 With NAMM taking place over the weekend and several of our clients in the musical instrument business, I thought it would be appropriate to evaluate the participation level in social media and web strategies of musical instrument companies. (Disclosure: a few of these companies are Heavybag Media clients, noted below.)
As part of this evaluation, we have set up a site bringing in RSS feeds from as many musical instrument related companies we could find at TheyAreTheMusicMakers.com (a reference to an Arthur O'Shaughnessy poem) using Sweetcron.
 I was inspired to continue the conversation that Chris Brogan started on his blog a couple of days ago. Chris' post begins:
"Pepsi doesn’t want to talk with a few hundred people at a time, do they? It’s just that all these businesses have built huge platforms, huge sales funnels, huge marketplaces, and I think what social software is setting us up for are cafe-shaped conversations."
Which is funny, because apparently Pepsi does want to talk to a few hundred people, including Chris Brogan. Why? Because Pepsi knows that cafe conversations are what is driving the social web. And they know that the conversations that Chris Brogan have are with larger groups of people, and that they tend to get repeated in other cafe's around the social web.
 Social media has fundamentally changed the way that people discover products, services and content. It's no longer simply about the old method of product, price and placement, it's about relevance, value and virality. As the effectiveness of traditional online marketing continues to decline, how can you be sure that your message is not only absorbed, but embraced, passed along and viewed as valuable?
Thoughts have of late been percolating in my mind. Thoughts about how the internet has impacted society, what it's meant so far and where all of this may be heading. The social web has had enormous impact on everything from our social lives, to our professional lives, to how we discover, purchase and discuss products and services. Personally, I love the impact the social web has had on my life, my career and the personal and professional interactions I have. I feel like as a society, prior to the social web, we tended to compartmentalize our lives. There was the "work me" the "social me" the "parent me" and so on. The social web has broken down barriers and given us permission to be human.
Let's face it: banner ads have been tanking for a long time. The term "banner ad blindness" was first coined in 1998 by Jan Panero Benway and David M. Lane.
In July of '07,Dave Morgan blogged about a study that he conducted with AOL on ad clicking behavior.
Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.
A guest post I contributed to Mashable, see the whole story here: http://mashable.com/2008/05/23/social-media-marketing/
...We realize the power of citizen reporters, word of mouth, media sharing, transparency and interaction. We have the tools, we have the stats, we have the case studies, we know how to develop effective strategies.
Our job now is two-fold: make sure the fakers who claim they get it, but really don’t, don’t screw things up, and educate clients, potential clients and our peers so they are able to make intelligent decisions in selecting an agency and implementing a social media strategy...
Studies indicate that word of mouth is the most influential and trusted source of information for North American consumers when considering a product or service.
This is going to be a short post...
Many social networks are still trying to figure out how to monetize while others are monetizing off of them. People are monetizing Facebook apps, selling Facebook apps and Twitter clients. Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not make it part of your API agreement that any company making a profit from your API needs to give you a cut? The APIs could still be free, and if an app makes money, the API provider gets a piece. After all, isn't the apps success based largely on the technology provided by the API provider? Just seems like it makes sense to me. I'd love to hear your opinion.
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