Upgraded Twitter Mobile Page!

Following your feedback (which is always welcome!) we've upgraded the Twitter page slightly. It was too condense and confusing.
Your new Twitter page allows your fans to view your tweets separately from 'All Tweets', and then they can also tweet about you.
Here's an example of how this new page works:

The key to making this page perfectly is to enter your Twitter credentials on the artist portal, in the "Fan Comments" page. With that, we can accurately present the information and create tweets on your mobile page.
If you do not enter your twitter details then your mobile page will not be as great, because we will be effectively guessing your twitter user name...here's an example what that would look like:

So...what you need to do?
If we do not have your Twitter details already, log into your Adva Mobile account, enter your Twitter details on the fan posts page and you'll be all set!

Check Out the New Raffles Feature!

With this exciting participatory feature artists have not only been gaining new fans joining their mobile club (fans telling their friends, your tweets etc.) but also renewed energy with their existing fans. 50% fan participation or growth in your fan base is not above the average performance we've seen in recent raffles.

Artists have mostly been setting up show tickets as the raffle prize. However, as far as prizes go, let your imagination run about what’s cool for your fans to win. You can set up several types of prizes in any one raffle, and for each type, you can raffle as many as you like.

Scheduling a raffle is a breeze: head over to the Artist Portal, and find the raffles setup page under ‘your mobile web page’ menu item. The form is straight forward. You can take advantage of another feature that allows you to enter instructions to your fans who won, for example “show this page at the will-call booth and you will get your tickets”, or, “Contact me at xyz@xyz.com to claim your prize” etc. We recommend that you then schedule a fan blast to invite your fans to participate in the raffle, when it is scheduled to begin.

When the raffle ends, we draw the prizes. We tell the fans who participated to check on the mobile website if they won. For those who won, we will present them with their prize and a unique ID, so they can claim the prize. They will also see your message for winning fans that we described earlier. Finally, we will SMS them with that information, for their records.

Raffles are a popular way to engage your fans. Be sure to take advantage of this new mobile feature as part of your marketing effort. Good luck!

Raffles are here!!!

Anyone for two backstage passes? AfterParty passes? Free giveaways?
If you've ever been to a show, you know exactly how electrifying raffles can be. Crowds go wild when they are being offered to participate in a raffle. Chances are, more than 50% of your crowd will participate in a raffle if ran one at the show.
Question is, how do you do that today?
The answer is, most likely, that you don't. Because you can't.
Not anymore!!!

Your fans carry a cell phone in their pocket, which means, now they can participate in your raffle right at the show!
What do you need to do?

1. Login to the artist portal on Adva Mobile, head over to the Raffles page (under "Your Mobile Site").
2. Setup a new raffle, schedule it, setup the prize(s) you want to give away. You can also upload complementary content they can download to their phones as a thank-you. 
3. Promote the raffle:
   
   
   • Send an SMS blast to your fans if you like.
   • At the show, tell your fans to text in your keyword ("bobby" to 88704). They will see your promotion message about the raffle on your mobile home page.

What happens next?

• Your fans join the raffle, and download the content you gave them as a thank-you.
• When the raffle ends, three things happen:
  
  
  • We draw the prizes between all your fans who participated.
  • Your fans get an SMS inviting them to visit the raffle page, where they can find if they won.
  • You get an email, telling you who won and what did they win.
  
  

That's it! Simple and fun!

What's left? Go try it!

New Features launched tonight: Try them this weekend!

Hi all,
We're excited to share with you a number of new features we've launched tonight on Adva Mobile. We think these features will help you reach more fans and get them more engaged through your Mobile Fan Club.

In this post we'll just name the new features. We will describe each one in more details in future posts. We encourage you to check out those new features on the site and try them (If you do not yet have a Mobile Fan club, it's time to get yourself one):

• Voting: Let your fans vote on their favorite song for an encore! Give them a free download as a thank-you. Click here =)
• Learn much more about your fans, add new ones with the new "Your Fans" page.
• Mobile Emails: In addition to the SMS Blast, you can now send your fans emails with the new fan blast tool 
• Target your fans: Use the Blast Filters to alert your fans in the city you're going to perform next (or by their age or gender)
• Get your LiveNation gigs on your Fan Club: Check out the new integrations page.

There's many more improvements we've made through the site, which we won't go into details here. Over time we will publish posts that describe each feature and how to use it best with your fans.

These new features are a result of great feedback+ideas we got from artists who see the value in their Mobile Fan Club and help us move forward, helping you! So, a big THANK YOU to Yasmin, Bobby Bishop, Jill, Brad and many many others!

Upgraded Artist Reports Portal: Knowledge is Power!

Hi Everyone,
Recently we've featured an important video from TopSpin's CEO talking about how important for an artist is the knowledge you can gather about your fans. We believe in that wholeheartedly, which is why we're very excited to launch our new reporting portal!

The new reporting portal provides you insight into the critical aspects of your activity on your Mobile Fan Club with your fans. For example, how Mobile Fan Club grows over time, where are my fans located, what's their age or gender, which pages or content my fans visit more, transactions reporting and much more.
We collect that data when your fans visit your mobile website, and the more specific data as they go to your exclusive content page and leave their details.

Using the new reporting tool you can make important decisions like:

• Planning your tour based on where most of your fans are
• Uploading (and selling) content and merch based on what sells best etc.
• Blast your fans about new shows based on where they are and what day they like to receive the blast 
• You could tell fans to find other fans in the same area
• Track the impact of your promotion efforts by how many new fans you get
• Determine if different merchandise sells better in different fan locations, gender and age

We encourage you to visit your new reporting portal, learn more about your fans on your Mobile Fan Club and make clever decisions with that knowledge!

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments, we'd like to hear from you!

How many fans on my mobile Fan Club?

Where are my fans located?

Mobilize your gigs from JamBase on Your Mobile Fan Club

Hi Everyone,
We're excited to reveal the next partner in our integration strategy, JamBase. Artists on JamBase portal who sign up for our free Mobile Fan Club service can now automatically import their gigs from JamBase into their Mobile Fan Club daily.
This is another milestone in our strategic effort to reduce the effort required by the artist to manage their promotion channels. Artists should not need to enter their profile, show and merchandise information for every service they sign up for. Similarly, social services like Twitter, Facebook and others share information between them to the benefit of their constituents.
JamBase is a website for fans of live music. By providing the largest database of show listings and ticket information, authoritative content, community, and personalization tools for fans, JamBase connects music fans with the music they love and empowers them to go see live music.
JamBase launched their own iPhone app, delivering Music Fans Mobile Access to Its 70,000 Live Music Show Listings, clearly identifying the potential of reaching fans on their mobile phones.

The integration with JamBase follows after our initial integration with MySpace and ArtistData. We at Adva Mobile are motivated to provide a superior and simple experience for entertainers, and we're already working with the next partner!

How to mobilize your JamBase gigs

1. If you haven't signed up for your own FREE Mobile Fan Club, do it here.
2. On the artist portal, visit the 'Integrations' page.
3. In the 'Gigs' column, check the "JamBase" check box.
4. Click 'Update'

You're done!

New changes and improvements to your Mobile Fan Club!

We're excited to announce exciting new changes to your Mobile Fan Club

• Changes to the Links on your Mobile Page Footer
  We've replaced the old links with new fun icons for your Gigs, Merch sales, News, Buzz and your Twitter pages.
• Your Keyword and Shortcode are changing
  
  
  
  
  As of Nov 1st, Your keyword is going to change from what it is today to be prefixed by "get". We found it to be much more intuitive to fans to remember "get"+the band name, "get" + the artist name etc. (if your keyword is "Santigold", it will become "GETSantigold". If it's "NBS", it will become "GETNBS". If it's "metal", it will become "GETmetal").
  Our shortcode is also changing from 43863 (GETME) to 88704. So, next time you do a shoutout, or in your mailing lists (if it's after Nov 1st), remember to tell your fans to text "get"+your existing keyword to 88704.
  
  
  
  

PS. If you want to change your keyword, you can always do that on the artist portal at AdvaMobile.com.

It's time to choose your own password!

Hi all,
In the past we've had many people unhappy with the way we managed passwords when they signed up: previously, we would create a random password for you, and send it to your email. That method was far from perfect...what if we got the wrong email, or that email went into your junk mail...Even if you got the email, you would need to go and change your password on the portal.
Too many people had password issues! no more!

We've just introduced a new signup method, where you can enter whatever password you like. Like before, we will enter you right into the portal so you can start checking out the amazing features we have for you and we will send you the email reminding you of your username and password.
The facilities to recover your password and change it are obviously still there for you!

Hopefully this makes a lot of people happier =). Go sign up now...

Introducing direct, branded URLs to your mobile page

You may remember, in addition to your keyword and shortcode (Remember "send McAlister to 43863?), you also have your own branded URL, that your fans can use on their PCs or their phones. It's short and simple:
http://adva.us/mcalister
or
http://advamobile.com/mcalister

Those URLs always brought you to your mobile home page. Not anymore.


Choose any of the following to send your fans to the correct page you want them to go.
For example:
http://adva.us/mcalister?p=b will send your fans to your mobile "Buy" page (your merchandise page).
http://adva.us/mcalister?p=t will send your fans to your mobile "Tweet" page.

So, what do you need to do? simply add "?p=" and the page key to your URLs and you're done!
The page keys are:
h: home (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=h)
b: buy (merchandise page) (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=b)
g: gigs (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=g)
t: tweet (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=t)
l: blog (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=l)
n: news (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?n=h)
u: buzz (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=u)
a: about (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=a)
r: request gig (example: http://adva.us/mcalister?p=r)

That's it!
As always, feel free to send us ideas and comment to here

Your Tweets are now visible!

Hi again,
We've just introduced a correction to the way tweets are presented, following some of your reviews: Previously, if you tweeted about a band on their mobile page, you couldn't actually see your tweet. That has to do with how we're tied to the Twitter API.
But now it's fixed. As soon as you hit the "Tweet" button, the page will refresh, and along the older tweets we collect from the web, you will see your recent tweets at the top of the list.

Just makes it a little more fun =)

How about trying it now? Brimstone's artists would love to hear from you!

Couple minor changes on the home page

Hi all,
We're celebrating these days our 400th artist to get their own mobile fan club! It's very exciting for us and along hard work, we're happy to see artists communicate with their fans using the SMS blast tool, fans downloading music and watching videos, and everyone benefiting from our free service.
To celebrate this occasion, we're introducing 3 changes to the home page, requested by many artists:

• Highlight tickets on sale right on the mobile home page: Whenever you set gig tickets for sale, the nearest 3 gigs that have tickets on sale will show right at the bottom of your home page. This way, it's not intrusive to the fan who just wants to listen to your music, but it does a better job of making your tickets visible to those fans who will be interested in them.
  
  
• Highlight merchandise on the home page: Similarly, we've been requested to give you tools to promote the merchandise on sale better. One way to do that, we've taken 3 of your merchandise items and highlighted them at the bottom of the home page. Again, with the intention of not being obtrusive about it, just serving you and the fans who want T-shirts, CDs etc.
  
  
• Last, a very minor change to the footer, in which the links are now one below the other, a little like an iPhone interface. Slightly nicer.
  
  

We hope you like those changes and use them to promote tickets and merch to your fans. As always, feel free to give us more direction and feedback here.

Get the latest activity of your Mobile Fan Club, in your inbox!

Many artists have been telling us that the reports on the artist portal are great, but a quick snapshot email of what happened on their mobile fan club recently is a big improvement.

We're introducing a new feature that will do exactly that: you can now get activity reports straight into your inbox. You can schedule those reports to come to you daily, weekly, monthly or never. Those emails will tell you:

• How many fans you got in your Mobile Fan Club, how many were added recently.
• New gigs you've added for which tickets for sale were added to that gig.
• New merchandise items you've put for sale.
• New Paypal transactions generated by your fans.
• New articles you've created or automatically imported from external sources (like ArtistData)
• And finally, new SMS blasts you've scheduled or executed.

Here's an example report:

The weekly reports come out every Thursday afternoon, the monthly ones will come out on the 1st of every month.

Log into the artist portal and under Profile->Change my password and email, you can set the frequency you'd like to recieve those emails. If no preference has been set, we will send you those email weekly.

If you have any comments or more great ideas like this one, write to us.

Thanks and rock your stage!!

More than Music Artists – Music Festivals!

Mobile fan clubs for music artists offer great promise for connecting fans to music, but mobile marketing can be a new way for music festivals to engage fans before, during and after the event, reaching them on their "always-with-them" mobile phones.

Before the Festival, fans can be notified of new Artists to the lineup, changes in times, and news from sponsors. At the festival, fans can get up to date lineup changes, directions, maps to bathrooms, stages, parking, the medical tent, etc. Merchandise can be ordered and paid for on phones and picked up at the event, reducing lines at the merch table. After the event the festival can follow up with video and audio for sale, fan comments, press coverage about the event, and other messages to start marketing for next year’s event.

Adva mobile is pleased to announce our first music festival using mobile marketing to engage fans. Providence RI’s SoundSession ‘09, New England's premier summer music festival in Rhode Island's capital city. A multi-stage, genre-defying event, the festival is produced by the Providence Black Repertory Company in collaboration with the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.

Adva Mobile developed a custom designed mobile experience for fans and attendees of SoundSession ’09, including a unique search function where fans can find music by Artist, Date, and Venue. Check it out: Text soundsession to 43863.

Get your Merchandise/tickets sales money into your PayPal account

Many artists have been asking us where do the funds from their ticket or merchise sales end up? And more importantly, how to make those funds end up in their existing Paypal account?

After a sale has been made to a fan, on the next round hour we will contact Paypal (automatically, we don't call them =)), and tell them to transfer the funds to the artist. We do that by giving Paypal the email address we have for that artist. Until now, we used the email address you gave us when you signed up.

We've just introduced a new feature that allows you to enter your existing Paypal account email, to be used to transfer those funds, on the artist portal under Profile->Paypal Profile. This email address will only be used for the Paypal transactions; we still use your primary email address for all other communications with you.
If we don't have a Paypal email for you, we still would use your primary email address for the Paypal transactions.

Also on the profile->Paypal profile page is where you can add email addresses for an affiliate service charge (for settlement through Paypal) as well as fulfillment entity email. That's a topic for a separate post;-)

To learn more log into the artist portal on Adva Mobile.

Thanks for reading and rock the stage!

Do you have a mailing list signup form in your gigs? Add mobile signup to it!

Hi Everyone,

As promised , 300 bands make us very happy and in return we want to make you happy, by pumping more helpful features you asked for!

This one has been asked for a while back, and we've been waiting for approvals from the operators to do it, now we can!!!

So, if you have a mailing list signup form on the merch table, for example, now you can add to it "Join my Mobile Fan Club". You need to get your fans 10-digit phone number, and their carrier (we don't support all of them, but we support many!). Here's an example for a ready form for you.

Once you have those phone numbers and carriers, email them to fansignupform@advamobile.com or fax it to us (the fax number is on the Promote page on the artist portal.

Next, tell your fans to expect an invitation to your mobile fan club to come on their phones as an SMS, which we will send in the next 14 days (just to give you a little time to tell your fans).

Once your fans receive the SMS, all they have to do it to reply YES or Y (case insensitive), and that's it! they'll get another SMS with a link to your site and they're done!

We will send you a report that will tell you how many SMSs went out and you'll be able to see on the portal how many new fans you have!

To learn more, or see other promotional tools, check out the Promotion page on the artist portal.

There's a new look to the Adva Mobile Website!

Those of you who visited Adva Mobile's site last week noticed a new website image for Adva Mobile. Sleek, with grey tones, a little "flash", and more functional, we've become very "Web 2.0". 

We'll add a few more features in the coming weeks based on requests we've recived from musicians, promoters and labels. For those of you who haven't visited, check us out and have fun exploring the world of Adva Mobile and mobile marketing services for music artists.

Selling Merchandise to your Mobile Fan Club

You have all heard the term leaving money on the table. Sometimes this refers to a negotiated business deal that you might have done better. But it can also refer to money that's there for the taking if only you ask for it. Your fans are incredibly motivated when they see you at a concert, and merchandise sales remain a powerful money-making opportunity for most music artists. When was the last time you were at a concert that did not have a merch table, no matter what size venue? And at the large music festivals, the merchandising is so important that it's typically removed from the artist to the benefit of the festival organizers.

We all know that convenience and availability are one of the prime motivators for making purchases. It's not just impulse buying, but often merchandise presented to us in a moment when we are ready to buy results in a sale. Selling your merchandise to your fans on their mobile phones is a perfect opportunity to capture this dynamic. The Adva Mobile platform provides three terrific opportunities for you to make money from selling merchandise to your fans.

First, you can sell physical goods like posters, T-shirts, pins and other items on your mobile fan club site. It's easy to set up on the Merchandise setup page on the Artist Portal. Fans pay through PayPal -- a trusted source -- and once the sale is made, the money is transferred to you almost immediately and we send you a notification for you to complete the fulfillment, by shipping out the goods or delivering the goods at the concert.

You don't have to sell goods via PayPal: You can also setup a merchandise item on your mobile fan club, that would hold a link to wherever you want to sell your goods, like iTunes, Napster, and Amazon. Your fans are brought from your mobile website to those storefronts to complete the purchase.

You can experiment and play with it, and present a simple introductory experience to your fans. Tell them that whoever comes to your merch table at the gig and shows their phone with some evidence (SMS or site) that they are aware, or joined your mobile fan club, gets some discount off your merch. Just for fun: nothing big that will upset people, something that would motivate fans to try it out. Eventually they'll discover the gigs and merch page themselves and start buying stuff from you.

 
Coming soon -- ring tones and other small dollar items that fans can pay for on their wireless phone bill. Stay tuned for this new capability to earn money in the next few months.

Everyone who is using the Adva Mobile service to engage their fans should have merchandise for sale on their mobile website.Login NOW to your artist dashboard and put merchandise up for sale. Send an SMS blast out to your fans telling them of its availability, and watch the dollars roll in.

Why doesn't anyone customize the experience?

I've (Jack) recently been giving some thought to why music artists don't offer up merchandise to their fans that is truly unique, limited quantity, and customized. I'm intrigued with two dynamics that seem to make this a no-brainer. First, the cost difference between a limited run item and the unlimited run is inconsequential and easily covered by the fan. For example, a simple T-shirt on one website at $12.95 for one is $10.36 each for 50 and $8.40 each for 250. The $1.96 cost difference between a limited quantity of 50 (and therefore rare and collectible) and unlimited run T-shirts seems small and, to me at least, is a minor risk set by the likelihood that your true fans will want the limited run T-shirt, likely in addition to other T-shirts they buy there also special, rare, and one-of-a-kind.

Second, of course, is that your fans would much rather have something from you that was unique and personal to them, even something that they had to "work at" to obtain. These simple dynamics drive fan loyalty and also can significantly increase revenues for the artists, who can charge more for special run, rare items.

Artists that are selling merchandise on their mobile fan clubs through the Adva Mobile service are increasingly putting personalized, rare, one-of-a-kind items up for sale. Fans appreciate the personal connection they have with their favorite artists through these unique products, and the artist has a virtually unlimited supply of personal relationship building and fan connecting experiences to offer the fan.

To learn more about selling merch, click here.

Tweet, Post or Share?

You may have noticed that recently the footer on your mobile website has changed. Specifically, we've removed 'Share' and 'Post' and replaced those by 'Tweet'.

'Share' meant that fans can tell their friends about your mobile website. It was a tweet that went on their account and carried your friendly name (preceeded by a hash sign) and a link to your site.

'Post' meant sort of a message board where fans would ramble about the band, music or whatever.

Since both of them were really about sharing the experience, and both end up on Twitter (in addition to the mobile website), we've figured it's best and less confusing to merge them into 'Tweet'. Those tweets would go on the fans' Twitter account, tagged with your friendly name and contain a link to your mobile website. When fans come on the mobile 'Tweet' page, we'll present them the Twitter search result on your friendly name.

BTW, if you wanted to substitue the hash mark that preceeds your friendly name with your actual Twitter user ID and '@', you can do that on the 'Fan Posts' page on the artist portal.

Send a custom confirmation email to fans who bought merch from you

Following up when fans buy your merch is important, because it gives the fans confidence that this new mobile system really works. The money is going where it should go (that's you, the musicians) for your merch, and the merch ends up with the fan. It also motivates your fans to buy from you again, as you give them personal attention while you're trying to "deliver the goods". Simply put, it's all about good service.

We've introduced a new feature on the artist portal that allows you to define a custom email that will automatically be sent to the fan once they bought merch from you. You can specify the subject, 'From', content of the email in rich text format, and add an attachment.

You can create a different email for every merch item that is sold, or, you can define an email that will serve as 'master' for all the items sold.

This new feature comes in addition to the email you get (the musician) once an item was sold, which also contains the fans' email address to coordinate the delivery of the goods.

To setup this email, when you add or edit a new merchandise item, see the new blue line at the bottom of the page titled "Confirmation Email".

Hope this all make sense and is helpful, we're open for your feedback!

Now's the time to sell merch on your fans mobile phones! Go sell!