I use Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm, MOG, HypeMachine, LaLa, and a few other music discovery/listening sites. They’re all good for a whole bunch of different reasons. And I was rather surprised when, of all places, I got totally hooked on Muse while watching Saturday Night Live.
SNL hasn’t really been a major force in music since … well … ever. They’ve always done great stuff, but overall the new frontier of music isn’t being broken in Studio 8H. Strangely though, I’ve got a couple of Muse tracks on the iPod, but I never had more than a passing interest. And with all the sites I’m connected to, and the amount of time I spend using them, how is it that a TV show I was watching while doing a few other things (my laundry is clean, sorted, folded and put away!) got me hooked on a band.
It gets me to thinking: where do you really hear about things? And do we discount traditional platforms because they’re just not as hip or cutting edge as the latest bright, shiny online object? And a bigger question: how do we truly discover new information?
Supposedly it takes at least 3 mentions of an idea/object before it has any influence. I’m not sure how true that is, but it does lead me to wonder if we truly need to be everywhere all the time. The SNL appearance was perhaps the tipping point (thanks Malcolm!) to get me into the band. First was the iTunes tracks I already owned, then was a stream from Last.FM, followed by the SNL appearance. Granted, each of these incidents was months apart from the other, but that’s where I see this coming from. Then again, it could be from HypeMachine, or LaLa, or ….
As marketers, we seek presence everyplace we go. A friend of mine routinely mocks the traditional newspapers and their stilted, elitist view of the world. He rants that they’re out of touch, outdated, and irrelevant in today’s on demand culture. At the same time, he told everyone he could (on every platform he could!) that he was going to be in the New York Times. It seems traditional press still matters. The third estate holds value: it’s a tangible litmus test for validity.
My goal, as a marketer, is to raise awareness in a product and in turn drive that interest toward generating sales. They can’t and won’t come from a deluge of presence on any single site. And I can honestly say that I don’t know which site creates that tipping point of mass acceptance. The best I’ve come up with is that we need everything, all the time, and consistently.
While this may be obvious to some, the successful implementation of that strategy is what separates the successful marketers from the hacks who claim marketing expertise without having experience outside any single area.
