The Idea

Just writing down the basic outline of my idea so it's out there. I think there are still a few creases to iron out here and there.

Gigs are a great place for targetted marketing. Upwards of 10,000 people at larger venues, all in a single building who all share a common interest through the music they have chosen to see. This could be used to great effect if there were an easy way to get information out to those people, say via bluetooth nodes to their mobile devices. The information sent to them could vary from reviews of other gigs on the tour, to clips of the band they are going to see, to adverts for their new albums, or the albums of similar artists. This could all link up to an iTunes like store where these purchases could be made.

The people who would be providing this service would be the people running the venue. The benefit for them is that they could use this service as a great form of targetted advertising, sending information about upcoming gigs to a large group of people who they know have similar interests, and who they know are willing to travel the distance to the venue. This part of the idea could link up to the venue's box office website, so that people can order the tickets there and then.

From a slightly less companies-trying-to-get-as-much-money-from-you-as-they-can point of view, there is another way that digital devices could be used, and to some extent are. People are always using cameraphones at gigs. These photos and videos are then uploaded to the internet via flickr or photobucket or youtube or any other of the dozens of media hosting sites out there mere hours after the event. The only problem with this is consistency. The photos and videos are all over the web, all with different tags, descriptions, titles, and with varying quality. Using GPS technology, it should be possible to work out what venue someone is in when they take a photo, and based on the time, what event they are currently watching. This information could then be used to automatically upload all the media taken by people at the event to one consistent place, ordering them by time and with user added tags. These could then be rated by the viewers of the site, in a similar way to how the videos on youtube are rated, making it a lot easier for people to find images and clips of the event they were at, as soon as they get home.

Links and Things

These are just a few links I have found while looking for information on viral marketing and designing for mobile phones while surfing the web.

Viral Marketing
This is a link to an article on generating interest in a product or event using viral marketing techniques. It has some good strategies on how to manage a viral campaign, such as how to keep track of what people are saying about you (good or bad) by keeping an eye on blog comments and messageboards via RSS feeds. It also goes into some detail on the technique of link baiting, the proccess of assessing how link-worthy your content is and attracting the right kind of people who will link to you, thus maximising traffic through using your audience.

The second link is a blog post on what it means for something to be viral. One of the main things I drew from this was that the ideas behind a lot of viral adverts are quite shallow, most of the time out of necessity, as things which are easy to understand and instantly entertaining are going to be much quicker to spread around that something thought provoking which takes time to sink in.

Designing for Mobile Devices
These two links focus mostly on the technical side of designing for small screens such as those of mobile phones. The first is a link to Mike Davidson's blog, where he suggests four easy steps that will create a mobile version of your site. I found the image comparisons half way through the article quite interesting. They were from sites which I would have expected to already have used mobile friendly technology, especially Gizmodo, but I guess that goes to show how under-developed and underused this technology is. The second link deals with compatibility, and shows how certain tags and page elements are displayed on verious devices. It has some pretty useful tips on how to make your site easy to use on a mobile device.

The Six Principles of Viral Marketing

This article is about the main principles of viral marketing. It provides good guidelines for creating a viral marketing campaign, along with information about what you can hope to achieve from doing so.

Among the information given in the article are useful things such as:

Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit "soon and for the rest of their lives"...

which explains that the payoff of a viral marketing campaign will not be short term thing, but when it finally comes around, it will be more than worth the effort put in.

I found the article useful when considering how to go about creating a viral marketing campaign, as it clearly highlights the differences between viral and ordinary campaigns.

ilovebees: An Example of Viral Marketing

ilovebees was a marketing campaign for the release of 'Halo 2' a highly anticipated video game. It took the form of an Alternate Reality Game, or 'ARG'. Typically these games see people from all over the world working together to harvest information from fake websites. They generate an unbelievable amount of publicity, and really draw the participants into the world of the product that they are publicising.

ilovebees was a cross-media experience that drew on the internet for the production of fake websites, as well as emailing, and even phone communication with characters from the game world. The game sparked interest when the url 'www.ilovebees.com' was displayed at the end of an early trailer for Halo 2. From here, players of the game unravelled the secrets held within that site and many others to reveal a complicated story full of twists and turns. The ultimate payoff of the game is that participants were invited to special locations to play the game before it was released to the public.