Emusic doesn’t really have standard stuff, offering out-of-the-mainstream tunes from 11.000 or so independent labels, rather than the big four music companies, Universal, Warner Music, EMI and SonyBMG.

Because of that, you have to rely on the recommendations of the community – the other subscribers and the site’s crack team of journalists and commentators – to discover new bands and new music. And the result is an incredible social media site with astonishing liquidity and richness that has helped me discover a range of amazing people that I’d never heard of.

The site has also made some design changes in the last few weeks which have really improved what was already a fabulous site. As you can see from the screen grab, I get recommendations based on previous choices on my home page, links to content emusic thinks I would like (they’re nearly always right), as well as some general editorial and chart-related stuff .

The appeal of emusic has made me think about whether there are any lessons for B2B companies planning to exploit social media. Emusic is an Aladdin’s Cave of comment about all types and genres of music, and the company running the site has designed it to facilitate that. Ultimately it means they get more subscribers who buy more music. There are lots of B2B firms that would love such a passionate community.

Emusic is testament to the truth  that members of a real community self-identify their issues and interests, rather than responding to the organizers’ opinions or strictures. Users are free to provide the content that makes this social network sing. And that attracts more people to the community. And that, in turn, attracts even more people.

Building a site like this requires a different mindset, one that starts with the users’ goals not the site’s. Rather than ‘build it and they will come’, it’s all about listening closely to what the community wants and then providing it. While to succeed, B2B sites don’t need the millions of members that emusic does  – a few hundred of the right sort will do – this example shows that there’s just no point in trying to set the agenda for a community. It has to do it for itself. All you have to do is provide the place and an initial reason for coming. After that, if you get it right, group momentum takes over.

PS My top five discoveries on emusic in the last three years: Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings (sweaty NY noughties funk that amazingly sounds even better than the giants of the 60s); Quantic (salsa, bossa nova, plus soul and 49 other genres mixed into the freshest-tasting electronic soup); Thievery Corporation (acid jazz melded with rancid Indian grooves); Whitefield Brothers aka The Poets of Rhythm (heavy German (that’s right, German) afrofunk that blows your lederhosen out of the room); Orchestra Baobab (unbelievably lissom and deadly music from Senegal).

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B marketing, BB Marketing agency, best software marketing, competitive advantage marketing, Content Optimisation, Content Optimization, hardware marketing, information technology marketing, marketing agency software, marketing positioning, marketing selling, Online PR, relationship marketing strategy, sales promotion marketing, software product marketing, technology communication, technology marketing agencies, technology marketing agency, technology marketing services

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All it takes is an idea — and a client with some vision and courage.

Our client VNL has plenty of both. Marketing guru Pär Almqvist and CEO Anil Raj responded to our ideas for bringing their story to life on the small screen with just three words, ‘Let’s do it’. A few weeks later, Pär and I were in Deorhi, a small rural village in Utar Pradesh, armed with two Sony HD camcorders.

VNL is the inventor of microtelecom, the re-engineering of the mobile infrastructure especially for rural markets. That means base stations that are solar-powered, incredibly low-cost and easily assembled by people with no technical expertise.

VNL sells to mobile operators but we wanted to make the promise of rural connectivity come to life by talking directly to the operators’ potential customers: the villagers themselves.

Deorhi was the perfect village for our needs. Two hundred kilometers from Delhi, Deorhi receives what we call ‘accidental mobile coverage’ because of its location near an important road between to larger towns. The people of Deorhi were never targeted for mobile services, but they got them by accident.

Deorhi is also where VNL’s Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Sirohi, grew up (his father founded the first school in Deorhi and served as it’s principal for 42 years).

The idea for the video was simply to go to Deorhi and interview the villagers about their experiences with mobile phones. We then edited the results into a warm, compelling piece that makes the VNL story come to life.

We expected people to like using mobiles — after all, it’s the first connectivity of any kind for Deorhi. But we were really blown away by the impact that mobile services are having on people’s lives — both for personal and business reasons.

The people of Deorhi were incredibly open and generous. As guests of the Sirohi family, we were also guests of the entire village. That made it easy for Pär and I to conduct over thirty interviews with everyone from 6 year-old kids to an 88-year old man.

After just a few interviews, we knew we’d got what we came for: even without professional cameramen, the footage looks great (bright sun and pretty amazing camcorders helped). We used one camera on a tripod and the other as a hand-held for cut-away shots and footage of the village. The stationery camera used a lapel microphone to make the sound as clear as possible (hugely important).

Pär composed and created the soundtrack himself. He’s not just a ‘marketing dude’, he’s also an incredibly talented musician and kick-ass web developer (he designed and coded the entire VNL site, which we wrote).

The footage was edited by Hugh Gormley, our quasi-in-house editor extraordinaire and posted on VNL’s Resource Library, designed and coded by Pär.

It appears alongside an interview with CEO Anil Raj that we shot over a few hours in Delhi (again, using our two camcorders). It’s a long piece so we cut it into chapters for easy navigation.

Looking back, a few lessons from these first forays into guerrilla video:

• Just do it – The costs of this kind of project are so low, you can shoot first and ask questions later. If you don’t like the footage, abort.

• Keep it simple – Start with a simple idea. No actors. No dramatisation. Just one idea executed well.

• Don’t ignore production values – Yes, it’s the YouTube ethic, but problems with sound, lighting, framing or focus will distract from your message.

• Invest in post-production – The film is made in the editing. Get a great editor and let him do his job. (Thanks, Hugh).

• Skip the committees – Pär and Elise Alpen were the only client contacts for both of these films. We checked in on the key decisions but they let us get on with everything else. It helped that Pär could handle a camera and both kinds of keyboard.

• Go for the end customer – B2B markets can be a bit abstract. Think about skipping over your direct customer and talking to the end consumer for some real energy and context.

Maybe we got lucky with these two films. But the point of guerrilla video is to keep costs low enough to be able to switch to Plan B or kill the project if it isn’t shaping up the way you want.

It isn’t just a video thing: this ‘shoot from the hip’ marketing is on the rise as companies harness the power of blogs, forums, wikis, social media, pay-per-click and email.

As our name implies, we LIKE this kind of marketing. It’s fast. It’s fun. And it makes a real impact in the time it takes traditional marketing to arrange a conference call.

We’ve got more videos in the works for VNL and for clients like dotMobi – and we’re hatching a few new case study ideas for ourselves. Don’t touch that dial.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, guerrilla video, Marketing, Technology Marketing, technology marketing services, video, VNL

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