The music industry has maintained a fairly static business model for the last 50 years, and it is only within the last 10 that it has been required to change. Record labels, if they want to keep up with the file sharers and pirates, need to come up with a strategy.

This does not mean cutting off the internet connections of file sharers (Digital Economy Bill) or taking file sharing websites to court (Pirate Bay.) It means upping your game and an A-Grade example of this happening in action is Stones Throw records.

Stones Throw is an indie hip hop record label that is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant and forward thinking in the world.

Stones Throw have an incredibly active message board community of around 4,000 fans, with an average post count of 60 posts per user.

They have a facebook page with 21,000 fans, and each receives around 100 likes and 15 comments (around 1/5^th the activity that adidas originals receives from 2.5m fans.)

Their twitter account has 23,00 followers and a Tweetlevel rating of 63 (compared to Universal_Music with a measly 52)

Search for any Stones Throw album torrent or rapidshare file and you will struggle greatly to find high quality versions. This is because they scour message boards, blogs and music communities and get the links removed.

How is this different to what the major labels are trying to do? Well the main difference is that they give something back. Stones Throw have created an incredibly strong presence across Social media and they use this to distribute content to their fans.

You can’t download an album for free but they will often give out free tracks as teasers of upcoming albums, or post the album on youtube so you can stream it there or from their website often before it is released. They also produce a regular podcast and offer exclusive mixtapes to their audience.

The audience reaction? They love the label. Stones Throw explain their actions, and the audience are happy because they have a level of transparency that all the big record labels lack. They are engaged with the brand and happy to pay for the music they love.

This is how I see the future of the music industry, and I think that major labels can learn a lot from Stones Throw’s strategy. Of course it is going to be tricky to scale this method, but if successful, the ones who benefit are the consumers and that in the end will help you sell more music (3 of the last 5 CDs I bought were on Stones Throw.)

3 of the best

U.K. to Regulate Social Network Marketing

An interesting challenge for the ASA, trying to manage the seemingly unmanageable internet. There are a lot of questions I have on how exactly this will work, in terms of constantly changing adverts and how far their jurisdiction allows them to regulate.

Facebook has certainly had its fair share of scammy advertising and one would hope this goes some way to stopping it! What I would hope for more is that the ASA see Social Media as not just something to regulate but also to enhance their complaints system.

Are they monitoring social networks to see if there are any complaints on adverts or do they just wait for the letters and emails? A tiny step in the right direction.

Ribbon Hero

Last week we looked at how gameplay and social structures could encourage better behaviour. Microsoft have added a social game to their Office Suite. I think this could be a great way to encourage people to become more efficient and make better looking documents. The interesting thing about Ribbon Hero is that it hooks into your Facebook so you can challenge your friends and compare your scores. Props to Microsoft

A little bit of politics

As the election looms the BBC will start covering how politicians are using the internet to enhance their campaigns. I don’t expect we will see anything of the level of Obama but it will be interesting to see how the major parties use social media and how much of an impact it really can have. Keep your eyes on the BBC tech blog.

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Infographic: Mega Shark

If you have seen the laughable Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus scene in which said shark takes down a commercial airline. You may be very amused and informed by this Mega Shark graphic .

Which Test Won

A neat website for UI people with real world tests on how you can alter your site to get the results you want.

Family see Jesus image in Marmite

The lord works in mysterious ways, some people love that and some people hate that…it’s a bit Marmite you could say. Divine intervention also occurred in our very own office!

Last week the gaming communities were working together to uncover a mystery. The popular Valve game, Portal, had received a mysterious update that added a new achievement to the game. No other information was given from Valve and initially the update looked like it may have been due to some sort of legislation agreement claiming it had “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations”

It quickly became obvious this wasn’t just a regular update and something was afoot. When moved to a certain place in the game, radios started transmitting strange signals and messages. Over the course of several days these messages were decoded by gamers. One morse code message translated into a series of letters spelling “LOL” – very funny Valve! Other noises turned out actually to be images when ran through Slow Scan Television (SSTV) application.

The most interesting transmission was a phone number that when dialed by a modem led to an old BBS (bulletin board). The password and username were worked out from the hidden images and more secret messages were uncovered. Various text and ASCII images all hinting towards something brewing inside Aperture Science, the game’s fictional laboratory setting began to emerge from the BBS.

The beauty of this campaign was not just in its clever design, but in the way the community responded. The only information that Valve gave out was that there was an update and it was up to the community to do the rest. Fans worked together across a variety of platforms and communities to unravel the mystery, with the gaming blogosphere picking up on every update as it happened.

This was a triumph in public awareness for valve but also one for the gaming community. A second game update extended the games ending and was shortly followed by an official announcement of Portal 2, but the ending is not as exciting as the journey.

The obvious take away from this would be ARGs are good ways of getting publicity, or clever marketing gets you buzz, but these are not interesting conclusions. The lesson to be learned from this is that your fans are your biggest asset and fastest way of spreading a message. They will speak louder and longest about your products than anyone else.

What this update did was supply fantastic fan service and give the fans something they wanted to share with everyone. Giving your fans something to get involved with and get excited about is much more fun than a press release!

Start thinking about how you can better treat your fans and how they can help you when you need them. They are not just a bunch of message board users to throw PR at.

10 links a week was starting to seem like a lot of links to read. 10 amazing stories all require quite a bit of time to read, so for a few weeks I am going to trial slimming down to 6. Let me know what you think of the new, leaner, fitter 3 of the best

3 of the best

Study: Ages of social network users

Social networks aren’t just for the young, but some definitely are not used by the old! Knowing which audience is on which social network and how they are using it is important for any monitoring or engagement. So swat up!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet

The internet, in case you didn’t know, is pretty big. Just how big? Watch this video. It is easy to get caught up in Twitter and Facebook (which do post big numbers in the video) and other Western-centric sites. But it is important to start realising the internet is global, and as Africa and Asia’s populations move more and more online it opens up whole new areas to communicate with.

3 of the rest

Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

If you missed it recently Jamie Oliver gave a passionate speech on how we need to better educate our children in the way of food. We wish Jamie every success!

DICE 2010: “Design Outside the Box” Presentation

A fascinating talk that is worth anyone watching. Some real food for thought and we had some more fleshed out opinions of this over here.

Roger Ebert’s New Voice

A heart warming story from a real legend of the movie industry.

Last week this quite interesting talk from the recent Games Developer Convention surfaced online. Jesse Schell addresses a few key talking points but the most interesting to me was how Gameplay could be used as an incentive in everyday life. I recommend you find half an hour today to watch this video! Once you’re done my thoughts on how you could use these ideas in your business are after the jump.

Gameplay and progression are such powerful incentives for consumers and they become super charged incentives when placed in social structures. Farmville would not be played by the millions of people that play it if it wasn’t for its social foundations.

Plenty of local cafes run reward point schemes, they are all pretty basic, each purchase gets you a stamp, 8 stamps gets you a freebie.

These are fine but what more could those businesses do to make being a customer more fun? What about bonus points for coming outside of lunch hours, or achievements for being the first person to order a certain meal. Rather than stamps for purchases maybe you can use them to reinforce positive behavior, bonus stamps for saying please and thank you or bringing your plate back to the bar.

Internally why not give staff experience points for performing tasks, doing the washing up, eating a fruit each day of the week, turning up on time! You can plot these online or just on a whiteboard. Perhaps when staff “level up” they can be rewarded with different things “Congratulations on reaching Level 10 Tom you have unlocked a £100 bonus!”.

Start looking at your own business and look for areas where you want to positively enforce behavior, this may be in your customers or even your staff. Think about how game play and social structures can be used both online and offline to make being your customer and working in your organisation just that little more rewarding.

Word of warning just make sure your look at the strategy and not the technology. It is easy to get bogged down in setting up Twitter account and Foursquare sites but unless you know why you are doing it..dont! Also just because everyone else is doing it is not a good reason! Have fun and let me know if you come up with or see any great examples

More about the travel and social media benchmark report.

High scores started in the arcades. Whilst “Insert Coin” flashed at the bottom of the screen the rest was a leaderboard of the best player with only 3 letters to identify them. Arcades were gaming hubs and being top scorer meant you were the best in the local area.

Those 3 letter names were infamous in friendship groups and you know who you needed to beat. It created a social incentive to want to be better than your friends, play one more time and put more money into the machine.

With modern online gaming the leaderboard is back. You can now see how good you are at the game compared to the rest of the world. But knowing you are 231,321^st out of 2 million players isn’t as impressive as being in the top 10 in your local arcade.

Some of the most powerful incentives we have are social ones, and trying to be better than millions of other people will only compel the few. We need to make the leaderboards local and unique to each user. This creates a much higher social incentive and makes players play more to beat their friends.

Games are turning our social circles into personalised leaderboards. Every user has a unique leaderboard that only shows the scores of their friends. Being the best of your ten friends is a lot more compelling than being better than millions of strangers.

The beauty of these modern games is that they can always be connected online. They can always be plugged into our social circles.

This means no one ever needs to play a game in isolation (unless they chose to) it also means you don’t have to play a game with everyone, you can choose to just play with the people that matter to you.

Now when I play Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook the game is constantly reminding me of how I am doing compared to my friends. I don’t know if I am the best player in the world, I don’t even know if I am in the top million, but it doesn’t matter.

What I do know is that (for a short while) I had the highest score of all my friends and it was great, but my high score just encouraged others to play until they beat it.

This is just the first step soon games will go beyond reflecting your social circles scores. They will start using our social circles to make our games more personalised and unique to us. Our experiences will be used to enhance other peoples games and we are starting to see the beginning of this with games like Spore using our friends creations in our game to make our experience matter just that little bit more. I expect a whole lot more of this over the coming years.

Now I must go and get the top score again on Bejewelled!

It was attended by representatives from a wide range of travel companies including Virgin Atlantic, Eye for Travel, A Hedonist’s Guide To…, Visit Britain, Virgin Holidays, Contiki Holidays, Siren PR, Travel Counsellors and Visit London.

One of the discussion topics was ‘Are all customers VIPs in social media?’

When any customer can broadcast to the world are they all VIPs? The best customer care used to be given to those who spent the most money or where deemed important but now anyone can start an internet campaign how do you deal with each complaint?

We considered the example of Dave Carroll’s guitar getting damaged when he flew with United Airlines a while back on the Qube blog.

More recently there is the example of Hollywood director Kevin Smith kicked off  a plane for being ‘too fat’

Some of the views at the roundtable included:

• We try to treat all our customers as VIPs online.
• The key to this is good monitoring – it is important to be listening to what your customers are saying about you online so you can react.
• It is essential to maintain a dialogue with people online. Respond to what people say on Twitter. Make sure on forums you respond at least once or twice during a thread.
• Get to know your influential customers. Build a relationship with them.
• Research has shown that products/services with some bad reviews (eg 10%) are seen as more trustworthy than those with all positive reviews.
• It’s an issue for customer contact centres. Social media is the new email. How do contact centres respond to bad comments?
• United Airlines missed an opportunity to deal with the fallout from the guitar incident by not engaging with people on the web
• Companies should respond to complaints in the media in the form they were made. For example, if it was in a social network they should not respond via a press statement.

We will be releasing some more insight from the round table and also our benchmarking report on Social Media in the Travel Industry over the next few weeks.

I have spent a fair amount of time saying how games need to bring themselves closer to the social web, it now looks like the social spaces might be ready to shoot/splice there way into games.

Even in this day and age of developer blogs and podcasts there is still an element of mystery around how many games comes to exist. There is no mystery however on the origins of “Dudebro: My Sh*t is F*cked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II – It’s Straight-Up Dawg Time”. This game was born by an off-hand comment on a messageboard and by trying to belittle the common “hardcore” game the user cuyahoga has ended up inspiring one!

After creating that title as a way of mocking the “mature” games, cuyahoga inspired the popular gaming forum Neogaf into an idea frenzy. Users began to speculate on what the game might be, what Dudebro looked like, how the game played until it was decided they would make it into a real game. (check out the full story here)

Not only was Dudebro created in Social Media, the creators are using a variety of social tools to make the game. Right now the team is creating design docs using Google docs, using a Wiki to share information on the game, Youtube is being used for users to audition for voice parts or share their Dudebro music, there are Twitter and Facebook pages, there is even a Cafepress to purchase DudeBro Merchandise.

The game, regardless of final quality, will be a great triumph for the hundreds of Neogaf users that have come together to create something. It is inspiring to see a group of people using the power of social media to find all the creators they need to make the game work. What is an important take away is that although the final game may not be as grand and impressive as a retail game, these guys are already using Social Media tools in a far better way then the majority of their professional peers.

I think big developers and companies could learn a lot from how these guys are using Social Media. It isn’t just about setting up a Twitter and Facebook for marketing, they are using tools for internal communication and collaboration. These tools are not just for the community managers and digital marketers they are for everyone! Start looking for communication problems and opportunities in your business (be they internal or external) and start experimenting with social tools and see how they can enhance the things you are already doing.

I look forward to seeing how Dudebro turns out later this year

A Which! survey has just found that despite seemingly cheap ticket prices, they simply hide more hidden costs than other airlines. Their charges increased by a massive 61 per cent (MORE than Bmibaby, Jet 2 and easyJet).

Why is this relevant for a Social Media blog? Because Social Media is all about personality.

How do you engage people, what is your online personality like, do people actually like you? This is equally (arguably more) important for brands as it is for individuals. And Ryanair has always maintained an… unapologetic online persona.

But with these findings showing they aren’t so cheap after all, might they need to improve their brand image to continue competing? Will it force a change in Ryanair’s external ‘persona’ and how they conduct their online – and offline – engagement?

Lunatic bloggers

Unless you’ve been in a cave pondering Platonian shadow dancers, you’ll know the appalling track record that Ryan Air has in terms of its online presence and engagement. If not, you can read more about their history of abusing bloggers and the like here.

If you haven’t got time to read a catch up, this quote from a friend sums up how many people feel perfectly:

I wouldn’t spend a second with a person who behaved like that – why would I spend any time (or money) with a brand like that?

Ryanair worst for ‘hidden costs’ that ramp up ticket prices

The findings of the Which! survey show Ryanair quoted £82 for a return flight for two to Paris but this increased by £50 to £132 with charges.

The brand isn’t yet showing any concern that this might affect business – in typical Ryanair fashion, spokesman Stephen McNamara said: “Nobody pays attention to Which? surveys and we’re not going to either.”

But with the knowledge that their hidden charges are higher than all of their competitors in the cheap air travel market, might that soon have to change?

I’m not going to hold my breath, but it would be nice to see something dent their ego a little.