No ratings yet.

Postcrossing is an online project website, on which people can exchange postcards with other people all over the world. Their slogan is “Send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!”

And following I will explain how the website works. If a postcrosser A wants to send out a postcard, he clicks the “Send a Postcard” and then will get a Postcard ID and an address of a randomly picked Postcrosser B via email. Also the profile of B will be sent to offer some ideas for A what type of postcard would be liked by B, for instance, B’s hobbies and preferences of the postcards(not demands).

And in the meanwhile, A will also be randomly picked by another user C, but A will not be informed about it. So A will receive a postcard unexpectedly from someone she never knew before. The feelings of expecting and surprising keep people involved in the exchange of postcards. After A receives that, he needs to “Register a Postcard” with the Postcard ID on it, and then A could upload the photo of the card and also write comments or message to C.

Postcrossing tries to keep a balance of sending and receiving, so there is a limit of the number of travelling postcards. As you exchange more postcards, the limit will be looser.

Postcrossing sends emails to you regularly about your monthly and yearly statistics, like how many cards you sent, from what countries you have received cards etc. You could also see a map of where postcards are from and to. It is like a journal to record the trips of your postcards.

Above is my profile page. I joined Postcrossing three years ago, having sent 40 and received 39(all of them happened three years ago also). Now I reactive my account and will start exchanging with others again! Hope I will still receive postcards from the Netherlands!=)

 

 

No ratings yet.

Musikid, a domestic fan-supported music platform, is out to reshape itself as a professional online broker of independent musicians.

The platform provides an array of services for starving musicians, such as assisting them in organizing crowd funding campaigns, booking venues and selling tickets.

The shrinking recording industry has left more and more independent musicians out in the cold with no resources and weak connections to producers or agents. The hard situation inspired Zhao Hongwei to found Musikid in 2012.

Zhao built a community music website in the early stages of the project, though it soon closed due to problems with copyright infringement. That was when he decided to take a lesson from Kickstarter.

Musikid builds on Kevin Kelly’s theory of “1,000 True Fans”: that an artist only needs 1,000 true fans to be able to make a living. Zhao said it is not hard for China’s independent artists to win enough fans to support their crowd funding efforts.

The first program promoted by Musikid was Tangsuan Radio, a popular Internet station for folk music. Under Zhao’s advice, backers who offered 1,000 yuan were given the chance to carve their names on a brick wall. Those who donated 5,000 yuan could win a free live show by the station’s DJs in their own home.

The tiered rewards alone helped Tangsuan raise 50,000 yuan – about half of its goal.

More than 400 bands and independent radio stations have applied to raise money with Musikid. Zhao and his colleagues audit each proposal for its feasibility and do background checks on whoever is pitching it.

Zhao said those who succeed in getting the funds they need are interesting, present a good story and actively interact with their supporters.

Nikhil Potdar from Outloop Management said the main task for each funding attempt is to prepare an attractive and high quality video that focuses on the project’s goal rather than the artist’s best song or achievements.

As for whether to help a band raise funds or schedule a tour, Zhao said it depends on the number of participants. Musikid sets a threshold for participants in each city and invites fans to pre-order tickets. If the number of pre-orders is high enough in several cities, it begins to schedule a tour.

Among more than 90 crowd funding attempts, half have succeeded in raising more than 1 million yuan. Musikid collects a 10 percent commission on each successful funding drive.

The bulk of its profits come from commissions, though it also benefits from peripheral sales of T-shirts, caps and necklaces.

Musikid offers two funding models: a Kickstarter-inspired system that disburses funds only if the group’s goal is met and a presale system that ensures artists get the funds irrespective of whether their goal is reached.

Zhao said he also plans to add a B2B platform to allow fans to support original music. When a musician gets 1 yuan from a fan, the fund will follow up by giving 10 yuan. The model is aimed to help newcomers find their first bunch of 1,000 true fans.

Musikid already has 50,000 registered users, 80 percent of whom are paid users.

Besides exploring the domestic market, Zhao is working on a “butterfly plan” that cooperates with Left Ear, a Taiwanese record label, to help organize and promote tours of Taiwanese artists on the mainland.

But Zhao said there are no plans to bring digital music to Musikid. Apart from his personal preference for physical records, Zhao said it is exceptionally hard to generate profits in the digital music market.

Live shows and memorabilia are still the most valuable sources of revenue in the industry, he said.

 

Reference:

C, Bao. Musikid Helps Indie Musicians Back Their Art. News. Online. June 14 2014. http://beijingtoday.com.cn/2014/06/musikid-helps-indie-musicians-back-art/

No ratings yet.

This post kicks off a multi-post miniseries on the topic of influencers: how to find them, engage them, and collaborate with them in word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing programs.

Influence marketing today is in a state of experimentation that scientists call the pre-paradigm phase or exploratory phase. During this phase, everyone is trying different approaches based on experience. There are incomplete theories about why some approaches work and others fail, but there is no underlying fundamental principle that explains everything. My approach in this series is to see if we can gain a deeper understanding by analyzing the process of influence from a data analytics perspective, using a simplified model of social media influence.

A Simplified Model of Social Media Influence:

Influence involves two entities, which I will refer to as influencer and target.

1. The influencer’s power to influence depends on two factors:

a. Credibility: The influencer’s expertise in a specific domain of knowledge.

Please note: There is no such thing as a universal influencer, because no one can possibly be influential in all domains. The best that anyone can hope for is an influencer in a specific domain of knowledge

b. Bandwidth: The influencer’s ability to transmit his expert knowledge through a social media channel.

Please note: Active influencers in one channel may not even be present on another channel. So influencers are not only specific to a domain of knowledge, they are specific to social media channels

2. The target’s likelihood to be influenced by a specific influencer depends on four factors:

a. Relevance (the right information): How closely the target’s information needs coincide with the influencer’s expertise. If the information provided by the influencer is not relevant, then it is just spam to the target and will be ignored.

b. Timing (the right time): The ability of the influencer to deliver his expert knowledge to the target at the time when the target needed it. There is only a small time window along the decision trajectory when the target can be influenced. Outside this golden window, even relevant content will be treated as spam because there is no temporal relevance.

c. Alignment (the right place): The amount of channel overlap between the target and the influencer. If the target is on a different social media channel, then the influencer’s information either take too long or never reach the target.

d. Confidence (the right person): How much the target trusts the influencer with respect to his information needs. Even if the influencer is credible, the target must have confidence in him. Without trust, any information from the influencer will be downgraded by the target.

This model is very general, and it is intended to be applicable to any social media channel. However, it is by no means complete. I just like to use the principle of Occam’s razor and start with a simple model that is consistent with the data out there and see how much it explains. We can always add to the model if it proves to be insufficient. As Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Please note that a lot of attention has been focused on influencers, but very little has focused on their targets.Although it is easier to work with the influencers, we must not forget that it is the targets that we want ultimately. I hope this simple model will help you think about social influence from a more balanced perspective, so that even when we are looking for the influencers and working with them, we still have the targets in mind.

Now that you know the basics of how social media influence works, it should not be difficult to diagnose the success or failure of a social media campaign, at least from a data analytics perspective. As shown in the photo above, any broken link between the influencer and the target is enough to break the chain and stall the whole influence process. Next time, I will show you how to take the first step of WOM/influencer marketing: find the influencers.

Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium’s Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and online communities. He’s a regular blogger on the Lithosphere and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog.

You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu.

Sources:

http://community.lithium.com/t5/Science-of-Social-blog/The-6-Factors-of-Social-Media-Influence-Influence-Analytics-1/ba-p/5708