April 2009 Archives

Many, many people will charge you money to shill your product on Twitter and Facebook. Many people have written many things on why this doesn’t really work, and I won’t rehash those points here. A little while ago, I came across this post describing an example of how social media can help with product marketing - basically, if your product is good, and you don’t actively prevent people sharing information about it, your customers will market it for you. (It occurs to me that you could make the same argument about The Pirate Bay, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)

In any case, yesterday I encountered another way that social media and product marketing can be mixed effectively. The sequence of events went like this:

1) I see a link on Daring Fireball to a Capo, a Mac application for playing songs in various ways (slowly, looped, and so on) so that you learn them on the guitar.

2) I tweet that it looks interesting, but I don’t really have the musical ear to take advantage of it.

3) A little while later, the developer (SuperMegaUltraGroovy) replies, encouraging me to try and learn, and pointing me at a video that might help.

There are two important points here. Firstly, it wasn’t a generic mass-mailed press release, but rather a specific reply to my post. That differentiates it from spam. Secondly, it was clearly from SuperMegaUltraGroovy - they weren’t pretending to be a neutral observer or satisfied customer. That differentiates it from shilling.

The end result is that, from relatively little effort on the part of SuperMegaUltraGroovy, I’ve come away with a very positive impression of the company, and am seriously considering buying a $39 application that I previously only had a passing interest in.

So, it seems there are ways to use Twitter and Facebook to promote your company or products without pissing people off. It also seems like a way that indie developers can differentiate themselves from bigger companies - I can’t see the latter pulling this off without it seeming contrived. We’ll see if this becomes the accepted way of doing things, or if more irritating methods prevail. Given that nobody seems to have figured out a way to make the irritating methods work yet, there’s hope.

I’ve finally watched the first episode of The Wire, and I get the impression that might be every bit as good as everyone says it is. One thing that is beyond doubt, though, is that it doesn’t take prisoners in terms of depth or complexity. I don’t think that this is due to the accents or slang - I’ve read in various places that this is a barrier, but I didn’t have a problem - but rather that a very rich and intricate world is thrust upon you in one go. In introducing both a large number of characters and an unfamiliar setting with little preamble or explanation, it does ask a lot of the viewer. For me, at least, this infinitely preferable to being spoon-fed.

Given the BBC’s insane 5-episodes-a-week schedule, combined with the fact that Tori isn’t keen, I’m unlikely to be able to keep up with it for very long, but I’m going to give it a try.