[Kate] Trgovac called this “the company I wish I had founded. White-label social media components that other companies can use: super smart.” [Michael] O’Connor Clarke called Filemobile a standout player in a crowded market because of its “breadth of solution offering, the flexibility of the UI, the quality of the analytics and the availability of functional APIs.” [Krista] Napier highlighted brand management: “Filemobile’s solution enables brand management with editing tools to let customers moderate their media services and approve and deny content, so they can protect their brands while simultaneously extending themselves to find and engage customers.”

Read the full article at backbonemag.com

Then I installed Viigo, and TwitterBerry and my BB really turned into the “adult soother”. If you haven’t tried Viigo for your mobile phone, then stop reading this and install it. Viigo must be an excellent company because they beat my company, Filemobile for the honour of the Canadian New Media Awards Most Promising Company of the Year, for which we and B5 Media were also nominated. Congratulations, by the way!

I very frequently, after reading an article, like to send it to potentially interested parties. Since email is so 1900’s, I prefer to tweet my URLs. I can’t do this directly, and have to go through some ass-pain to get the URL (especially the Google reader feeds), copy it, and paste it into my Twitterberry. In fact, it completely discourages the action.

So I sent a feature request to Viigo via their feedback function in the app to allow me to send articles to Twitterberry in the same way as native BB apps do. I got a friendly, “Thanks for your feedback!” email. I then tweeted the fact that I made a feature request. I got a response from Matt Bogart via Twitter:

Ability to use #Viigo as your mobile Twitter app is close at hand. Send articles, updates, replies and more directly!

For those of us who read a lot of articles, and like to tweet URLs, this will be extremely cool!

I am now following Matt, and plan to have that upgrade installed as soon as its available. Hopefully, their Ops team will have there servers ready for the load….

In that post, I discussed that user can participate to the creative world not only by authoring content, but also creating playlists of pro content (UGP – User Generated Programming) or presenting it in their own way (UDP – User Distributed Programming).

The CBC recently launched Rogers Hockey Night MashUp, where users can browse a massive gallery of NHL clips and fly them into a very Flashy online video editor.  This solution was delivered via a technology partnership between Filemobile and IndusBlue.

User-Edited Content

Using this set of tools, Joe can now assemble his favourite videos clips, add music tracks, and then publish his “creation” to a gallery, where it can be picked, panned, rated and shared by the masses.  Future versions will include the ability to add voice-overs and actual user-generated content to the timeline.

This adds an interesting balance between professional, high quality content and personalized content.  Users are engaging with the content brand as well as the sponsor, and feel compelled to share their creations on their networks.  Time-on-site is higher than anything I’ve seen, and bounce rates are rock-bottom.  Add in pre and post roll video, and you have an impression bonanza.

Check out the press release from CTV…

This is my audition! Why not leave a comment?

I do feel for the artist that simply must accept that people, probably their fans, are stealing their music. I would probably be pissed off too.

Some people within and without the music business argue that giving away your music for free is great publicity. I couldn’t agree more, but the fact is, artists have no choice. There is a big difference between giving and taking.

So I say “give it”. Give all the studio recordings away. It’s over. Let it go.

Stop trying to sell your marketing.

It used to be that the labels would spend a bundle on a recording, and then use music videos and tours to sell the song on disc.

Now, the reality is that the studio recording is the marketing of the band experience. “Listen to our music, share our music, visit our website, get addicted, then pay!”

• For high-quality versions of awesome video set to the band’s music. Serj Tankian is drip-feeding his fans super-cool videos for all his songs on his required-viewing-for-labels website. Who’s his label, anyway? Granted, he isn’t charging for it, but he could (read on)…
• Concert appearances. You have to be good, very good these days to be a successful musician. Good. It’s about time we went back to the pre-autotune days (sort of).
• Merch
• Fan club. Join for $30/year and get the album and tons of free content. With a shipping and handling fee, send them the CD and a t-shirt. A fan in a t-shirt is more marketing.
• Keep the content coming. Moblog from the road, shoot some back-stage video, twitter… Upload to the site daily. Let people send concert pics right to the fan site.
• Pollute the social networks with your music. It’s the new radio, and it listener-programmed. Free advocacy.
• Use Filemobile to do all this stuff (shameless)

Artists need to create long-lasting relationships with each and every fan. Who’s responsibility is this part of the business of artist development? I would think that the future role of the big labels would be as digital marketing agencies. If that’s the case, why don’t artists get a regular digital marketing agency to do this for them? I might think its because the labels are savvy of the public’s consumption of music and have the necessary technical acumen to provide a comprehensive digital strategy.

The last line of The Age article really sent my head shaking:

“[Missy Higgins' manager] believes that due to the lack of resources within labels, it is incumbent upon artists and managers to work on marketing and promotion independently and be more directly accountable for turning people on to new music” (Murfett, 2008)

Maybe next year.

Full hypocrisy disclosure: I have downloaded my share of music.

I have also just bought the Protest the Hero album from iTunes which included the special edition instrumental version. It was not special enough, however to include lyrics, etc and Canada does not get the HQ downloads yet. Good record, though. I also bought my Killswitch tickets for May 10th with Poison the Well and The End. I was notified that they were on pre-sale to fan club members.

The microsite is called “Connect NOW!” and encourages fans of the show to gather and share photos, videos and “Life Lists”.

Check it out at: http://www.cbc.ca/now

We are live!

Filemobile has launched the latest version of MuchMusic’s ShowMeYours.TV!!

I uploaded this picture directly from the site. You can also upload content with you mobile phone. Cool.

http://www.showmeyours.tv

My new employer is Filemobile, a social networking platform and CMS technology company that is truly Web 2.0 savvy.

FileMobile was recently featured on the highly influential tech news-maker blog, TechCrunch.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was recently described in Wired Magazine as “being among the most influential — and quite possibly the richest — business writers in Silicon Valley.”

This was a very good sign indeed for the King West Village startup whose client list includes the iconic Canadian media companies MuchMusic and CBC.

My blog will continue to focus on new media companies, ideas, trends, entertainment and all manner of things that interest me and hopefully others in and out of the media business.