I was planning for months to execute this strategy. Unfortunately, scheduling conflicts and timelines did not pan out. However, I at least put together a pretty cool proposal on how this was going to be executed.
Hopefully this helps you out and if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments please feel free to comment!
“You can’t arrest an idea”
Just like Napster and similar to Wikileaks, ideas formed into applications are folding industry paradigm’s. When forces seek to limit technologies with intentions for solving problems, there becomes a clashing of ideas. Slowly over time, these issues resolve themself through the spreading of knowledge.
Spotify is like soundscan on steroids. That is if you are on the music side of things. If you are a user, it’s like Pandora & Napster but more catered to the user. Basically, this is the perfect tool for anyone who loves music.
Discovery is the mechanism in which innovation floureshes. When there are limitations, innovation becomes stagnant and controlled. This is why Spotify will raise from the crop. For starters, there is a freemium version for unlimited streaming on your desktop. Similar to Pandora, but way more user friendly and less intrusive advertising.
Here is an example of how Spotify claims the throne:
Without Spotify, labels know only when an album is sold. If a CD is ripped for a friend or borrowed for a party, they know nothing. Spotify gives them a record, by location, age and gender, of every single time a track is played. Jay-Z used to think he was big in London, based on U.K. album sales; it turns out he’s big in Manchester.
It’s over. The majors lost. The users won. Play to the users. Build a fanbase. There’s a ton of money to be made. It’s easier than ever to reach everybody but harder than ever to get people to pay attention and stay focused on you. That’s your challenge. Daniel Ek is an engineer, a businessman. You’re an artist. It all depends on you.
Sign-up for your free Spotify account here.
Are you a celebrity or do you manage a celebrity brand? Are you looking to humanize your online identity? Well then this is for the both of you. There is not much content targeted for celebrities to consume, so I thought this would help a little bit for the artists looking to manage and grow their following online. These 7 tools will get you started on your road to connecting your community.
WhoSay is a service that helps artists, athletes and iconic personalities connect with their fans. When you see someone posting via WhoSay, you’ll know that it’s real, authentic messages, photos and videos coming from your favorite people. As an artist you own your content, as it is then ‘pushed’ to your preferred networks as a WhoSay post. WhoSay is growing their business model with their celebrities to create more opportunities for online monetizing.
Celebrity endorsements in social media. I have never worked with Ad.ly but have colleagues who have. Test it out for yourself.
Started as platform for musicians, however the digital game is enabling musicians, actors, directors, writers, and any form of artist to use mp3, video, and various forms of intellectual property to connect with their audiences. Topspin connects you to your fans by creating tools that help you market, sell, and track your results across the web.
iTunes is self explanatory. They had a record earning this 2011 Q1 for over $1.5b! You can sell anything digital on here. Awesome. Use it.
This is the most artistic community on the web, besides those awesome people over at DeviantArt.com. Like every single artist in the world, seriously. Maybe Tumblr will squash Twitter? I really really like this and yes it is necessary to have this, a twitter, and a facebook.
Not sure how long this will last, but it’s good for now. My twitter followers have already trickled to my other networks, so the dependance on this platform is sketchy. They are currently in turmoil at the offices and there hasn’t been much innovation. However, I hope they turn it out. Ironic to me it seems that what everyone says about Twitter is actually true about Facebook, while all the negative comments about Facebook actually reflect more on Twitter’s actions. None the less, it’s a great tool and I hope someone Facebook’s this MySpace.
If you have any suggestions on tools that celebrities, artists, or individuals looking to grow their online social presence, then please leave them in the comments. How have your experiences been with these tools?
This is a very deep question. There is no one way to go about it, especially since there are several languages, devices, and platforms that are not on the same page. Before you determine anything, you need to first figure out some very basic qualifications.
1. Have an idea!
It all starts with that “A-HA!” moment. You hopefully find a solution to the worlds problems like Facebook or you think of the most addicting idea game angry birds, the results are the same. Success through prosperity and abundance. Determine the following things:
2. Tool Belts
iPhone
Android
WIndows
BlackBerry
3. Where are you a star?
What makes you valuable? Are you the angel that everyone wishes they had or a beast objective-C, or self-taught android genius? Or maybe you are the social networker that has social capital. If not him or her, you just have a good idea and you want to make it happen.
Regardless the position, you just need to understand that you are going to have to adapt to any role that is necessary. ”Bootstrapping” and embracing entrepreneurism is the only thing you can do. This will include tasks like researching, administration, designing, developing, marketing, promoting, or even taking out the trash every now and then.
Over years of entrepreneuring, I have learned that your team is vital to the situation. It may not be employees even, but your family, friends, vendors, or anyone you surround yourself with makes a huge difference in how you are going to succeed.
4. Research. Research. Research
Use Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and every single way you can find out more about what you are trying to do. This will help you save time whether its discovering that someone else already did this, you have a great opportunity, or you have a small time frame.
5. Understand your UI
Whether you are building on an android, iPhone, iPad, or android tablet you need to have a full understanding of its capabilities and what you want to do with it.
Go to the app stores and play with the top rated games and see why they are successful.
6. Target your market!
We assume here that you’ve already determined that your app will bring value and that you will have a raging audience for your app. Well, fine, they are raging fans, but who are they really? What actions will they take to achieve their goals within the app?
If it’s a game, maybe they want to beat their high score. Or perhaps they are a first time player – how will their experience differ from someone who is getting a nice case of brain-rot playing your game all day?
If it’s a utility app, and your audience wants to find a coffee shop quickly, what actions will they take within the app to find that coffee shop? Where are they when they’re looking for coffee? Usually in the car! Do present an interface that requires multiple taps, reading and referencing a lot? Probably not! This is how thinking about how real-life intersects design.
Action: Line item out the different types of people who will use your app. You can even name them if you want to make the scenarios you draw out as real as possible.
7. Pre-Plan
Sketch your app online or offline. You can use your moleskin to cut out pieces or you can use Adobe Photoshop to speed up the process. Depending on your creative abilities, you will know what you have to do. If not, try something until it works!
8. What is your timeline?
Do you have a deadline for a launch? Is the market closing? Don’t have a deadline? Find out and make it realistic. Sometimes I get requests from agencies that want a week to design something. This is not reasonable, unless you have nothing scheduled and your ready to take on the job 24/7.
9. Developing it
Designer
If you are a designer, download the iPhone GUI Photoshop template or our iPhone PSD Vector Kit. Both are collections of iPhone GUI elements that will save you a lot of time in getting started. If you’ve solidified your layout during sketching, drawing up the screens will be less of a layout exercise and more about the actual design of the app.
If you are not a designer, hire one! It’s like hiring an electrician to do electrical work. You can go to Home Depot and buy tools to try it yourself, but who wants to risk getting zapped? If you’ve followed steps 1–3, you’ll have everything you need for a designer to get started.
When looking for a designer, try to find someone who has experience designing for mobile devices. They may have some good feedback and suggested improvements for your sketches. A few places to look for designers: Coroflot, Crowdspring, eLance. When posting your job offer, be very specific about your requirements, and also be ready to review a lot of portfolios.
Programmer
You can learn how to do it yourself, or search on places like twitter, facebook, quora, odesk, elance, or solvate. The best solution is to learn it yourself then seek out a partner.
10. Distribute
iPhone
If you are working with a developer make sure to ask them the following:
If you don’t have a developer make sure to use the resources above to find the best match.
If you are the developer then make sure to be organized and have your strategy layed out to save you time and money.
Android
If you are working with a developer make sure to ask him the following:
zipalign tool to optimize the final APK package.If you want to learn on your own then O’Reilly has some great ways for you to distribute your Android application.
11. Marketing
Whever you do, its making sure that you have access, interaction, and create compelling experiences. The following is a list of things you can do to increases success.
12. Don’t knock the hustle!
Keep at it, moving, and don’t stop. That’s the only guarenteed you will succeed.
14.10.2010
Special thanks to Jeff Pulver and the 140Conf for providing the opportunity to share these ideas.
Yesterday, I watched/listened to a fantastic discussion on Privacy & Publicness from Supernova 2010 featuring danah boyd and Jeff Jarvis. It was a casual and very informative conversation about an important social issue, with powerful consequences on how we decide to live.
If there’s a buzzword out there, it’s privacy. Both Boyd and Jarvis agreed that “privacy” doesn’t have a concrete definition. There’s no consensus yet on what “privacy” means when one is talking about Internet activity. Now, that’s a problem — not having a consensus on the definition. However, there is a great opportunity here. Now we can have the much-needed social and cultural conversation about what “privacy” means to people when they’re carrying on their lives online.
Boyd explained that “privacy” as she’s discovered through her research, seems to comprise three general spheres for people. One privacy sphere is security. Privacy depends on a system and the promises made to people who use the system. Another privacy sphere is identifiability — all that data that is collected about us when we do anything electronic. The last sphere is “personally embarrassing information” — the things that one doesn’t want others to see or know.
I like Boyd’s description of these different meanings for privacy because, well, it shows that the elements of privacy depend on expectations in different spheres. What’s the information that a person wants to protect? How does the information flow into the world? Those are the questions that may influence the decision about what kind of online and/or electronic interactions in which a person may choose to participate. What is at stake? The answers to such questions will determine what privacy is going to mean to different people, about different information, and in different forms.
Jarvis examines privacy as a legal concept. The privacy concept grows from a fearful response to the unknown, which is new technology in this case. People start hollering about privacy when they don’t know what is going to happen to information about them or created by them or created for them. People want to control what is revealed. When a technology appears that challenges this control, lawmakers can act irrationally and against the public interest, even when the lawmakers believe they are acting in the public’s best interest.
I had never heard this word before listening to this discussion. (It’s as if they had to make it up because “publicity” was already taken, and has so much attached to it anyways [press, marketing, TMZ.]) I would define publicness as a status or a position in which information and data are available and accessible instead of hidden. Publicness is the default option for people who believe (complete) transparency should be the default.
Now, that sounds a little scary to me. Jarvis, however, described publicness in a way that is more well-reasoned and nuanced than by others who claim almost everything should be shared and available to anyone who wants to see it. Jarvis explained that the increased emphasis on privacy would actually harm the public because privacy reduces the size of the public sphere. Privacy reduces the quantity, and maybe even the quality, of public goods available.
Jarvis believes publicness provides benefits to society. His examples include public spaces, public/social education on cultural issues, and the public domain (in a non-copyright sense. Although, it still works in a copyright sense.) He advocates transparency as the default position because it protects the public generally, whether through the accountability of governments or corporations or through the “theory of mutually assured humiliation.”
Now, I agree that transparency should be the default with some institutions, but I don’t think that will work for individuals. Consequences for an individual seem so much heavier than consequences for government and corporations, which are protected in ways that an individual isn’t. (Basic example — physical violence). Corporations and governments are only as powerful as we legally allow them to be. We can create them, so we can demand that they be transparent. The same is not true for individuals.
A very thoughtful example that Jarvis gave of an irrational government/legal reaction to technology was Germany’s issues with Google Maps’ Street View. German legal authorities stopped Google from taking pictures of buildings, and even I thought that maybe that was a good thing. But Jarvis made an excellent point: the government was telling people who could take pictures of buildings on the street, things that didn’t have intellectual property protection, things that we can all see with our own eyes. Right now, they’re foiling Google in what they believe is society’s privacy interest. Would they foil the citizenry next in what they believe is society’s privacy interest by telling people that they can’t take pictures of things they can see with their own eyes? What an excellent example of the shrinking public sphere.
Of course, Facebook’s privacy settings were a topic in this talk. The controversy, according to Boyd, arose when people’s expectations did not gel with reality. People believed that only their friends, within the Facebook community, could see what they were sharing, even though a little examination of their settings and Facebook’s stated policies would have indicated otherwise. People had notice, and they still got mad.
Once expectations and reality clash, then the privacy policy fails, even if it is explicitly posted somewhere. I agree, because in this country the customer is always right. Business has to respond and adapt, and Facebook did.One could argue that just by putting things on the Internet, that any person’s expectation of privacy is simple-minded. I wouldn’t completely disagree, but Facebook presents itself as a network of friends, and there is privacy among friends. One could also argue that Facebook is hypocritical because the Facebook public is not the general public. People have to be members; if Facebook advocates sharing everything with everyone and widespread sharing and transparency, then why the membership requirement? It’s an issue of the public vs. a public.
We demand a lot from our online experiences. We want control over our information, our original content, our thoughts, and our reputations. We want control over who can access this information. We want safe online spaces to share information with select people. We want to avoid crime and humiliation. We want to learn. We want to protect.
Perhaps we are demanding too much when it comes to privacy and the Internet. Maybe we’re trying to have it both ways — putting personal/private goods into a very public arena and expecting those things to stay personal. The privacy discussion is where we can really figure out what realistic responsibilities and expectations are.
Start with this talk.
The Future of Independent Digital Movie Making is now. As we take each step, there is a new form of technology that is enabling people to create more efficiently. The issue is that studio’s like Warner Brothers & Paramount are not willing to adapt. The connectivity of the internet and growth of technology are creating a limitless opportunity for independent entrepreneurs of the future.
“Each print typically costs about $1,500 to $2,000 to make, so the distributor must consider the number of theaters a movie can successfully open in. Many of the 37,000 screens in the United States are concentrated in urban areas. A popular movie might fill the seats in several theaters in the same city while another movie would have a much smaller audience. Since opening a movie on 3,000 screens could cost $6 million for the prints alone, the distributor must be sure that the movie can draw enough people to make the costs worthwhile.” – howstuffworks
This old method includes an army of gatekeepers and middlemen that are only focused on Profits and Losses at the end of the day. Let us take a look at an alternative model of movie making.
The cost of traditional film and distribution is inefficient in terms of delivering valuable content to a targeted audience.
The future platform is in P2P/IP TV. Imagine your video console, computer device, or digital top box that deliver’s ALL content to you. Like Kid Cudi says, “The Evolution of the revolution”. Let us face it, children are going to be projecting HD via their iPhone5 during recess. This technology has been in the talks for year, but now people are empowering themselves with on-demand control. You can already get started with AppleTV & Boxee.
Youtube is just one example of how a “lo-fi” production like iJustine or Natalie Tran can drive an average of 500,000 to 1,000,000 views per video post. Which ranges from $5,000-$20,000 per month depending on your demographic based on those views per month.
This model is only one of the models until developers start creating dynamic algorithms and technology starts to adapt towards the user viewing the content. Imagine interactive roll-over product placement pieces that fluidly allow you to engage simultaneously. Think of all the meta-data from your Facebook account & Google Searches that have been data-mined since your early internet days. Thus enveloping a choose your own interactive adventure, per say. As the restraint of technology, ideas, and accessibility decrease, then innovation will become abundant.
I’m sharing this article for many reason.
1. Put things into perspective from my perspective.
2. I am creating a movie and this is a perfect blog post entry
3. Sharing these ideas could be beneficial for movie makers and entrepreneurs
4. I need to blog more
Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below! Thank You!
**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**
New Creative Digital Group Optimizes Social Media to Help Sexual Abuse Survivors
Los Angeles, CA/April 20, 2010 — Prince Consulting & Services announces the launch of Follow the Prince (www.followtheprince.com), a one-stop shop for myriad social and digital media marketing needs. Follow the Prince (FTP) combines creative marketing tactics, social media smarts and entrepreneurial principles to provide businesses with the tools, ideas and support required to develop and spread their unique brands. The group assists entrepreneurs, established businesses and individuals in becoming highly visible to their audiences.
The Angela Shelton Foundation is a non-profit organization that teaches sexual abuse survivors how to heal and lead joyful lives. Collectively, they converse about thewhite elephant in 27% of living rooms in America. FTP and the Foundation have released a bevy of tools for social conversation about the truth of sexual abuse. Initiatives include encouraging survivors of sexual abuse to change their profile picture to one depicting themselves at the age at which they were abused and a centralized blog that various survivors are able to share their experience.
More than being cathartic, the Foundation believes that the only way to eradicate sexual abuse is to remind every survivor that no one can make himself or herself a victim. Currently there is a growing blog network, The Survivor Manual, organized by the Foundation and powered by Follow the Prince to allow survivors to reach out and grow with other survivors who are apart of the community, that they may not have otherwise known. These are a combination of outreach & social media marketing services implemented by FTP.
Christopher Prince Boucher from FTP realized that perpetrators were infiltrating seemingly save havens. They provided custom solutions and tools to train the Foundation’s Army of Angels to diffuse the power of ambient lurkers and teach the survivors critical tactics in Speaking Up and Speaking Out. This was an Outreach Package that has been a staple service and why brands like BermanBraun and Angela Shelton have Followed the Prince.
Shelton is Following The Prince and his techniques by producing a weekly instructional and inspirational live USTREAM to help survivors inspire and empower their lives. She covers topics from “how to find your voice through blogging” and “setting up a safe twitter presence”, to how to deal with reoccurrence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Follow The Prince has facilitated these practices through their Social Media Marketing services.
Follow The Prince honors integrity, sustainability, and the community growth. Because we understand the diverse nature of relationships, we work with various individuals, small business and corporations. Our clients include entrepreneurs, technologists, entertainers, and activists. We believe that the use of social strategy is the best way to engage humans and technology in order to benefit unique brands.
Contact:
media@followtheprince.com
Contact:
Christopher Prince Boucher
p: 646.727.0530 | e: chris@followtheprince.com
www.followtheprince.com
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