

I logically argued that the WS situation was simply pointing people to a spot to petition and pressure folks to really do their job, while with the ICRM, money has already been donated, accountability for historical failures have been scarce and the future looks somewhat bleak. Molly instinctively dropped into the world of eros, determined to figure out how to affect the lethargy through online social organization, especially as Greensboro celebrates its 200th birthday over the next few months.

While we both want the museum to become a reality, I found it interesting how the eros and logos in our positions quickly came to the foreground. I usually don’t shrink away from a problem; I try to provide a solution, often creatively tapping into the mechanics of the web. But with this issue, I’ve no idea where to start:

• Funding has been both a blessing and a curse to this project
• Everyone and their mother in town wants to see this project come to fruition
• Yet residents have twice refused to support the project as a bond referendum

What type of a solution can the social economy of a Facebook offer to this type of political conundrum?

Before I get into this post, let me put out there that I’m not that big a fan of advertising anything through traditional channels.

I mean, the cost of both print and television advertising (production and placement) in relation to the ability to gage actual ROI makes for a ridiculously obscene (read: poor) investment. Companies — or more specifically, executives — have money allocated to marketing budgets that need to be spent, but imagine if a percentage of marketing budgets were to be reallocated to actual product development instead.

You know, adding improved talent or more resources to the mix to give products or entertainers a chance to actually sell themselves based on their merit?

Dream on, right?

Enter Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Facebook as a platform for the past few months, deep diving into its advertising functionality to get a sense of its potential value for independent musicians trying to raise local awareness.

I can’t tell you if Facebook is worth its $15 billion valuation, but man, to an indie artist this platform is gold.

The above is a snapshot I took of a campaign that I created to pimp Molly’s recurring Tuesday night show at M’Coul’s Pub in downtown Greensboro, NC. Through 5 some odd days, we’ve served just over 7,000 impressions with 7 click-throughs, which in traditional advertising terms is a wasted campaign. But there’s nothing traditional about our internet, so even a walled garden like Facebook can flip the script on another angle of meat space industry.

For Team Molly, that .10% click-through rate represents a huge win. Let me explain.

Less Is More… Seriously

Facebook users tend to fill out a good percentage of their profile information, so advertisers attempting to target any number of niche markets have a wealth of structured, personal meta-data options to leverage. Take the above campaign as an example.

Molly plays a weekly 2 hour show — a mix of jazz, blues, alt-country and funk — in downtown Greensboro at a 21 and over pub venue. Our primary goal at this early phase of her solo career is to raise awareness of her musical style, specifically with locals who dig the style she plays.

Alright, so here’s where our ROI kicks in:

• Greensboro is a city about 230,000 strong and 79,360 of them are Facebook users (34.5%)
• Out of that crew, 4,320 people have explicitly told Facebook that they like Jazz, Blues or Country music (5.4% of Facebook users in Greensboro)
• Narrowing that set down to a 21 to 50 year-old range — our guess at who Tuesday night bar goers might be — 2,460 people remain (3.1%)
• I created an ad to speak to those 2,460 people, choosing to go the CPC route, bidding a top bid of $.75 (the range was $.53 to $.75) for every click-through to Molly’s Facebook musician page. If we had chosen to place the ad in the News feed — going the CPM route — the cost would’ve jumped to ~$10 per every 1,000 impressions.
• I then set the daily budget to $5.00, knowing upfront that we’ll never get more than 7 or 8 click-throughs per day, which is fine because we’re promoting a weekly event

So yeah, we’re only getting a .10% click-through rate, with an average impression day of ~1,200… but Molly’s Tuesday night show isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. For less than $7.00 per week, we’re serving twice as many impressions than the total number of neighbors who probably most appreciate Molly’s talents.

Over time, that equals awareness.

This week, 3 of the click-throughs have “fanned” her page, which in Facebook lingo is synonymous with making a commitment to be kept up to date with her happenings around town. It’s too early to bank on those numbers staying consistent, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they keep steady. Extrapolated over the next 52 weeks:

• One years worth of fans: ~156 people (6.3% of our targeted market)
• Cost to reach them: ~$338
• M’Coul’s upstairs capacity = ~40 people

That’s four times the capacity of Molly’s weekly show, located smack dab in the middle of our hometown. These people have visible names and actual faces attached to them and they can be contacted either individually or as a group — Facebook’s notification system delivers iCast updates of what Molly’s doing and auto-updates fans when new gigs are scheduled.

Compare those costs and the qualified ROI of the campaign with a Rhino Times (a local, free weekly) full-page ad that runs for ~$1,200.

That .10% click-through rate is looking pretty sweet now, isn’t it?

We’re now building our local strategy around the contextual, hyper-local, interconnectivity that Facebook’s platform provides for free. The platform is working for us 24/7 — the exposure of friend’s actions consistently drives fan adds — and now we have a low-cost mechanism for simultaneously overlapping multiple niche campaigns to a local crowd.

Fuck making it big time; we want to make it locally.

You can become a “fan” of Molly here. Just know upfront that if you click that magic link, it’s a two-way sentiment coming right back ‘atcha.

That status line from Stephen made me smile. Big time.

You’ll probably digest it differently from the next person — those familiar with the current state of the dotmatrix project have the best context — but I’m taking a positive drop such as that as a sign that I’m progressing in my attempts to become a community-centered entrepreneur.

My last project, The People, Yes, fell on its face — and is currently on life support in a coma — after more than a years worth of effort from a number of super talented people. While working with the homeless community isn’t an easy venture to begin with, we ultimately closed up shop due to my stubbornness — locking onto my initial vision with titanium clamps rather than to allow talented people do what they do best.

I won’t make the same mistake twice.

I’m sure I’ll continue to toss ideas into the mix that complicate everyones plans, but I’ll do so with an explicit understanding and respect towards the agreed upon and established roles of the dotmatrix project team.

Above is Stephen Charles, our Lead Coordinator, Photography Community. If you’re not familiar with his work, you should be.

I’ll introduce the entire team in a couple of days.

(originally uploaded by Living Juicy)

The DNA of our internet is fascinating — specified as a flat, open and relational network, so that only the limits of our imagination could obstruct its evolution (except for the omnipresent power brokers of industry who try to control anything disruptive, I suppose).

What’s becoming obvious is that as more domains decide to make their APIs available in the public arena — to both independent developers and to the very same domains they compete with — our internet rapidly progresses from a linearly connective space to a multi-layered, inter-connected environment — more akin to a network — ripe with exposed hooks to latch onto and build upon.

The most powerful part of this equation? How about the fact that a great number of internet services — across numerous industries — have evolved to a point where Joe Layman can now leverage our internet’s many to many power of connectivity and discovery, yet never have to bust out one line of code in the process of doing so.

Consider Me Joe Layman

I’ve a few close friends who are talented musicians; all of whom are trying to catch their big break during the off hours of their daily grind. Being the curious guy that I am, I told both Universal Mathematics and Molly McGinn that I’d dive into the online music and event promotion space to see if I could craft an approach for promoting their gigs and sound.

I figured that with all of the free services online — from social networks to event services to video communities — I’d be able to figure out an optimized approach to:

• promote their recently booked gigs
• expose the various media artifacts of their events
• increase their online findability when people run contextual searches
• both give away and sell their music online

After about a month of reviewing practically every service under the sun (feel free to suggest ones I’ve missed in the comments), I’ve come up with a particular approach for:

1. enhancing the community currently building around Molly and Clement’s personalities and music
2. tapping into the guts of the internet to expose their talents to potential fans

Like I said, it’s only one approach of what I’m sure could be many. That being said, let’s break down the thinking behind it.

If You Don’t Promote The Event, Who Will?

If an act has a gig, but doesn’t promote the event online, will the audience make a sound?

Of course they will.

We’ve not quite evolved as a species to all internet beings (well, those of us outside of Silicon Valley at least), but to disregard the power of the internet in building community and enhancing reputation is a mistake, as the only cost to harnessing the web is time.

The key to this approach is recognizing that it needs to augment an off-line promotion plan. Without fliers, listings in weeklies, real world word of mouth, real friends and family support, etc., the online plan can’t guarantee results.

So, understanding that time is money and precious — particularly for independent musicians — I came up with a simple plan for online event promotion, utilizing four web services to get the word out: Eventful, Last.fm, Facebook and MySpace.

Most indie artists already maintain a Facebook and MySpace profile, which in turn has prepped musicians to become accustom to interacting with their communities on a somewhat daily basis; adding a couple additional event spots to their periphery shouldn’t be too much for them to manage.

The benefits of these two particular spots?

• Last.fm has a global audience and event info can be found contextually throughout the site
• Last.fm allows artists to list not only their bios, but upload their music and videos for the community to check out
• Eventful has a nice footprint in Google and Yahoo! search results
• Eventful allows you to create a rich event listing, with links back to the artist’s sites and any number of videos, songs or photographs
• Eventful broadcasts the event listing to multiple event services, greatly impacting the chance of discovery

All of this is free.

What I’ve stressed to my artist buds is that as soon as they book a gig, they need to update these four services with richly crafted and tagged event submissions. Once they do so, their Facebook friends will automatically catch the new event in their stream of friend updates. With MySpace, artists can send out a single bulletin to their people and make them aware of the gig. And while Last.fm and Eventful have their own degree of community built-in, the purpose of including them in this approach is to work the information retrieval mechanisms of the web itself, not to add layers of complexity and management for the artists.

Curate your communities and provide findable metadata for the rest of the world to discover you.

Not too crazy of a concept, eh?

All Recording Devices Are Welcome At Our Gigs!

Jerry Garcia was quite possibly the most brilliant marketer the music industry has ever known.

Way before the internet came into play, Garcia was giving his fans the pass to record and distribute his music between themselves, which obviously spilled out to potential fans at parties, cookouts, late night bake sessions, etc. While the RIAA would argue today that such an approach would be taking money out of the artist’s pocket, go ahead name me one artist who wouldn’t kill for the degree of popularity and recognition such a decision helped foster.

Of course, in order to have Universal “Heads” or Molly “Heads” as a fanatical, viral, media creation fan base, the artist has to bring it to each performance, just like Jerry and the boys did. But it’s not like that has to be explained to an artist; that motivation to excel live is already built into the deal.

So with an open media policy — actually promoting the concept of audiences recording live performances, whether it be photography, video or audio — an artist can tap into the myriad of free media communities and services found online and stack the deck for discovery and the potential for viral exposure.

In my above approach, I outlined the services that an artist could leverage with a mixture of planned performance coverage and audience participation. Again, any number of services could be used, but I wanted to keep the list somewhat manageable. Here’s my rationale for including the diagramed services:

• flickr has an extremely rich online community, with tons of topical photography groups that have strong followings
• flickr images are well represented in Yahoo! image search results (not as much with Google)
• Blip.tv allows an artist to create a customized channel and offers advertising plans to monetize media
• Blip.tv also cross-posts elements of the video submission to multiple sources — iTunes, del.icio.us, The Wayback Machine and flickr
• Veoh allows high-quality video posts and cross-posts to a handful of popular video communities — YouTube, Google Video and MySpace
• Last.fm empowers the artist to upload videos, new music (albums or live tracks) and photographs

As long as media is uploaded with a rich description and tagged well enough (names, places, genre, etc.), it really doesn’t matter if it comes from a representative of the band or an enthusiastic fan — in either case, search engines will index the additions and place the media within search results.

The benefit of artist’s hiring a media generator is that they have the extra incentive to spend the time and effort in cross-posting within each community. For example, a concert photo uploaded to flickr with a decent description and tag set is valuable, but one assigned to eight related groups as well will greatly increase the chance of community interaction.

The more that people talk about a great shot of a band or a great video clip, the greater the chance that the band name sticks in their head.

Well, at least that’s the idea.

Sell, Sell, Sell! And Give Away!

The last part of the online equation is music distribution, where most businesses ratchet down their open policies a notch or two, falling in lock step behind the traditional distribution behavior of the music industry.

It’s a lot harder to get a spot on Amazon or iTunes for an independent artist than it is for a label-backed act. That being the case, I decided to focus on two music communities with rather liberal policies for uploading original music: Last.fm and AmieStreet.

I’m going to save the insight I’ve gained from using those services for my next post, but I’ll leave you with a hint of what I’ve discovered…

AmieStreet rocks!