A few weeks ago I spoke on a panel at Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville and was asked, “So you’re saying that email marketing is still more important than, say, Twitter or Facebook?” I responded, “Yes. Quantifiably.” I went on to say that in the campaigns Topspin has run so far we’re seeing Facebook represents 2-4% of first-week sales and Twitter 1-2%.
Then, just two weeks later, Jimmy Eat World made a liar out of me. Through killer Twitter integration into their tour (via the band’s support for the medium and spearheading by one of our favorite young geniuses, Lee “Chauvin” Martin at Silva Artist Management) Jimmy Eat World managed to accumulate 200,000 Twitter followers in just over 30 days (as of this writing they’re over 350,000 followers). Considering I started bringing bands online in the early 90s and remember it taking 5+ years to collect more than 100K email addresses, this is a pretty impressive feat of modern technology and critical mass around social tools IMHO. The tour culminated with a release of the music from their hometown show in HD audio. The band posted news of the release to their Twitter stream, and offered fans a chance to enjoy an encore performance live via Ustream. All of this was connected to a live Twitter feed featuring fans comments about the album and performance (via the hash tag #claritylive) on the front page of their site. The fans re-Tweet’d the news and boom, copies of the album were sold. Lee explains it well, “It’s as if you were in a record store looking at the new Jimmy Eat World release and 1000 people standing next to you told you how good it was.”
In the first day of release, Twitter lead the traffic drivers to the Jimmy Eat World site, with more than 22% of all traffic coming straight outta Twitterland. Twitter was third as a driver of revenue, though, driving just over 20% of all sales. Still, with the large number of people reached, and email a smaller percentage of total sales in this campaign than we see on average, it’s very reasonable to conclude that Twitter was a meaningful driver of incremental revenue in this case, and there’s no question they proved you can do much better with Twitter than I led the crowd in Nashville to believe just a couple weeks previous.
Trent Reznor drove a separate but similarly interesting Twitter event when he re-Tweeted one of my Tweets about the Arcade Fire DVD release, Miroir Noir. Arcade Fire started selling a feature-length film from their Website (via Topspin) back in December. It was a successful release, but sales had died down as of late. A few weeks back, the deluxe DVD I ordered for myself came in the mail to my house, and I simply Tweet’d that fact. Trent saw the Tweet, checked it out, liked it, and Tweet’d that he thought it was a great way to release a DVD, and that he bought one. Trent had about 250,000 followers at the time (as of today he’s well over 400,000), many of them visited, and some of them took the liberty to re-Tweet themselves. Check out the report below from TweetReach to see the spread of the re-Tweet activity over the first day or so (reprinted with permission from Hayes Davis at TweetReach — thanks, yo).
What’s interesting is this single event added meaningful incremental sales to the project, many months after the original release. The behavior mirrored that of a “Slashdot Effect”, large volume and low conversion (conversion to sale was less than half a percent, compared with 11% for the email campaign), but an impressive and needle-moving revenue number simply from one person giving a less-than-140-character endorsement.
Also interesting are the tools we are able to use to track this sort of thing. Note Trent re-Tweet’d the shortened URL I Tweet’d originally, http://awe.sm/2q5. This was made with a URL shortening service Awe.sm (full disclosure: this is my good friend Jonathan Strauss’ company and I’m involved on an advisory basis) and as a result I can easily track the click-throughs on the URL. Between Twitter Search, TweetReach, Awe.sm (or other great services like bit.ly), Google Analytics, and the Topspin sales data one can pull together (and cross-check) some pretty interesting data on reach and conversion down the path to purchase. One interesting finding: 25% of the clicks on the URL came from OUTSIDE the Web, that is, mobile and AIR/desktop clients.
What to conclude from all this? That Twitter is the marketing machinery of the future? Naw. This isn’t about “the next big thing”. It’s about how little we know about how marketing will work and how transactions (not just purchases, but any kind of value exchange) will be earned (and I do mean earned) in the future. Success is highly variable. Execution matters (as James said). Unexpected events can make an impact. People are powerful marketers. But not only are the drivers for traffic evolving, the tools we use to measure the attention economy are going through a really interesting growth phase. It’s hard not to be excited by seeing some of these tools work in ways that are more than just novel, they’re shuffling meaningful amounts of attention around and making real money for artists. Exciting times indeed.
Thanks so much for that. I’m fascinated by the numbers in music marketing, but they are hard to come by. It’s really difficult for artists, managers, or labels to know if they are on the right track without comparing what they are doing to those who are successfully creating profitable music businesses. Yet, there’s relatively little public disclosure of sales, income, expenses, etc.
Man, this is some of the best brainfood I’ve found for music biz. THANK YOU for grounding this in reality.
Also, thanks for the headsup on Awe.sm and TweetReach, both of those were new to me.
Thanks for the awe.sm shout-out! Working with you guys has really helped us to take our stuff from theory to practice.
If anyone is interested in looking at more of the specific data from Trent’s retweet of the Arcade Fire awe.sm link, Ian was kind enough to give me permission to include some of it in my BarCampLA presentation yesterday:’URLs are the new cookies‘.
Today I wrote this blog post, pressed send, created a share-able URL with awe.sm, posted it to Twitter, went to a BBQ up the street at Jon Theodore’s house, then for a margarita and some dinner at La Serenata. I came home to find a ton of nice folks had re-Tweet’d this post. Kinda meta, but very apropos. Thanks, everyone.
Follow the interest here:
http://t.opsp.in/S
and here:
http://t.opsp.in/T
Welcome to the future.
ian
Can anyone help me out with the jargon in the line graph key: 3Ni, 1Ph, 1PS, etc.? I’m afraid I’m not getting it.
Hi JamesLucas,
Sorry, that graph is really just an example of URL tracking with Awe.sm. I picked that graph because it was interesting, it’s actually not related to the link in the post. It’s interesting because you’re seeing the same URL re-posted many times over time, and the traffic to it from both the original postings and “child” postings.
The 3Ni, 1Ph, etc are all the unique URLs. So originally this is a graph from me linking to my daughter’s radio show at WMBR repeatedly with the URLs http://awe.sm/3Ni, http://awe.sm/1Ph, http://awe.sm1PS, etc.
Sorry for the confusion, was really just giving a graphical example of URL tracking with Awe.sm.
ian
Gotcha. Seems obvious now that I know. Thanks for cluing me in (and for the very interesting post).
“I led the crowd in Nashville to believe”
you are the digital Jesus. One day there will be a topspin in every hotel room.
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This is extremely interesting. I am a musician recently launching my project and just started using twitter to strengthen my fan base.
I found a lot of new marketing terms and ideas in this article.
Can anyone recommend new literature that may further explain such terms and trends?
Thanks,
AP
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About the whole Jimmy Eat World thing-
I was looking at Soundscan and, unless the band isn’t reporting their sales correctly, they have only sold 2,044 copies of their new Clarity Live album since it came out three weeks ago. If 22% of those sales came from Twitter followers that adds up to 450 copies sold. That means around .125% of their 350,000 followers actually bought their CD.
Any thoughts?
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Hi Michael,
I don’t want to share anything too specific I haven’t pre-approved with Jimmy Eat World’s management (we treat our clients’ data as private and I always get management approval before posting any data here on the blog), but I’ll respond generally…
I don’t have the number in front of me, but I don’t think your conversion numbers are very far off. Still, I wouldn’t look too closely at conversion to sales from total Twitter followers. No question that not everyone on Twitter is engaged with Twitter, and not every one sees every message. More interesting to me is the conversion on clicks and how that compares to other channels. Conversion from click to sale in this channel was much lower than in the email channel, but still healthy nonetheless.
But you’re correct, I’d expect conversion from total followers to sale to be less than 1% based on what we’re seeing thus far. Still, if this were judged against impressions in an online ad campaign, the conversion would be considered strong.
Thanks for the sleuthing and commenting. Talk to you soon.
ian
For those interested, here is the TweetReach report for my shortened URL and subsequent Twitter(s) of this article:
Tweet Reach Results for Http t.opsp.in R
Ian,
Thanks for weighing in on my comment; totally awesome! The way you handle things has to be a big part of why Topspin is such a respected name.
Sincerely,
Michael
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Twitter as a Digital Marketing Channel: Since they started to use Twitter in 2007, Dell has earned more than $2 .. http://tinyurl.com/mmmenr
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I just found a great squidoo article on twitter advertising i hope you all find interesting, http://www.squidoo.com/twitter-marketing-secrets
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