Spotify conquers the world

“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”

Sir Barnett Cocks

Launched by two guys from a back bedroom in Sweden in 2006, it’s the latest online music phenomenon, and it’s at least as important as the advent of iTunes, if not more so. It gives you instant access to a library of four million songs which you can search for and listen to free of charge.  Beat that, iTunes! OK, you have to put up with the odd interruption for ads, but they’re (so far) few and far between, and it’s a small price to pay. And if you can’t stand the ads, you can go ‘premium’ and ad-free for £9.99 a month. A rumoured tie-in with iPhone is set to enable subscribers to download their play lists. Could this spell the end of digital piracy as we know it?

You’ve heard of Spotify, of course. You haven’t?  Well you have now. Go sign up! You’ll never look back. And like the majority of Spotify’s 2 million listeners across Europe (It launches in the USA next year and is destined to go global!) you heard about it first via a blog or word of mouth. Spotify does not advertise. Nor does it need to, because it’s gone viral.

Spotify’s strategy is far from unique…

In 2005, an obscure team of software developers launched a free internet browser. Their immodest goal was to present a direct challenge to the market domination of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). They named their new browser Firefox. Distributed exclusively by means of a dedicated blog, Firefox achieved 25 million downloads in its first 99 days. Within 6 months, this figure had exceeded 50 million.  By April 2005, Firefox was being downloaded 200,000 times every day. It’s estimated that 2 out of 10 of the world’s web developers downloaded Firefox in its first 100 days. All of this was achieved by word-of-mouth, with barely a penny being spent on marketing or advertising.

There are literally hundreds of similar stories circulating on the internet. As far as I’m aware, it began with Hotmail and continues to this day, and more recently with the launch of Skype, which by 2005 had achieved an estimated 30 million downloads almost exclusively by means of word-of-mouth marketing. In that same year, Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies SA was acquired by eBay for approximately $2.6 billion, no doubt leaving co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom very happy indeed.

The moral of the story?  People can be relied upon to blog.

The same applies at a micro-level. Are you tapping into the blogosphere yet?

It’s been likened to a giant conversation all going on in the same room: a party, at which numerous satellite conversations develop and spark off each other, with you the partygoer drifting from group to group, conversation to conversation. In the process, you exchange business cards, phone numbers, make new friends and nurture new relationships.  Conversations inevitably move from website to website, and because blogs inevitably link to other blogs, and yet still more blogs, if you’ve got something genuinely interesting to say, there are millions of bloggers out there who will be happy to spread the word.

Unlike any other medium, blogging enables you to communicate in real time with any number of like-minded people; it enables you to develop ongoing relationships with your prospects and customers that will be at the expense of your complacently non-blogging competitors.

What’s your line? Dog grooming? Oil exploration? Rare coins? Curry? Widgets? Garden design? Taxidermy? Whatever your business, you can bet your life there is a blog out there devoted to it (OK, perhaps not in the case of taxidermy). And if there isn’t, it’s only a matter of time before there is, because you’re about to create one!  You are, aren’t you?

 

Outbound Marketing vs Inbound Marketing – where’s the smart money?

During the course of my work as a copywriter, I encounter a surprising number of established businesses who, in marketing terms, have so far allowed the 21st century to pass them by.

While they may have an online presence, they do little to enhance their branding through incoming channels.  Many have never conducted an online campaign, and few attach much significance to their online rankings and flow of site traffic.  The prevailing attitude is ‘business as usual’ – i.e. reliance on the traditional channels of tradeshows, direct response, email marketing and cold calling.

But while these methods remain effective in the short term, they are, like the dinosaurs before them, locked into a slow and irreversible demise.  The evidence is all around us. Just take a look at the prevalence of new tools for blocking interruptive marketing, including sophisticated spam filters, and caller ID.  And, even more worryingly, laws such as the CAN Spam Act and Do Not Call lists mean that even if marketers find a way of getting past the gate keepers, they’ll find it much harder to circumvent the law.

The fact is the way people research new products is changing forever right beneath our noses.  Smart businesses realise this, and are slowly shifting the emphasis of their efforts from  ‘outbound’  marketing – i.e. broadcasting your message to thousands of people in the knowledge that between only  1% and 7% have any interest whatsoever  - to ‘inbound’ marketing  - by which people seek you out when they’re ready to buy something.  This means making the move away from conventional old-school marketing and investing more in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, business blogging and social media marketing.  It means you’ll be found by more qualified prospects and convert more of them to paying customers, and you’ll stop wasting money on costly, hit-and miss interruption marketing methods.

A good place to begin is by analysing your business’s internet marketing effectiveness. Currently, how often do you to get ‘found’ by prospects in search engines, blogs and social media? To get the relevant data for your company, do some keyword research using Overture Keyword Tool, search on Technorati for blogs in your industry; search on social media sites relevant to your industry (Facebook, LinkedIn and others).

Use the data from the report to see how you can build more opportunities to reach prospects who are searching for your products and services.  Finally, develop a plan for transforming your company’s marketing strategy from inbound marketing to outbound marketing, and bring it screaming and kicking into the 21st century!