Category: communication

Friday Five: an open letter to eMusic

Blogger’s note: Today’s Friday Five has nothing to do with higher ed, but a lot to do with marketing, public relations and brand management.

Dear eMusic:

I’ve been a member of your subscription-based independent music service for five years now, and I’ve usually been pleased with your service and offerings — even when you bumped your prices that one time. More than that, though, I’ve come to appreciate what you stand for. (Or, maybe, what you once stood for.)

  1. You thumbed your nose at the mass music world of big labels and iTunes, offering music fans an alternative.
  2. While the RIAA bigs were pushing to limit mp3 usage by DRM (digital rights management) encoding, you stuck with your DRM-free philosophy. You sold the music, and didn’t interfere with your customers’ right to use the tunes as they wished.
  3. You offered decent, rare and eclectic music on the cheap. Very, very cheap.
  4. Unlike other pay-per-download services, you offered a menu of subscription plans, giving listeners options on number of downloads per month at different, very reasonable pricing.
  5. You built a brand as — in your words — “the internet’s corner music store.” You were a kind of virtual Empire Records that “offers a deeper, more personal alternative to mass market digital music retailers.”

You were punk, and then you got popular. You gained a big following — 400,000 members strong.

You built a brand out of sticking it to the man.

But now it’s sounding like you’re sticking it to us, your loyal customers.

Earlier this week, you announced you had struck a deal with one of the music giants, Sony, to add their back catalog to your service. I have mixed and conflicted feelings about that move. Yes, it’s cool to know that you’ll be carrying some of my all-time favorite artists — the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith and others (whose back catalog I happen to already own, thankyouverymuch) — but by letting Sony in, you’re on the way to squeezing the little guys out, and you’re losing that “corner music store” vibe that forms your core.

If this were the only thing you were changing about your service, I might be able to roll with it. But what really sticks in my craw is that because of this new deal, you’re changing your subscription and fee structure, effectively doubling the cost of the mp3s for your customers.

So, instead of 65 tunes a month for $14.99, I’ll now get 37 downloads for that same price, effective in July.

I can hear the iTunes subscribers now: “Get over it, tightwad. So you’ll be paying 41 cents a download instead of 23 cents. You’re still getting music cheap.”

The fact that eMusic has offered such a great deal as compared to iTunes — and will continue to do so, even with the price increase — isn’t the point.

The point is that a mainstream corporate entity has entered the game, and the price goes up.

Your CEO, Danny Stein, claims that “Independent labels and artists will continue to be eMusic’s core” and expresses his confidence that “with this enormous, ridiculous catalogue and our shared musical philosophy (listen to the good stuff, ignore the rest), it’ll be that much easier and more fun to find records, to get inspired, to get into some phase that you never expected.”

I hope that’s the case.

Still, as i think of all that’s transpired this week with eMusic, I keep thinking about these words from James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. They seem to ring truer than ever today.

Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

By entering the eMusic fold, is Sony actually “doing fury honor”? Or is it a brilliant marketing move that will capture some dissident iTunes shoppers who figure out they can get tunes from mainstream artists at a cheaper price from eMusic? Is the RIAA giant swallowing up the independent guy, or does the independent have the upper hand?

OK, so it’s only rock and roll. (Insert Rolling Stones quip here.)

Will i stick with your service, eMusic? Let’s see what July will bring, but yeah, I probably will. But I won’t much like it.

Cordially,
Andrew Careaga
eMusic member since 2004

* * * * *

This is a Friday Five, so here are the obligatory links, all about how eMusic’s PR and customer relations folks bungled this situation:

  1. One step forward, one big step back with the eMusic-Sony deal
  2. Did No One At eMusic Think About PR Impact Of Raising Prices At The Same Time Sony Signed?
  3. Ten years later eMusic.com crushes its brand values in one day
  4. eMusic faces PR challenge in the wake of Sony partnership, pricing announcements
  5. eMusic and Sony – It is getting worse

Guest post: Stefany Wilson on strategic planning (part 2 of 2)

Today’s post is the second from guest blogger Stefany Wilson (@stefanyw), director of communications for the Georgia Tech College of Computing (@gtcomputing on Twitter) and author of BOOM! the blog. Below, Stefany continues her discussion of the importance of strategic planning for communications. Before you dig in here, however, you may want to read part one of Stefany’s post.

* * * * *

The Heart of the Plan

Numbers 4-7 of the contents suggested in my previous post form the centerpiece of your plan. This contains what you’re going to do, who you’re targeting, with what messages and by which means (and the cost). Your key messages should be arranged per audience and I like setting these up as a message matrix that includes the desired action from each group.

Audiences for an academic institution are numerous. It’s almost unfair how few resources we get to communicate with more kinds of people than anyone else even has to think about. Mine include: faculty, staff, current undergrad and grad students, campus VIPs, advisory board, government relations officers, prospective undergraduates, prospective graduates, parents, alumni, corporate partners, donors, board of regents, peer institutions, local, state and federal officials, funding agencies. Even among these you could segment until the cows come home (diversity goals, anyone?).

Since everyone finds themselves arguing over what a goal is versus an objective (strats and tactics, too), here’s a rule of thumb:

  1. Goal – long term, generally broad, not immediately measurable.
  2. Objective – something specific and measurable at the end of the year. Your evaluation methods will address these.
  3. Strategies – The means by which you will meet the objectives.
  4. Tactics – the tasks that implement the strategies.

It all sounds so easy, but it is really quite hard and takes some finesse to state these in a way you can evaluate later. In fact I’ve never had such a hard time getting specific with objectives as I’ve had in academia. Academics are people who like to think big and broad, but our job is to focus, and stay focused if we want to do better than just make noise. Here is a sample set of a goal, objectives, strategies and tactics from our plan:

GOAL

Assert greater influence on state and federal education initiatives, science & technology policy creation and decision-making (jargon-free: become a bigger player in government relations)

OBJECTIVE

Increase the number of congressional (and other) testimonials, requests for expertise and study appointments for sci-tech by raising the profile of Computing faculty among state and federal officials, elected reps, the Board of Regents, Georgia Research Alliance, and members of the Metro Chamber of Commerce.

STRATEGY

Initiate relationship with GT government relations team

  • TACTIC: Set up regular meet and greets with key faculty across the college who have expressed interest in participating in government relations activities
  • TACTIC: Share strategic plans and new developments as they arise
  • TACTIC: Share major news about funding agency awards with them when they happen

STRATEGY

Position computing faculty as an expert resource on relevant science and technology topics.

  • TACTIC: Identify policy experts and spokespeople for the college
  • TACTIC: Develop one page briefs to the team on ‘hot’ research areas and topics

Evaluation – Why You’re Worth It

This is where most people seem to go wrong if the number of invitations I’ve received to measurement conferences is any indicator. The first thing to remember is to measure outcomes, not output. The second thing to remember is that you have to have data. If it’s your first foray into something you might not have much, but you need to be tracking the things you do in an at-a-glance dashboard (or scorecard) format. Here is a pretty good model (PDF) of what I mean.

In my above example of a government relations communications goal, I could evaluate my success by counting the number of spokespeople I rounded up or the number of briefs I wrote, but none of it really matters if we didn’t receive any invitations to testify to Congress or consult on policy. What matters about your output is weighing if the amount of it was a worthwhile investment for the outcome, and that metric is strictly up to you and your organization and is best addressed in the objective.

But that’s a rather simple evaluation example. More sophisticated ones include drawing correlations in Excel between, say, your number of media hits for the year and increases in enrollment or research funding or rankings change (don’t be intimidated – it’s so easy to do). This is a good year over year metric and one we began to employ when we implemented a media relations program in pursuit of reputation improvement.

TruthyPR is a blog that discusses a lot of case studies about measuring non-profit communications initiatives. You should also use web analytics to evaluate your web strategies. There are tons of articles about doing this so I won’t go into it here, but my personal favorite is a blog called Occam’s Razor. Of course, the maven of PR measurement is KD Paine. She is a regular on the higher ed communications speaker circuit and writes a suggestion-packed blog, which I recommend adding to your RSS feed.

The End

If you’ve made it this far in the post, you must really be a planning dork (like me) or you’re hungry for information from a broader perspective of communications. Perhaps you’re starting out in a leadership role or just need a basic outline of how to do develop coherent plan in an often cacophonous environment. Whatever the case, I learned all of this the hard way and am happy to answer questions, share ideas and resources, or just commiserate. You can reach me at stefany at cc dot gatech dot edu.