Adva Mobile Artist Survey Results

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey. We were very encouraged by the general feedback that you appreciate the service, see value in it, and want us to continue providing a service for you, to reach your fans on their mobile phones. We also appreciate the comments related to simplifying the experience. We will be working on that as we continue to add new features and try to make the service simpler.

Your response to the questions “whether the service was valuable enough to pay for” was encouraging. We are looking to introduce a “Freemium” model, where some artists could receive basic mobile web and mobile marketing services for free and others could have more specialized services for a small price. While some of you indicated you would never pay for it, more than 85% indicated you would pay for it, or you would pay for it once it started generating revenue for you. That’s great news for us, since we expect mobile commerce to really take off in and outside the US in 2010, and that your fans will be increasingly comfortable with making purchases for your music, tickets, and merchandise on their phones.

Shortly, we're going to introduce a paid service to complement our free service. While going from a free service to a partially paid service may be a difficult transition for some, were committed to our existing artists and you will continue to have all the services you currently have without cost. Moving to paid services is good for everyone, since it will make us stronger and more valuable to you, the artist, and to your fans. The financial support we receive from those of you who choose to upgrade to the paid service will help us build a stronger platform and provide each of you with better resources.

We built our mobile marketing platform when we realized nothing existed to help artists connect with fans on their mobile phones. Our mobile fan club service will continue to be, built with your feedback. We want to hear from you about these changes and the many future improvements we will introduce to help you expose your music to more fans, market to them, and realize your dream of creating a career in music.

Jack and the Adva Mobile Team

Use Mobile Alerts to Help you Market

For people to come toward you when you are marketing to them you have to make your fans’ lives better in some way for them to accept mobile marketing from you. Otherwise, they will ignore your campaigns just like they ignore anything that is irrelevant or annoying to them. Two insights here can help you make sure you are providing value, and not interrupting their lives:

Timely Alerts: Your fans want timely alerts. Adva Mobile provides a terrific tool - Fan Blasts - for you to schedule your mobile alerts so that the information your fans are receiving is timely and relevant. there's lots going on in your music career, so let your fans know about it! Upcoming show this weekend? New merch item for sale? Heading into the recording studio? Relevant info is important, and mobile provides you with the capability to reach out to your fans.

Location Specific: Your fans in Tampa don't need to know your upcoming show dates in Portland, so think about who needs the information you're trying to send them. Our Fan Blast tool lets you filter your messages by location, so that relevant information is sent to those who really appreciate the alert.

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!

From If to How Much

We recently attended a mobile event in Boston where Jumptap CEO Dan Olschwang was asked about how brands view mobile advertising - the market of Jumptap. Referencing the recent acquisitions of Admob by Google and Quattro Wireless by Apple, he said "One billion dollars moves a market. Their attitude is no longer if, but how much." So brands have moved from asking themselves if they should be advertising more on mobile phones to how much they should be advertising on mobile phones. They see value.

I was thinking of this and how it applied to mobile marketing for music artists. Will it take a watershed event like the movement of a billion dollars for artists to move from "if you should be connecting with fans on mobile phones" to "how much should you be connecting with fans on mobile phones"? When will the value of mobile marketing be apparent to you?

We ask ourselves about value here at Adva Mobile all the time, especially about services that you, the artist, find valuable enough to pay for. The text messages we send out to fans, in particular, cost us, but reaching fans on their phones - that's valuable. Some of you are building large fan clubs so we'll need to begin to charge for those. Other services, like location targeted text alerts, also provide a valuable service to you that we believe you'll pay for. As your fans increasingly appreciate text messages and mobile web connection to you, you'll no longer ask if you should reach out to them on their phones, but how much.

Mobile Texting Sent Millions in Charitable Donations For Haiti - Can It Also Sell Music?

Image Attribute: NYT

This was the byline to a recent article in Billboard by Antony Bruno about the challenges of delivering digital content to your phone. Only two days after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled the capital city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the American Red Cross raised $7 million via text messaging from more than 700,000 wireless customers. Donations poured in from every wireless network, including ATT, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

For years, analysts have been waiting for mobile commerce to take off only to see it stumble. Red Cross' relief efforts in Haiti signaled a turning point in the history of mobile commerce. "It was a major validation about the possibilities of text and mobile commerce and what we're going to see in the future," says Gartner analyst Jeff Roster. Consumers have been slowly warming to the idea of zapping money through the air for years, from mobile banking to online shopping to purchasing mobile apps themselves. In fact, some analysts say that this year will be the year of the start of a mobile commerce tidal wave. Gartner predicts mobile app revenue will hit $6.7 billion this year, up from $4.2 billion last year, and the trend will continue to almost $30 billion in 2013.

Last year, a rare Lamborghini and a $150,000 boat were sold over eBay's iPhone app. "There's no question this is the year of social media and m-commerce for retail," Roster says. In Vienna, a majority of people pay car parking fees using their mobile phones. Ten minutes before your allotted time is about to expire, you'll get a text alert-and the option to extend parking minutes. "This isn't location-based services; it's anti-location-based services,“ says Diarmuid Mallon, product marketing manager at Sybase 365 "You pay for your car parking without being near your car."

We at Adva Mobile also see a turning point this year for mobile commerce. We’ve already powered show tickets and merchandise transactions, the artist and fans feedback was very positive. Further, we are working diligently to create a mobile-optimized content sales mechanism. The key guidelines for our solution is ease of payment, secure content delivery and content formatting optimal to all mobile phones.

Forecasts suggests that 70% of US mobile subscribers are interested in using their phone to make a purchase in 2010. It’s time for you to benefit from it!

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!

Mobile is to internet like TV is to radio

This post is based on an article by Allan Moore, bestselling author and the CEO of SMLXL.

Image Attribute: BBC

Mobile is to internet like TV is to radio. Mobile is as much superior to the internet, as TV is to radio. Today at 2.7 billion mobile phone users, there are three times as many mobile phones as personal computers (and over a quarter of all internet access is already from mobile phones). There are nearly twice as many mobile phones as TV sets. Twice as many people use messaging on a phone (SMS text messaging) as use e-mail on the web. In this article, (including key quotes from Alan Moore's article with the original headline) we'll discuss what makes mobile so effective channel to your audience, and why you should include it in your marketing plan.

I often hear various internet experts talk about how limiting the mobile phone is for internet consumption. That there are problems with scrolling, and the keypad entry is cumbersome, and we lack a mouse on the phone. This is as stupid as the TV experts. We should NOT try to replicate the existing internet onto the mobile. Mobile is not a "small internet", it is a NEW mass media. As different from the internet as TV is from radio. We can do so much MORE on the phone that cannot be done on the internet.

Allan highlights 5 unique elements that distinguish Mobile: Personal, The first always-on mass media, the first always-carried mass media, the first mass media with a built-in payment mechanism and uniquely offers the media audience the input tool, at the point of creative impulse.

Our service enables you to build your community and reach your fans on a recurring basis with rich-media, engaging experiences we power. Take advantage of the unique ability to engage your fans in the right context. Get started now.