Lee Hammond is the Director of New Media at Interscope. He will present at WOMMA Summit 2010 about how Interscope has worked with Janrain to keep fans engaged with their favorite bands.
Since your product is content, how do you decide what is the best balance between paid and free content to maximize ROI?
We do a lot of events around artists like Lady Gaga, artists who don’t really need to give away product to develop market awareness. In that category, we create promotional content to create awareness of an upcoming tour or album. What I’m going to be speaking about at Summit is how we have been able to create highly social mini-events around surprisingly straightforward content. The example I’m thinking of is simply taking album covers and, rather than syndicate that out as we used to do, we’ll create an event where it is revealed on the website. In the eyes of fans an the artist, that’s a big deal.
We used to go through traditional registration approach for things like this, which was nice because you captured information about those who were interested. But now with social logins, people can login without filling anything out and see that album cover. With the right authorization, we can update their status for them on Twitter or Facebook to drive their friends back to the site. We started doing this with just singles on the site before it goes to radio. But now we’ve come up with more things like artist photos and videos. Any of these things become micro marketing events that lead to the big marketing event, which is street date.
How do you organize a band’s digital presence? Do all roads lead to their website or is it a series of digital embassies?
The unique thing about the music business is that each artist comes with their own business in themselves. I’ve been doing this since the times when a band would only have a website before there was even MySpace. These days it’s hard to imagine a band showing up to without a MySpace, Facebook or Twitter page in place.
Internally we see more value in being the hub at the website and messaging from there. It gives us more data points and control. But we also don’t want to interrupt a good conversation. If an artist is really active on Twitter, we encourage them continue to do that. We can syndicate their tweets on Facebook and their site.
We want the artist to continue to have that good organic voice, even though that voice isn’t necessarily what closes the deal and drives sales. So we augment that with sales offers, street date links, and television appearances.
Probably the biggest challenge with Twitter is that it still feels like a conversation between the artist and the fan. So we are trying to figure out how to insert sales messages in that without disturbing that conversation and sounding too sales heavy.
All these landmarks are resources we need. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and websites are critical to a band’s online presence. One of the things I like to illustrate for bands is that official artist websites are usually the top search results. So you might feel like you have a big social network on Facebook and Twitter, but there is also an anonymous social network of people who lean in, type your name into Google and show up at your homepage. In my experience, that is an equal number of impressions that you can capture compared to the social presence. For marketing people, that’s found impressions and very important.
The pendulum swings from one platform to the other. For a while, it was all about MySpace, then it was Facebook, then Twitter. And now artist websites are making a comeback. I don’t think there is any set rulebook except for adjusting to how the environment is changing.
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Summit 2010 is full of great speakers like Lee. Learn more and register here.
