Today we’re excited to announce the first of several releases of an exciting new suite of features we’re calling Topspin “Sharealytics.” We’ve been working with our pals at the social analytics company Awe.sm on giving artists the ability track the spread of their marketing widgets across Facebook and Twitter, revealing the amount of traffic, signups and sales driven by fans who share your content online.

“Sharealytics” was created as a research and development project inside the Topspin Creative Services team. Parker, Nicole and Chris have been running prototype version of the feature for awhile, and have seen sharing from Topspin widgets into Facebook and Twitter drive an additional 10 percent of the total traffic to artist campaigns. So now that we’ve put the chocolate into the peanut butter (incorporating the awe.sm analytics platform with Topspin’s direct marketing and commerce tools) we’re happy to start delivering real, actionable data to artists on the effectiveness of social campaigns and the power of fan evangelism.

Here is Ian’s quote from the official press release:

“We’re excited that Topspin now shows artists just how powerful fan sharing on Facebook and Twitter can be,” said Ian Rogers, CEO of Topspin. “Before now, users had no way to quantify a share on Twitter or Facebook. Now, Topspin allows users to see the number of shares, the amount of traffic created by those shares and the number of new fans acquired from the shares. You can see if Facebook is more effective for you, or if your time is better spent on Twitter. Over the coming weeks, we’ll add the ability to track the direct sales driven by a Tweet, an e-mail or a Facebook post. No more guessing about the effectiveness of social sharing and direct marketing — it is time to measure social campaigns in dollars and fans.”

Here’s how it works, starting today:

First, make sure you have a Topspin account. Then email artistsupport@topspinmedia.com and let them know you’d like Sharealytics enabled in your account. Next, publish streaming players, email-for-media widgets (give your email, get a free download) and purchase offers, and encourage your fans to share them into Facebook and Twitter. On the details page for each widget, you’ll notice the Sharealytics graph, which shows the following metrics (displayed on separate lines for Facebook & Twitter):

Shares: The total number of times fans shared the widget, per day
Clicks: The total number of clicks to your offer (streaming player widgets and purchase buttons) or email submissions (email-for-media widget), per day
Clicks-Per-Share: Daily clicks divided by daily shares. Stated plainly, this metric show you how many additional clicks you get on your offer when fans share it out to their friends online. We’ve already seen clicks-per-share numbers as high as 5.99 on E4M campaigns in Facebook, so it’s clear social sharing works, and results in more fans on your mailing list and more eyeballs on your offers.

By the end of February, we’ll be showing you the total number of email signups driven by sharing, the number of plays of your songs and videos that happen after shares, and most importantly, we’ll be showing you the real dollar figures driven by sharing… and the real sales dollars created when you send an email to your fans… even the sales created from a single Tweet or Facebook post.

It’s about time artists had real data about the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter with regard to their online businesses. And it’s time we all as marketers start measuring social campaigns in dollars and fans. No more guessing, no more vanity metrics. Introducing “Sharealytics” — let’s get started!

Thumbs up for rock-’n'-roll,
-bob
@bobmoz

MIDEM asked me to host “Visionary Monday” this year, a day of talks and panels focused on engaging artists in the new music business. It’s an incredible day kicking of with Saatchi & Saatchi’s CEO Kevin Roberts, continuing with artists Paul Van Dyk, Zoe Keating, and Mark Ronson, Dan Rose of Facebook, and some brand new research being released by both the Future of Music Coalition and TechDirt’s Mike Masnick.

If you’re here at MIDEM in Cannes, France, join us in Auditorium Debussy at the Palais. Kevin Roberts from Saatchi & Saatchi starts at 10am local time.

If you’re not in Cannes, please tune in live online here at LiveStream. It all starts at 10am here in Cannes which is 1am PT or 4am ET (adjust accordingly for where you are).

Follow @midem on Twitter for more info and updates.

And don’t forget about our meetup tonight at 6:30pm at Au Bureau, 49 Rue Félix Fauré!

Thanks and see you there!

ian c rogers
Topspin

The Webdoc team has created a new type of web canvas for anyone to mix elements of different services into a highly expressive and interactive web experience. It’s one of the most unique platforms to quickly share ideas, events, experiences, and engage with fans in a fun and immersive social conversation. The Webdoc interface allows for simple drag and drops and immediate resizing of widgets and HTML panes. It’s a rather groundbreaking way to create rich, on the fly experiences for your audiences.

With the new Webdoc integration Topspin users can enter in the log-in info + API key and access all their Topspin widgets and offers, which can be quickly dragged, dropped, and resized into their Webdocs. It’s an exciting evolution in creating fan experiences, and Topspin is excited to be included in this next phase of Webdoc. Check out David Widaman’s video below on the newly launched integration.

Head on over to Webdoc, get a free account, embed your Topspin widgets, and create an instantly shareable page for your fans.

Shamal

For posterity, the letter we posted on our Web site last Wednesday is included here.

As you’ve seen via site blackouts across the Internet including sites such as Wikipedia and Google, your actions today can help shape the future of the Internet. Bills in front of the US House of Representatives (SOPA) and Senate (PIPA) aim to shut down overseas piracy sites. Unfortunately the original versions of these bills go far beyond that, opening the door to abuse of a different kind, from censorship to Internet security concerns to plain ‘ol axe-grinding and stifling of genuine innovation (imagine a world where big media companies could shut down the “threats” of Tumblr and WordPress in their early days and you’ll understand the fear). Thankfully groups ranging from The Future of Music Coalition to The White House have shined big bright lights on the bills’ faults and, with thoughtful and intelligent opposition by people like you, it looks like our elected officials will need to go back to the drawing board to find a solution which fights piracy while still allowing for an open and innovative Internet.

Topspin’s raison d’être is helping artists earn a living. 50% of what Topspin sells is easily-priated digital audio and video. We are as opposed to piracy as anyone at the RIAA. But as technologists we cannot support SOPA and PIPA. They do not achieve their stated purpose and create many other unintended problems. These bills are not the solution to our piracy concerns.

Topspin proudly stands among those opposing SOPA and PIPA and humbly asks you to take a few seconds to sign this petition, hosted by Google. Additionally, we encourage you to contact your representatives on the phone. It’s very easy and only takes a few minutes.

Thanks,
Ian C Rogers
CEO, Topspin

Hello from snowy Utah! Sundance 2012 is in full swing (the photo above is from the totally incredible Sixto Rodriguez doc “Searching For Sugar Man“) and Greg, Paul, Parker and I are in Park City, bringing Topspin Direct-To-Fan power to festival filmmakers. I really believe this is the year the indie film community embraces direct-to-fan as a core component of a modern film career. By way of example, check out On The Ice, who have a great-looking Topspin-powered preorder up now, with some killer products. There’s a lot more margin in these offers than there is in a Netflix stream!

In addition to meeting with lots of filmmakers, we’re also going to bring a little piece of the festival to you online today. At 11a Pacific we’re going to include a full stream of a great festival short film inside the Topspin Weekly Webcast. We’ll also be joined by Chris Horton from Sundance, who will talk about Sundance Artist Services.

If you’re in Park City, come see me in person on the The New Social Pollinators Panel at the Filmmaker’s Lodge at 4p today. Or head to the High West Distillery at 8:30a on Monday for the Sundance Artist Services forum. If neither of those events work in your busy schedule, hit me up on Twitter and we’ll chat over a hot chocolate or adult-type beverage. See you in the snow!

Thumbs up for rock-’n'-roll,
-bob
@bobmoz

Topspin’s Co-Founder Shamal Ranasinghe and I will be heading to Cannes, France next week for one of our very favorite (and most productive) music conferences, MIDEM. I’ve been going to MIDEM since I was at Yahoo! Music and have always found it to be the conference where I get the most actual business done. Fortunately and unfortunately I missed the glory days described in the music biz roller coaster Kill Your Friends and the MIDEM I’ve experienced has always been one of meeting after meeting with the worldwide music community from managers to labels to publishers to technology companies.

If you’re at MIDEM this year I hope you’ll come see us. Three opportunities:

1) Come to our meetup! We’re co-hosting an official meetup with MIDEM, Spotify, Soundcloud, MobileRoadie, Webdoc, MXP4, Next Big Sound, MusixMatch, and The Orchard Marketplace on Sunday evening. This is our fourth year of Topspin meetups at MIDEM and each year has been bigger and deffer than the year previous. It’s not an exaggeration to say this is usually *the* event of the evening, wall-to-wall with everyone who cares about the intersection of music and tech. Please stop by, have a drink, and say hello. RSVP here.

2) Come to Visionary Monday in Auditorium Debussy. I’m hosting an entire day of programming this year and moderating a conversation between Coca-Cola’s Music Chief and super producer Mark Ronson! Check out the programme for Monday’s festivities and you’ll see you want to be there. From Facebook to Om Malik to Angry Birds, this will be a truly fascinating day hosted by yours truly. At the end of the day I’ll attempt a little extemporaneous synthesis of what we’ve learned throughout the day so be sure to be there for the brief review session at the end.

3) Running! I am training for the LA Marathon and have a couple of training runs to get in over the weekend. I’ve been injured so they won’t be overly long, 4-8 miles or so. If anyone cares to join please let me know.

See you at MIDEM,
ian c rogers
Topspin

Band photo sessions are fun, right? You get to hang out in some gritty neighborhood or at the back of a club and look cool for a few hours, and then you get awesome pictures. And then…what the hell do you do with them? You paid the person with the camera a nice chunk of money — how do you make it back? By making your photos work harder for you. ThingLink is a tool that makes it easy for Topspin artists to share content and offers inside a photo. Add video and audio players, Like and Follow buttons for Facebook and Twitter, and the custom Topspin E4M tag which lets you offer a free download in exchange for an email address:

You can also use your images to tell stories — we’ve found that people like to click on unexpected links. So by all means, add links to your social media properties (Twitter, Facebook) and of course to your songs and videos — but think creatively, too, on how to best engage fans. Childish Gambino put a link in his ThingLinked images to the Wu-Tang Name Generator that spit out his own moniker many months ago — and fans loved it. Are you in a band from Portland? Link to Powell’s or Portlandia (depending on how seriously you take yourselves, I guess). Does your new album have a song about saving the rainforests? Throw in links to stats and show people where to help the cause. Want to generate a quick hit of buzz? Put up a link to a ticket pre-sale, new track, or special announcement — then take it down after 100 people have clicked on it. ThingLink also lets you track engagement — links that were hovered over, clicked, and how many times and where your image was shared — so you know the content that’s most popular with fans. You can also send ThingLinked images to bloggers for promotional purposes — they’re just as easy to post as a regular JPEG and all your links play inside the posted image:

Pretty cool, right? The technical details (which aren’t super technical, don’t worry) are right here.

If you have any questions or want to send ThingLink some cool examples or your own, just reach out to cortney@thinglink.com

As you probably know by now, Topspin entered into an exciting partnership with YouTube and now offers that sold through Topspin can appear on the artist’s YouTube Channel in a Store section. (Read all about it here.) The YouTube announcement got the Creative Services team (me, Parker & Chris) thinking…what else could we do on YouTube? Can we still collect email addresses?

Hell jes.

Here’s how you create an Email for Media campaign that lives right on YouTube.

There are two things you need to know.

1) How to use Download Anywhere.
Chris posted a great how-to blog post in November. Read this and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. *whistles, looks around.* Good? Okay.

Displaying your E4M inside of the Download Anywhere modal is as simple as adding these parameters to your confirmation URL: &fb=1

This will be the link for your banner ad on your YouTube channel.

This means you’re actually setting up TWO Download Anywhere campaigns – one that will have the YouTube URL as its resident and the one you’ll use to append “&fb=1″ and another that acts like every other Download Anywhere campaign and you use for the confirmation URL in your Topspin E4M set up. In our case, the second Download Anywhere URL drives users to nullco.com/GDT.

Here’s where you set up Download Anywhere.

2) How to put a banner on your YouTube channel.
In the new Cosmic Panda design which was released on 12/1, you can edit the header in “Appearance” in Channel settings. The banner is no longer separate in the new design but rather embedded as part of your background image. To “push down” the header space to reveal your banner, you need to enter “150” in that top space.

In order to hyperlink your banner, you’ll need to use image map code. I’m probably the only person at Topspin who doesn’t know how to program a damn thing. Good thing I’m resourceful with the Google.

Want to track the clicks on that banner link? We do, so we shortened our “Download Anywhere” URL with awe.sm link and used that for our banner link.

Your code will look like this:

I humbly request that someone out there give this a whirl in tandem with a brand-new video premiere. Imagine you’ve got a hot new music video and you can give away the song in exchange for an email address right where people are watching it. You’ll drive eyeballs to YouTube and grow your mailing list at the same time.

Nic

Note: You must be a YouTube Partner to add a banner to your YouTube channel

Did you know we do a 60-minute webcast every Friday morning at 11 am Pacific? We do. We take questions via chat, demo new features of the platform and show off great Topspin-powered artist campaigns.

Bookmark this URL and join us: http://justin.tv/topspinmedia

Thumbs up for rock-’n'-roll,
-bob
@bobmoz

Thanks to everyone who came by Topspin’s Holiday Open House on Monday night. We loved sharing our space with y’all and hope everyone had a great time joining us.

If you couldn’t make it, check out photos from Monday here on Facebook. Click play above to re-live the priceless moment of Amanda Palmer serenading the children with her call-to-arms Ukulele Anthem.

Happy Holidays!

ian c rogers
Topspin