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« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
Springsteen's Radio Nowhere is Everywhere but The Radio
On my favorite Springsteen fan site Greasylake the rumors were running 
everywhere about NY's Q104.3 (yes that old classic rock station is back) playing Springsteen's new song Radio Nowhere. Sadly, it didn't occur on Monday but they were able to play the song on Friday. In addition to that, Little Steven's Underground was also supposed to play it tonight, but even though I registered for the site to listen on the web, I'm not tuning in. What gives? Have I become disappointed with Bruce and the band? Heck no, I'm even more Badlands fist pumping excited over a new E Street Band CD and tour to follow. I just think the folks at Springsteen Inc ought to have a New Media Strategy. You see relying on radio stations to debut a song is a waste of time for Bruce and a waste of time for you when you can easily find it on the net.
Late last week, you could have downloaded the song from BitTorrent, but let's say you are like me and don't really want to leave a footprint. Sure I'll trade bootlegs because Bruce and the Band have given their blessings over the years (bootleggers start your tapes), but downloading a studio, copyrighted song, no way. However, about 2 days ago you could have found the song uploaded on YouTube which is really the uploader's and YouTube's problem. As of this writing, approximately 45K plays of the song has occurred on YouTube. That's 45K times that a listen occurred without a radio station.
Now of course I benefited from not wasting my time listening to commercials and songs that a DJ or program director thought I should listen to and for that I'm thankful. It just points out the sad state that radio is in especially classic rock stations when a classic rock star like Bruce puts out a new song and they can hardly cash in on it. Does Bruce have a new media strategy? I don't know and I'm not sure if he cares. The folks that posted it don't look like they are official types, but who knows maybe the song was leaked to them. Will he lose sales from posting like this? Sure, but I don't think anyone should cry because a tour to follow up the release plus merchandise will guarantee Bruce and the Band hundreds of millions of dollars.
If the song was leaked, then why not cash in on the search activity and runs some pay per click ads to drive even more traffic. How about a free download of his site? Perhaps he can't because of his contract and if that's the case will Sony now come after YouTube? It clearly points out that a rock star like Bruce, even with an aging audience has to have a new media strategy. Anyway, I L-O-V-E the song; nothing is better than listening to a new song by Bruce and The E Street Band to make you feel new again.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
What Happens When You Mix Google, a Dwarf, and a Vacuum Cleaner?
Thanks to my friend Ryan, he turned me on to popurls a few months back and when I need a break I check it out (sadly I don't have a blogging career). In the middle of the day this article called Dwarf's <insert term for male private part> stuck to vacuum cleaner was one of the top Diggs of the day. Basically Captain Dean the Demon Dwarf was supposed to appear in a circus with a vacuum cleaner attached to his member, but he had some problems with glue and the vacuum and had to be taken to a hospital (honest Dr, this was part of my act). 
BTW - why do these crazy things always happen in England. Anyway the article is funny, but what really makes it are the Google ads found at the bottom of the page. See this screen shot.
Now, you readers know how much I love Google and I am starting to grow to love the reach and targeting abilities in their content networking, but this is too funny. Serving up vacuum cleaner parts ads tied to the content in this article is really funny. On a somewhat serious note, Google actually did a decent job matching 2 out of the 3 ads to the content in the article (guy has problems with his vacuum cleaner breaking down); what I don't understand is how Google decided to map a newspaper print quote ad to the article.
Anyway, funny stuff and if my Google friends keep funniest content matches this has to be near one of the best.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
American Express - Killing You Softly with Fees?
Yes I ranted regarding all of the direct mail that American Express generates as the Junk Mail King and begged them to try email out. Well, I've been receiving weekly emails from them now, but all of them come from their Rewards group which I think is perfect. Besides getting on board with this email thing, using email/web for Rewards program is key because you don't have to print up pages and pages of junk to describe all of the redemption options. However, just like their sign and travel options and hosts of other fees, you MUST READ THE FINE PRINT on Amex's offers. Case in point, take a look at this offer I received this morning.
The email looks very enticing and tells you that you can pay your business taxes online 
using American Express. Basically the pitch is "hey pay your taxes with your Amex card and get get rewards points that you can use to get valuable prizes." It also direct you to "officially" approved websites to make payments. These websites of course have that schlocky US Government looking graphics and titles like official payments or 1040. Its enough to fool anyone except for those footnotes.
The first footnote at the top which I'm sure the Amex lawyers insisted on putting above the fold says "These tax payment companies charge a convenience fee of approximately 2.49%.
This fee may be tax-deductible. Check with your tax advisor". Well, I did at the end of tax season and my accountant told me, why would you want to pay that fee. So, as a service to you readers, I checked over with the IRS official site and here's what I found regarding the fee: "Credit card service providers charge a fee for their service. This fee
can be deducted as a business expense, when paid or incurred by the
business." Ok, so the fee is charged by these "official" looking companies that can assist with your tax 
payments.
So, here's what we know. 1) Use your Amex card to pay your taxes and get whacked with a 2.49% fee 2) The IRS says you can deduct this as a business expense 3) According to American Express you can get an $100 Amex Gift card for 20,000 points. 4) Depending on your card you earn 1 point for every $1 spent; there are other options but that's the base card. 5) I'll come back to that earning points thing because it is very confusing.
Let's do some math. In order to get 20K points you need to charge at a maximum $20,000. If you paid $20K in taxes using this offer it costs you $498. However, you may get some tax benefit since you can claim this is a business expense, so lets knock 30% off that $498 to get some tax savings. Therefore charging $20K in taxes costs you $349 and that gets you $100 in cash from Amex. Woot, that's some losing proposition and that's on the low end assuming you get 30% in tax savings.
Now to be fair to Amex since I used the lowest points earning option lets see what your break even points earning option you would need to pay for these fees. I personally can't figure out the levels because the pages on their websites are confusing, so let's stick with the math.
Let's keep the tax benefit the same at 30%. So, in order to break even on the $100 you need to have a cost of $143 charged on your Amex card for the service ($143*.7=$100.1). To get a charge on your Amex card of $143 you need to have paid $5,743 ($143/.0249) in taxes, but in order to get the 20,000 points on that $5,743 charged you need to earn 3.48 points per dollar charged (20,000/5743).
What am I missing here? Unless you know for sure that you are earning at least 3.5 points per dollar charged, this is a lose, lose scenario for you just like my accountant told me a few months back. Are you earning 3.5 points per dollar spent? Do you even know what you are earning or can you even figure it out? Looks to me for the convenience of not writing out a check you are getting hit over the head in fees. Seriously, did I make a mistake? Is this wrong? I'll be more than happy to correct this post, but it looks to me like this is not a good offer at all. Some things are just better the old fashioned way - PAPER and CHECKS; that is until that fee comes down!
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
What's Springsteen's Magic Marketing Plan
As you can tell from some of my past link posts, I'm a huge Springsteen fan. I've seen him over 35 times since 1985, own every one of his releases except for the Seeger Sessions (like Barry Bonds' HR "record" I like to make believe it never occurred), have plenty of signed pictures in my office, and boxes and boxes of bootleg CDs traded over the internet. Plus, I made sure my son saw him on The Rising Tour even though he was 3 and I plan on taking the whole family to one of the shows.
Springsteen just announced a new studio release slated for October 2nd
and it also is an E Street Band CD which is the first one since The Rising. That is huge news, but besides his dwindling fan base (more on that in a second) does anyone else think it is huge news? The two major fan sites Backstreets and Greasylake saw huge spikes in traffic with the news, but that is probably fans that have only just started to return from Bruce's E Street Band hiatus (I've been missing since Seeger). You see, Bruce followed The Rising with Devils and Dust which was mostly an acoustic CD and then toured solo. He then returned with the folk CD of non-Springsteen covers called the The Seeger Sessions and then toured with a non-E Street Band. So, it has been a while in between Bruce's rock sound.
So on Friday I looked around the internet to see what buzz I could find and for a while I was excited. In the middle of the day searches for Bruce Springsteen Magic peaked to 91 according to Google trends, but by the end of the day, Bruce faded away and was no longer in the top 100 searches. Who ended up ahead of Bruce for the day? How about?
- John Blewett
- Zach Efron
- Wily Mo Pena (that's pathetic)
Then while experimenting in Facebook I clicked on one of those polls that runs in the margin and decided to construct my own. So for fun I constructed one on Springsteen to see if Facebook users were excited about the new CD. Even though it cost me $50, I wanted to test out the Facebook survey service. Here are the results:
- 8% of users will buy the CD and about 7% might download a song
- 20% don't know who Bruce is
- and 66% said they were not excited about the new release
I don't know if those numbers are good or bad because I've never run a music survey before, but what surprised me the most were the 20% of users who didn't know who Bruce is. The people that didn't know were more likely to be younger (13-24 years old), but if you looked at the # of people that are excited they are also more likely to be younger (the chart adds to 100% by age group not by answer) followed by the oldest group of responders. Clearly there is an opportunity to capture both sets of age groups on the internet.
Clearly with a great sounding CD Bruce can grab tons of fans that can be introduced to him for the first time. And, if the CD works its Magic Bruce can bring a lot of old fans back into the fold. I'd love to see what his marketing plan looks like and whether he will use some of the tactics he used the last time for The Seeger Sessions which included music downloads, concert footage, as well as email blasts.
If I had to guess, Bruce goes out like he has done in the past and tours behind the release, hoping that the greatest live performer in Rock History lifts sales. However sometime in 2008, Bruce can't resist another Presidential Election and jumps in to support the Democrat Nominee which really introduces him to a new, younger audience that doesn't know who the Boss is; that's the boost to his CD sales.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Behind Those Google and Yahoo Customer Satisfaction Numbers
My friend Megan emailed me this link the other day from ABC News called Yahoo Just Beats Out Google in Customer Satisfaction and then later I found the link to the actual study put out by ACSI. eMarketer also jumped on board with this chart which compared the trends over time. This study led Larry Freed President of Foresee Results to declare "Yahoo is emerging as the leading portal," he says. Hmmm, I always thought they were a portal.
I think the study itself is very interesting; interesting for a number of reasons.
- To me Yahoo has always been a portal, at least since it really ditched its mantra of being yet another hierarchical officious oracle or for you youngsters back when it was just a listing of links.
- Google on the other hand has always meant one thing which was search. Even looking at their homepages show the sharp difference between the two. I'm not saying that Google isn't trying to become a portal and your on ramp to the internet, but maybe for the most part it still means just search to people.
- Why would someone's satisfaction with Google go down? Are their search results not superior any more? Perhaps their biggest issue is not getting enough traffic on their other product extensions. I haven't seen an update from Hitwise in a while of traffic to other Google properties, but maybe they aren't getting enough downstream. How many people actually have their own iGoogle page? I do and its my home page today.
- Meanwhile Yahoo redesigned their website to make it even easier to get more information
From a media buying perspective they are both awesome. The Yahoo Search side can use a little push but I have had and continue to have a lot of great account executives from both of them. I'm not sure who is #1, but through the years I have worked with a lot of great people and even a few of them I'd call friends (Adrienne S, Richard K, Lisa G). One thing that is different between working with them is that:
- Google for all of their great account service is really a self-service model with account support. If you know what you are doing you can setup your own account, put in your credit card and off you go.
- Yahoo (not search) is largely an account service model where they supply you the rates and placements and then you have to agree to the buy. Other than their search platform it is NOT a self-service model.
Perhaps the media buying examples explains a lot of the customer satisfaction numbers. Google has a lot of great tools for consumers, but unless you know someone or read a blog you may never find out about what they have to offer besides search. Yahoo on the other hand pushes out the content to you, making sure that you are force fed the service. By definition, Yahoo should have better customer satisfaction - do you like table service or buffet service? Anyway, I love them both, but unless you submerge yourself into Google, you are probably missing some great tools.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Are You An Idiot If You Pay for Shipping on Amazon.com?
I had to have this before the summer was over. It was more Jimmy Buffett CDs which the whole family loves listening to especially on our back deck in the summer. So which Buffett CDs did I have to have? They were a 4 CD box set called Boats, Beaches, Bars, and Ballads and a single disc called Feeding Frenzy. That's a lot of songs to download at 99 cents per and I don't subscribe to a monthly service because I don't download a lot of songs - mostly listen to a few artists and then Satellite Radio for the rest.
So, I went to the only place to buy CDs now which is Amazon.com and placed an order, Friday at 9:12 PM EST which qualified for free super saver shipping. As I recall, to get the CDs with next day delivery would have cost me $15 or so, but I wasn't stupid. The CDs arrived today at around lunch time. That's 4 days including the weekend. That's really, really fast and the best of all it was FREE with no taxes. Seriously, I got two day (business) delivery for free.
I wonder how much faster it would have been delivered if I would have paid for it. There's no way I would have received it on Sunday, so maybe Monday at the earliest? So, the next time you buy at Amazon, DO NOT PAY FOR SHIPPING if your order is large enough because you are just flushing dollars away.
No wonder my old favorite record store, Scotti's Records is only down to a few stores. How do you compete with such a large inventory and almost instant gratification without the download? You can't.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
P.S. Thanks Jackie for the comments before this post!!!
Caroline Giuliani Is The #1 Hottest Search on Google Today
As shown on Slate.com, Rudy Giuliani's daughter is supporting Barack Obama. 
While I guess that is newsworthy since it is embarrassing to the Mayor, one could only guess at what her motives are and how upset she must be at him. What I found even more interesting and worthy of a post besides the link post (below) where I first read about it is that she is the #1 Hottest Trend on Google Searches for today, worldwide. Here's the link and a screen shot. Google is listing her searches as being on fire and one could only guess as to the type of bad press this can bring to the Giuliani camp. Said another way, what will the long term effects, if any, this type of hot search volume can do to a political campaign. I guess the Mayor can be happy it occurred now instead of closer to a primary.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
Eat Your Heart Out - We Were There for ARod's 500th HR
Yes, the family and I were there at Yankee Stadium in the hot humid air and saw Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th home run. I snapped these photos as he it out of the park. It made sitting on the Deegan Expressway forever worth it. The only downer on the day was the thought that ARod can walk away at the end of the season which would be a real shame. Anyway, here are my photos - enjoy them.
BTW, speaking of another "milestone" home run,
I could care less about Barry Bonds. He took illegal steroids, he cheated, end of story. And, please
don't give me that garbage that taking steroids wasn't illegal in baseball. That's just convenient. It is illegal to take steroids without a prescription in this country so he broke Federal Laws. Comparing that to throwing a spitball or putting a super pinky in your bat is the most ridiculous comparisons I've ever heard. It is not illegal in this country to throw a spitball. Bonds broke our country's laws and cheated - it is a tainted record.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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