New Store Feature lets you link to iTunes, Amazon and others

Selling music and merchandise on your mobile site continues to be a primary thrust for your mobile marketing efforts, so we’re always looking for ways to help you sell to your fans. Selling directly to fans on your mobile site remains your most attractive alternative:

·        You keep 100% of the sale price

·        You learn which fans are purchasing your items, and can specifically target them again with special items

·        You collect important contact information about them

However, it’s also true that fans may wish to buy from the popular stores like iTunes or Amazon, or you may, for administrative reasons, prefer fans to buy from CD Baby, Tunecore, your own store, or any of hundreds of others. Now fans can do that.

The new feature enhancements allows you to enter the URL to these external stores that bring fans directly to your page on these stores.

When you add a link, the bottom of your mobile Store page is automatically populated with the Store icon, which links directly to the Store.

We’re starting with the popular Stores but if there’s a Store Link you want to add, just let us know and we’ll put it up. Making it easy for you to direct fans to buy from you – wherever you want to sell them – it what’s behind this new feature.

Happy selling!

Real Time Marketing vs Campaign Based Marketing

Heading into 2013, David Meerman Scott predicted that marketing campaigns as they are typically known would change, but acknowledged that change is difficult. "The old model of marketing built on a company timeline doesn't work so well, but after decades of 'campaigns' planned way in advance, it's difficult for marketers to change a mindset based on speed." Planning out campaigns with a beginning and end, and then analysis of the effectiveness of the campaign, was no longer appropriate. It's simply not how consumers operate in today's economy based upon instant everything and millions of choices.

At dmexco 2013 - one of the largest digital marketing conferences of the year - MediaCom's EMEA CEO Nick Lawson admitted that, while interest in real time marketing continued to spike, universal adoption has been slow. Apparently, it's not easy to react in the moment as a marketer.

But, as Meerman Scott predicted, real time marketing did make huge strides in 2013. Remember the infamous Oreo cookie Tweet during the Super Bowl blackout? During the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII when a power outage at the Superdome caused some of the lights to go out for 34 minutes, the sandwich cookie’s social media team jumped on the cultural moment, tweeting an ad that read “Power Out? No problem” with a starkly-lit image of a solitary Oreo and the caption, “You can still dunk in the dark.”

The message caught on almost immediately, getting nearly 15,000 retweets and more than 20,000 likes on Facebook – not quite Beyoncé halftime show numbers, but pretty impressive for a one-off joke made by a cookie. And IBM's Global Report on the state of marketing showed that half of all marketers used real-time tactics on social media.

Real time marketing hasn't usurped campaign based marketing, but it is definitely "in" and here to stay. This has important influences on Artists because we are uniquely positioned to market to fans in real time - at the moment. And since they have their phones with them, mobile is the perfect device to reach out to fans in their "moment of inspiration" to connect with fans and market to them.

Think about that during your 2014 shows.