At the time there were only a handful of friends who also had access it, so the social features seemed a little underutilized at the time. Now that I have 30 or so friends on it I was hoping to see more relevance, but I’m still not seeing much activity in my inbox or in the feed. Can’t wait until that feed is busy with my recommendations from my friends or rock critics that I admire. When that comes, I’ll be a happy camper

The opportunities for (dare i say) game mechanics in Spotify are endless. I’m always looking at my play counts on iTunes to see what I’m listening to most. As someone who is always on the search for a great album (new or otherwise), I’d love to see what my friends have spinning. I want to know what they’re listening to right now. I want to know what they’ve listened to 10x times this week. If people had access to my playlist, most people would find out I listen to a lot of Built to Spill in the morning these days. Mid morning – A Love Supreme is fantastic. Friday afternoons I prefer Jay-Z or Tribe. Saturday morning – Sonny Rollins. These things can and should all be tracked and analyzed. The data that could come out of it will change how we all find new music to embrace.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my music collection over my entire life (minus a couple awkward albums I bought when I was very young. Right Said Fred? Young Brad: really?!). From regular trips spending all of my barista tip money at Easy Street in Kirkland during high school to college stopping at Tower Records on the Ave to spend whatever was in my pocket. I have amazing memories of selecting 2-3 albums, going home and absorbing it for the next week, month, year. I’d put my new album on and read the linear notes on the couch, maybe stare at the wall and listen to every note, maybe cook dinner. The entire time, listening to every note. The value of an album for me during that time really meant something. It wasn’t a download or a stream, it was my entertainment. In college I didn’t have much disposable income so $10-$15 for an album added up. I didn’t care though. I’d save money on other things for a chance to hear the Maids of Caidz anytime I wanted.

It all hit a crescendo when I joined the Starbucks Entertainment team after college in 2004 to find that promo copies of great music in a magical place called the promo bin. Rip and Return became a common phrase. My iTunes library filled up and my genre’s expanded. No longer was I only interested in jazz, classical and jamband. Now it was a lot of hip hop, indie rock and the occasional pop record.

The point I’m trying to get to is this … I have my graph of music already. It’s in my house on my wall of cd’s and records. It’s on my hard drives in iTunes already. I have everything I love right there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to listen to music at home, on my iPhone or at work.
There are many great things about Spotify. But for now, for me, it isn’t the answer for 2.5 reasons:

1. The genius function / my pre-selected music graph: I love picking a favorite song and hitting genius in iTunes. It creates an instant 2 hour playlist that includes music I don’t go to as often but still love hearing. For example, tonight I selected a great Freddie Hubbard Track, Red Clay. From there I’ve had a great journey through some deep cuts that I wouldn’t normally listen to. It is right 10x more often than it is wrong. Spotify doesn’t know my tastes like my hard drive does.

2. Ownership: When I buy a track on itunes or a cd or a record it’s mine. I own that piece of music. i can do what I want to do with it. I can listen to how I want to. I don’t need to pay a monthly fee for it. It’s mine.

2.5: Airplay: I’m not using Airplay in my house. Yet. But I have big plans for having speakers all over my house connected to Airplay. I can’t wait. The ability to play music off my iPhone or from any computer in the house to any speaker is very appealing. Sure, I could spend money on doing the same thing with Spotify and Sonos, but that is a lot more expensive. Airplay is much more affordable, I can also use existing speakers and computers to do the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m rooting for Spotify and will continue to use it. Its just not the answer for me. Yet.

p.s. whoever integrates group listening / music discovery, ala Turntable.fm first is going to get my eternal love. That would be amazing.

They took a sample set of ‘connected customers’ who are often leading indicators of how people interact digitally. There are a lot of great snippets of data that are worth reading through. Highly recommend.

Buzz Canuck: The Blindsiding and Bubble of Social Media

Key quote:

But in a very few short years,  my prediction – the term will fade into irrelevance – all media will be social – no more need for the distinction.

Twitter Census: Publishing the First of Many Datasets

Infochimps has been scraping tweets for the last three years, and they have a dataset of information that is very hard to find. This is data that I would love to dig into. I’m positive that the amount of insights into every part of Starbucks (and digital society, really) would be astonishing. I’m sure we’ll see some interesting studies come out from this.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Why Did Google Buy AdMob?

This post is to the point. Love it.

The last two weeks have been filled with a lot of traveling. I also don’t get cable at home, so I generally have cable TV on in the background in hotel rooms. I get my fill, and it’s decent background noise. When I go home, I don’t miss it. Some were making the point that cable news is a good place to emulate for how to tweet. Repeat the same message many times over the day to make sure you get it across. There are many great tools available to get this done, so technically, it’s no problem.

However, I have a problem with this. To me, it feels like it’s fighting noise with noise. Eventually everyone is going to go twitter-deaf (twideaf?) and unfollow you from the amount of redundant tweets. I personally try to keep my number of followers kind of low on Twitter. It makes it easier to actually get to know people, which is what I’m interested in. I’m sure that if I followed more people, I would have built up a bigger following base. Which is great, but that is tertiary to what my actual goal on twitter is; have great conversations with great people and learn something every now and then. This use case on Twitter is not conducive to brands that counter noise with more noise. I’m far more interested in real conversations with real people, quality always trumps quantity.

The conversation on the panel was top notch, and I’m thankful I was asked to participate.

Anyway, here’s the panel, in it’s entirety:

Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

There are many sides of the equation, such as; i have friends and i want to see what they’re doing, maybe I’ll hang out with them right now, i’m a stalker and i want to be a creep, i’m a gov’t and i want to follow my citizens, and i’m an advertiser and i want to spend my money wisely with smart call to actions. All sides need to be addressed for the location based social web to take off, which it will someday.

Existing location based social web apps exist for the iphone right now. All of them have their advantages, some range from neat story-telling with people you don’t know at the place that you’re at, see where my friends are now, play a game based on the location, or see what else is around me. I like all of them for different reasons. I hate all of them because whenever I use them there is no benefit to me. None of my friends are on there, at least the ones that live in my city that I hang out with. It’s only a matter of time.

These social networks are going to take off this way, by focusing on shared experiences and shared events where a lot of tech savvy people are going to be present and leveraging existing mature social networks for promotion. Facebook and Twitter are great, but the problems they need to focus on are very different from the features that these location based networks are focused on. It’s a big area of opportunity. Hashtags are great on Twitter, but they aren’t the final answer.

This is going to be a fun area of the internet to pay attention to.

I’ve had a curious mind my whole life, occasionally it gets me in trouble, but sometimes it works out. I decided to put some thought and keystrokes behind what I’ve been saying, and here it is: 

Most of the time, I converse with my friends/coworkers more via text, IM, Twitter and Facebook as I do talking on the telephone. I can navigate my way around a website, and I’d rather find the answer on my own than talk to a robotic customer service rep that can’t actually help.

Lesson: Give me options to contact your business that aren’t just email or telephone. Let me contact you via Twitter, SMS, or live chat. Have a well thought and living/breathing FAQ on your website. I’m probably not the only person with this problem. Respond quickly, if needed. Act like you want me back (see: Zappos).

We’d prefer to spend more money on fewer, higher quality items. I want real food, with ingredients I can pronounce.

Lesson: Don’t try to always be a cheapskate. Make food that you’d want to eat. Try to source your items locally. Try to get foods or products with a backstory. People will remember, and even tell their friends if you give them something to remember. If you don’t even try to give your product a story, then why will anybody talk about it?

If you have some neat environmental programs, tell me about them, but it better be legit. We’re smart enough to know when you’re just greenwashing. (special note to the oil companies: I appreciate the effort, but really?)

Lesson: The internet lets us get lots of information, very quickly. Somebody will catch you if your efforts aren’t what you say they are.

Talk to me like a person. 

Lesson: Ignore your PR department, they’re probably doing more harm that good. Especially if these words aren’t available to you, “we messed up, it happens. we’ll try harder next time. sorry.” 

It all comes down to three main points, in order: 

1. give me something of value
2. don’t be a dick
3. be authentic

That’s all we’re asking for. Thanks for listening.

I have always been a big baseball fan. Until I reached the awkward years of puberty, I wore a Seattle Mariners uniform to every game I went to. It had my favorite players number on the back and name, Scott Bradley, no. 9. He was the backup catcher, but he always came through in the clutch and he he also had the same name as me. I skipped many school days to go to the Kingdome to watch my team play the first time they went to the playoffs. I cried in 1994 when the world series was canceled, and I’m not sure if the joy I felt when we beat the Yankees in the ALDS in 1995 has been equaled. The summer of 2001 in Seattle was boring because all the Mariners did was win, I didn’t know what to complain about. Baseball was my first love, before the other loves of my life; my wife and music.

That being said, Major League Baseball’s blackout policy on mlb.tv needs some serious help. In the year 2009, content providers should be agnostic in their delivery method. I would gladly pay twice the amount to mlb.tv to be able to watch my Mariners play every night at Safeco, or whereever they are, over the internet. I could watch games in my cubical, on the road at a coffeeshop, or at home. You can still generate ad revenue subscription fees through mlb.tv. Instead, with your current policy, you’re leaving out a whole generation that believes you should pick what you want to view, where you want to view it, and how you want to view it.

I don’t subscribe to cable. It’s not because I wouldn’t enjoy watching cable or because I can’t afford it. In fact, both of those statements are very true. I don’t subscribe to cable because I know I would enjoy it too much. So, instead I get all of my viewing over the internet. I can choose what I want to pay for, ala carte.

Please take a lesson from CBS Sports in their presentation of the 2009 NCAA tournament. Games were available for viewing through an iPhone app, streaming over the internet or on the plain ole’ television.

a lifelong baseball fan,
Brad Nelson

My question is this: I have yet to find a business that is using it. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I don’t think it’s happening right now.

The success of new/social media has happened because people like sharing content with their friends and family. They like talking about their lives or their friends lives or watching other peoples lives. It’s no surprise that these online worlds became fodder for college kids to share the previous nights keg stands and bong hit pictures with each other, as younger generations are quicker to adapt to new technologies. It’s no surprise that these things became popular, very quickly. 

Some things have surprised me. Twitter has surprised me, immensely. It makes total sense when you look at it now. The world is so connected, and so eager for information and human dialog. It was genius to build a service that makes it so easy to write short 140 character. It was genius to create a service that was so open and available, that most any developer could build an application to use it. They recognized that if a service that only allowed 140 character posts was ever going to succeed, it was going to need a lot of entry points. 

What’s also surprising to me is that brands of all kinds have been able to get into this world and participate too. These days, you can’t just build a website and hope for everyone to visit. If you want to make an impact online, you must go to where your users are. I would guess that most of the time, your users aren’t on your flash powered microsite. I’m sorry. It’s probably really neat, probably has a lot of nice graphics, and probably cost a lot of money. Truth be told, they probably aren’t visiting your site every day. You know what sites they are visiting? Ask your kid in college, and it’s probably the same: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, and every other site that you think are just for college students. 

So, what does this mean? 

Grab the account names of every major social media service named for your brand. You’ll thank yourself someday when you want to start using it. You’ll also thank yourself when you don’t have to spend time trying to get the account name back. Believe me, I’ve done that. Luckily, my employer causes people to move a little faster than most mom and pop shops. 

Don’t listen to some social media experts saying you should ‘personalize’ the account more, and grab an account named to a person. Unless you’re already a celebrity or are very able at gaining notoriety, nobody is going to notice you. I’m sorry, you’re just not that popular. I’ve built the biggest corporate brick and mortar twitter account and on average, 5 people visit my blog on a daily basis. I’m certain that I know all of them. 

Don’t listen to the best advice of your PR department. They’ll come around eventually.  It’ll be best if you ignore them for a little while. Most of them equate targeting demographics with mass produced magazines or tv shows. For the most part, they do an awesome job getting your story out to these demographics. This would have been their entire job 2 years ago. Not anymore. Driving a good narrative online is as important as getting the soccer moms who watch the Today show. Eventually they’ll come to you with a big problem asking for advice and guidance on ways to solve it with the ‘internets’. Leverage your existing accounts, buy some google adwords, tell them to do a video … Basically, follow the Obama Campaign’s crisis strategy. 

Speaking of, the Barack Obama campaign built one of the best brands online, ever. If you were connected online, and somewhat inclined to voting, you saw them somewhere. They recognized that you need to not only build a compelling online experience on your own servers, but you must also go to where your users are. Create a compelling experience across your spaces, and syndicate content. Target your users when they least expect it. I distinctly remember getting a text message from the Obama campaign in the summer of 08 asking me to text my zip code to get localized responses. I was talking to a republican coworker when I received it. I told him immediately, “this guy is going to win,” I had never got such questions via text message, and I’m loyal to certain companies who could ask me such questions. Now political campaigns aren’t exactly the same as big corporations, but there are plenty of lesson to be learned from them. 

The next article will deal with how to converse over these networks, without making an ass of yourself (and possibly winning people over).