world champion

Why Does Everyone Suck At RSS?

My latest RSS feed complaint. Upcoming.org. I wanted to use their feed for a little site called music-post that I am messing with to provide show listings. However, for some odd reason the listings they provide via RSS do not link back to the listings on their site. Call me crazy, but isn't RSS supposed to really serve two purposes? To provide content and to drive traffic back to the content providing site? This may need to be a whole section - sites that suck at RSS.

I'm On The List

Guestlists, comp lists, promoters lists, vip lists, rsvp lists, mvp lists. Everyone wants to be on the list. Just going somewhere isn't enough anymore. You must be on the list. Doing a lot of local club and bar promotion over the years, I quite often find myself receiving emails and phone calls from long lost friends and acquaintances asking to be "put on the list" for some random club night or special event. No sweat off of my back, I do it happily most times. It makes me a star in the eyes of the venue for bringing more bodies to the event, and it makes my friends feel like VIPs. In the end, we all get to feel vaguely important for a minute.

So what is it about the list? Because truth be told, nine times out of ten, this "list" gets the listee nothing more than that feeling of importance. List or not, it is a safe bet that at most bars and clubs will have no issue letting you past the velvet rope and hulking bald man as long as you abide by the dress code and have money to burn. So what is it then? Is it really just the shared feeling of importance on both sides of the transaction that keeps these "lists" alive? Do people just need the extra status and social validation of coming to the doorman and uttering that one phrase that just reeks of both self-importance and self-doubt at the same time? "I'm on the list".

So let's assume that this is the case. That people just like to feel important and create some sense of exclusivity whether it exists or not. And since I am on the never ending quest to think of more ways to entice people to go to certain bars, clubs, and events...let's ratchet this thinking up a notch.

Playing on that need and that insecurity, it would be interesting to promote an event where being on the list was not only advantageous, but necessary. You would need an invitation to attend, and that invitation had to come from someone who had already been invited themselves. The idea is simple in concept, and is already being executed online to some degree - but not with the level of exclusivity I am proposing here. eVite and others have simple invite tools that allow for public and private invites to public and private events, and other sites reward you for telling friends about public events, but no one that I know of is limiting admission to events in such a manner as this.

To begin the process, there would be a small seed group of socially connected and active individuals (Maclom Gladwell calls them "Mavens" in the Tipping Point) who would be given a set of invitations and asked to distribute them carefully to other people who they feel would not only attend the event, but also invite their friends as well. These people in turn would be asked to do the same and the cycle would continue until the appropriate number of invitations spread throughout the network. Attendance at the event would be limited ONLY to those who had received an invitation from another guest, and there would be no exceptions.

The idea is not complicated, but involves a sharp change in thinking and approach versus the traditional means of marketing in the club world as well as a small leap of faith for the club owner and head promoter. Fill your club by telling people they can't go. On the surface, this this flies in the face of the normal marketing done by most nightclubs which typically involves printing mass amounts of flyers and sticking them under thousands of windshield wipers in hopes of seeing a 1% return. To put it in better perspective, think about the manner in which Google's Gmail or Orkut are/were marketed. A limited number of invites were distributed to a small group of individuals, and you could only gain access to the systems by receiving an invite from an existing member. This created instant and incredible buzz, not to mention a brief booming market on ebay for Gmail invites. People were killing each other to get into Gmail, not because it was the best email client out there, but because it was exclusive. It was the it item for tech-geek status on the web. It fostered that need for people to feel important, no matter how baseless it was.

Realistically I don't see any local bars or clubs coming to me and allowing me to try and execute this idea. Having dealt with many of them, I understand that it is hard enough to explain any level of non-traditional marketing to them, let alone telling them I have this great idea where I tell people they can't come to their club. Should I ever get the chance to give this a shot, I will post the findings...

One Day Only! Seriously.

These days online retailers are climbing over one another to get more inventory, more selection, more colors, to serve more people, more items, in more places. But while Amazon, Buy.com, and others stockpile goods in the equivalent of a retailer arms race, one company has taken the complete opposite approach. One item for one day. Woot.com posts a single item each day around midnight. That one item remains on the site for purchase over the next 24 hours or until it sells out. Once it is gone, it never returns to Woot.com, and no one outside of Woot.com knows what tomorrow's item will be...interesting marketing...and apparently it works too. Seems like today's item (a fancy looking blender for $39.99) is already gone and it is only noontime here on the east coast.

Today's Woot Item

ToolBars Are Soooo Played Out

If pink and black  is the new white and black, then desktop search is the new toolbar. With everyone and their retarded step sister producing a toolbar, the market was saturated quickly and as Peter Caputa points out, your browser was overtaken by these search driven monsters each more useless than the next. Well head on over to the uninstall panel and get ready to shift all of that browser real estate into the new gold rush item. Desktop search. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AskJeeves are all looking for the next big thing to search and they think they have found it on your desktop. With Google leading the way (no big surprise), desktop search has burst onto the scene and gotten the search engine community all hot and bothered with it's find anything on your machine super technology. Riding Google's coat-tails, and in classic Microsoft fashion, MSN is set to launch a similar product that is, surprise, only compatible with IE and most likely wrought with bugs and security holes. At least the people who write the Microsoft updates have some job security.

The Highs and Lows Of MTV

In it's twenty some odd year history, MTV has churned out more series than any other television station I can think of. Some are enormous hits (such as the Real World) and some are enormous bombs (such as Lunch with Jesse). With typically low production costs, and a never ending "talent" pool of teens and twenty-something's clamoring for their 15 minutes on TV, it is no wonder that the MTV juggernaut continues to roll along tossing crappy shows out of the window like empty fast food containers as it rumbles down the entertainment highway. I was compelled to post this earlier today as I sat watching a new MTV series that, in my opinion, is instant top ten material on the list of worst MTV shows ever. The show is called Date My Mom and is a complete train wreck of a show where young men go on dates with moms and then from these dates, choose which of the daughters they would most like to go on a "real" date with. Bill Simmons of ESPN encapsulates the feeling of the show perfectly:

Just when you think MTV can't top themselves, they go ahead and top themselves. A kid takes three different Moms out on a date -- each of them try to sell him on their daughter. The sexual tension is disturbing and palpable. All the Moms say their daughters look like Britney Spears even though some of them look like dudes. Then he has to pick a winner without ever seeing the three daughters. Mesmerizing stuff. When they realize that they passed up the hot daughter for a dog, they all make the same face that ML Carr made when he missed out on Duncan in the '97 Lottery. FANTASTIC TV

Notice that he calls this show "FANTASTIC TV" which is what makes putting together a list of the worst MTV shows especially tricky. Each of the bombs that MTV has produced, at one time or another has sucked in even the most seasoned television critic. They are stealthy shows that get into your day and only after you catch the marathon on some lazy Sunday, do you realize just how bad they are. Here are what I consider to be the top ten worst, and top ten best, MTV shows ever. Mind you, there are so many that I am sure that I have forgotten some and as I remember, the list will change. Your opinions are welcomed.

Top Ten WORST MTV Shows Ever Made

1. Date My Mom
2. Newlyweds
3. Room Raiders
4. The Grind/Club MTV
5. The Wade Robson Project
6. Dismissed
7. FANatic
8. Beavis and Butthead
9. Say What Karaoke
10. The Blame Game
    

Top Ten BEST MTV Shows Ever Made

1. The Real World
2. The State
3. Jackass
4. Cribs
5. Unplugged
6. The Andy Dick Show
7. The Jon Stewart Show
8. True Life
9. Undressed
10. My So Called Life

iTunes Fails With RSS and Affiliate Program

Sometime in the next two months I will be launching music-post.com as a side project to my 9-5 job in the internet marketing world. I am starting this site mainly because I like music, but also, launching a site like this  gives me the chance to try and make a few bucks while  messing around polishing my tech  and marketing skills. There is no substitute for good old hands on, trial and error learning.

One of the technologies I am fascinated in is RSS, and more specifically the ability to use RSS to have a constantly updated site such as music-post, teeming with fresh content daily whether I decide to manually add something or not. Among other things such as mp3 hardware reviews, album reviews, tour schedules, and forums, I wanted to have iTunes power my top albums and top singles lists through their RSS feeds. In addition, I figured that as long as Apple was going to feed me content daily, and that content linked to a music store, they could pay me each time someone decided to click through and buy a song that they saw listed on my site. To do this, I logged into my Linkshare account and got hooked into the iTunes affiliate program which would pay me 5% of all sales generated. A nickel per song and 50 cents per album isn't much, but I am guessing that once a person downloads and begins using iTunes, they will spend upwards of $100 on music through iTunes over the lifetime of the program. Obviously in some cases more, and in some less, but there is potential to keep on earning as it seems unlikely for someone to purchase a single song and never return.

The RSS feeds are robust and very easy to customize by genre, category, etc and I was pleased at the ease with which they were spit out of the Apple system. I plugged them into my site and it was instant content with a revenue stream (albeit a small one) back-ended right into it. BRILLIANT. Then....horror. I tried some of the links on the site generated by the feed while I was on my machine at work and was given an error saying that "itms" is not a registered protocol. In short, the links are useless unless you have a working version of iTunes already installed on your machine. If you don't, linky no worky.

What is Apple thinking? Through this awful execution of the affiliate/rss program they are cutting off what must be nearly 50% of possible revenue and 100% of new customers that could be had via affiliate links. If Apple and Linkshare were smart, they would at the very least bounce out those that did not yet have a working version of iTunes to a page where they could download the program and purchase the song that they were looking for. In addition, an affiliate program that tracked the clickers purchasing activity over the life of their iTunes download and then rewarded the affiliate who initiated the download would be fantastic. A compromise would be for Apple to determine what the revenue generated is over the lifetime of an average iTunes download and then pay affiliates a flat fee per download initiated similar to the way many many other pay per download programs work.

No matter what the solution, they need to do something. I can't have links on my site that go dead if the user doesn't have iTunes already installed. I am all for pushing business to iTunes, but they need to meet me halfway here and provide some tools that make my making them money a bit easier.