Crowd Factory Marketing Apps Gain Traction With Major Music Companies
Crowd Factory, a software as a service company focused on social marketing tools, recently introduced a new function for their Social Offer service that enables quick creation of landing pages for group deals and social campaigns on the web and Facebook. This rounds out their suite of "crowd-powered marketing apps" already in use at a number of major music companies.
The cost of Social Offer is not low, starting at $1500 a month, but that's still less than a programmer would charge. Think of it as a corporate DIY offering for marketing departments that, as Crowd Factory puts it, feel the need to bypass the IT department. Music industry customers have included Sony Music, Universal Music Group, MTV, Jive, Billboard and Island Def Jam.
Crowd Factory's Social Offer allows you to set up group-buying opportunities that can be presented as social games. So you can create a special deal that might be made available only to customers who recruit a certain number of friends which brings a game element into a discount offering.
For example, Social Offer was used to power a recent campaign for Britney Spears' Femme Fatale in which fans who got a certain number of people to participate got a discount as opposed to a Groupon deal which is unlocked for all those involved:
"Using social media to spread the word, Crowd Factory created a campaign that enabled fans to share and post about the new album on Facebook and Twitter. After sharing with 10 friends, each fan could get a 20% discount on the album. In the first 3 days, Social Campaign delivered 31% of all traffic to Britney.com as a result of the social visits from fans sharing."
Other customer case studies include campaigns for Parachute, on Island Def Jam, and for Hot Chelle Rae, on Sony Music.
That's not to say you couldn't use their service to do a more "traditional" daily deal or similar offering but they seem to have developed a sophisticated suite of services at this point, including social media marketing and analytics tools, that allows one to experiment without getting locked into a limited template. If you're interested in getting a closer look, there's a "How to Deploy Group Deals and Social Offers" Webinar focused on their services.
Though Crowd Factory's offerings are pretty much out of the range of most indie music marketers, I believe we'll see more and more such services that will be available at a lower price point. Then again, I'm still amazed at how difficult it can sometimes be to find simple workable solutions for basic problems.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance is his primary web project.
What do you mean by “basic problems?”
I agree that we’ll probably see more services that will be indie-cost friendly. It’s probably a good idea for indie artists to look local for their app needs. It is hard to find one source that effectively provides a large umbrella of services, though.
I guess basic problems is a little vague. Here’s one example: Over the years I’ve done various sites that included sections with news feeds. Finding services that can effectively mix rss feeds together and then serve the resulting feed as headlines plagued me for years. The popular ones sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, while getting raves in the tech media.
It was especially difficult to find services that could display headlines that were spiderable by search engines. There were options available if you had your site on a server and could muck around with a bit of coding but having a web service option that could handle what seemed to be a relatively simple problem was almost impossible.
That’s just one example. On a related note, so many services have launched, gotten popular and stopped development. Feedburner pretty much stopped going anywhere after Google bought it. I think they added email newsletters that you can’t do anything to and they also added posting to Twitter which often didn’t work over a period of months while Twitterfeed has handled that task admirably. Why couldn’t Google do it? Are they chock full of people with high SAT scores?
I use Typepad, it’s gone almost nowhere over the last few years except for services designed to get people into their oddball excuse for a social network. WordPress.com offers pretty solid service but won’t do any deals with any of these plugin companies so, if you don’t want to deal with the .org version, you’re mostly out of luck for doing anything beyond a blog and some pages and lots of services offer that.
Much of the web remains broken and most of the services are stunted. Even before Silicon Valley started complaining about companies that were launching with a feature as the company, most companies weren’t really offering that much and haven’t developed much beyond their initial offerings.
That’s my take on the state of Web services for small-time web publishers!