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Film producer builds pre-release buzz by making soundtrack available for free download

Readers of this blog know that a great way to build buzz and generate interest in products and services is to make select content available for free online. There's no doubt that free content sells. For example, my free ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing has been downloaded over 330,000 times propelling my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR to bestseller status and helping to sell translation rights in 22 languages.

So it was with great interest that I had an opportunity to connect with Ryan Gielen, Executive Producer of The Graduates to learn about his strategy of making much the soundtrack of his new film available for free download. From this link, you can get a new song every week, or if you don’t want to wait, you can get the entire soundtrack for just 99 cents.

The Graduates, which will be released in May 2009, is an award-winning comedy about four friends who head to the beach without a care in the world, The film has been developing a loyal 18-34 year old following through a dozen sold-out festival and sneak preview screenings, advertised solely by word-of-mouth.

The film features the music of some incredible indie bands including:
The New Rags
Plushgun
Sonia Montez
The Mad Tea Party
Our Daughter's Wedding
The Smittens

Of course, the bands also benefit because people are exposed to their music and if they like it, may buy an album or see them live.

David Meerman Scott: How did the idea to offer the music free come about?

Ryan Gielen: "Marc Cuban wrote a great column on why studios should give away their soundtrack to every audience member, and advertise that as part of the ticket price. I forwarded it to my producers, even printed it out and put it on my wall, it's still there (I'm not a Mavs fan, but my best friends are, and turned me onto his blog).

Studios are extremely unlikely to ever adopt this model- for a lot of reasons- but we're not a studio film. We're a very indie film, with very indie bands on our soundtrack. Both the bands and the film need as much promotional help as possible, because we're competing with studio films, major marketing budgets, stars. We don't compete exclusively with low-budget films. We compete with everyone. So what do we have to offer our potential audience to set us apart? A great film and a great soundtrack isn't enough, we need people to know about it.

The film comes out in May, and we'll launch by giving away the first 20-25 minutes, free. But for now, we can only release the soundtrack. So we felt it made sense to give away half the soundtrack leading up to the release to build loyalty, show off the product, and compensate for a zero-dollar marketing budget, all in one fell swoop.

And when the film does well, everyone including the bands will make more than enough money to ease the pain of giving songs and 25 minutes of film away."

DMS: Was there any resistance from others on the film (producers, artists, etc.)?

RG: "My producers and I all loved this idea, and when we carefully explained it to the musicians they came along. I think it helped that everyone was aware of how hard the producers and I are working to promote the film and the individual bands on the soundtrack. They recognized that we're extremely dedicated to their success, not just our own. I think the knee-jerk reaction is to get really uptight about giving stuff away, even if it's just one song, but that's so shortsighted.

I should add that movie studios will probably be very slow to adopt this model, possibly because they load soundtracks with famous music that is too expensive to give away. But anyone outside the studio system can recruit brilliant music from tens of thousands of indie bands and use the soundtrack as a living, breathing flexible promotional tool.

This model is why iTunes has turned record stores into dinosaurs- anyone can preview the product on iTunes, we never have to buy blind again. Our giveaway is really just another version of the preview. If you're already letting people preview your music, why not give a song or two away, just to make sure everyone is listening to you, instead of the MILLIONS of other bands available."

DMS: What advice would you give musicians and filmmakers?

RG: "Music licensing is an enormous headache for indie filmmakers (and probably for ad agencies?), and we have enough challenges in front of us with this tiny little film to promote. We all agreed early on that we would go out and find great bands that hadn't been discovered because that would help us license the music, and they would be excited by the exposure. I expect that if we had pitched this to established, signed bands we would've been laughed out of the room.

But that's their own shortsightedness. The media landscape is so broad that we literally had 9,000 bands submit, something like 100,000 songs to choose from. If our little film takes off, people all over the country will discover new music and buy it through our website and iTunes. The worst-case scenario for even an established band is that we just crafted a $100,000 music video for them. The Rolling Stones should laugh us out of the room, but this is a good opportunity for many, many bands.

Bands need to take their future in their own hands. Track down indie filmmakers on IMDb and send them links. I listen to everything people send because I know they're as hungry as I am. One good indie film can set you up with a brand new audience around the country. One great indie can set you up around the world. If they were really clever bands would even insist on having a thirty-second or one-minute trailer cut exclusively with their song. The filmmaker would be likely to agree because it costs him nothing, and he gets a great piece of music, and the band just got a free music video.

Which, of course, they should give away immediately to any and all potential fans."

DMS: Nice work Ryan! You, your produces, and the bands that are participating are doing the right thing. I wish you great success with The Graduates!

When your product itself has potential to go viral, create triggers to push it along

I'm fascinated with Web-based products like Hotmail, Gmail, YouTube, and YouSendIt - products that people share with their friends, colleagues and family members.

When you get an email from someone’s Gmail account or watch a YouTube video or someone sends a large file to you via YouSendIt, that's a trigger for you to potentially sign up and use the product too. These products sell themselves: no coercion required and "advertising campaigns" a waste of money. How cool is that?

Lauren Grunstein and Stephanie Gurtman (the Gigi Girls), both juniors at Boston University College of Communications, are co-founders of InternshipRatings.com, a place for students to reveal and critique the internship world so other potential interns can get the real deal at potential employers.

I've spoken with them several times over the past year as they've developed and launched InternshipRatings.com to learn how they developed the triggers so people share their product. (This photo was taken at the recent HubSpot Inbound Marketing Summit).

They met their freshman year in the College of Communications class and then kept in touch during the application process and internship experiences, which were vastly different than what they had expected. When they spoke during that summer, they realized that if there had been information about the companies where they were slated to intern, their experiences might have been different.

"So we decided to create a site," Grunstein says. "We are used to these kinds of user-driven ratings services because we used RateMyProfessors.com a lot." RateMyProfessors.com currently has 6 million opinions on a million professors who teach at over 6,000 schools. "We saw the opportunity and we created something that we would use ourselves, with a young feel to the site as well as the company name and tagline: Is it worth the coffee?"

To launch InternshipRatings.com, the Gigi Girls focused their efforts on social media sites, sending out personal messages to about 1,000 Facebook friends. They made the messages really short and personal and told people about the site and the InternshipRatings.com Facebook group.

"We used our network in a way where we were letting our friends into our lives. Facebook is how people of our generation communicate, so that’s how we launched," Grunstein says.

In a world where companies spend zillions of dollars on inane advertising, sometimes we forget that a product can be launched via word-of-mouse. How can you tap your network to launch your next product?

Here's a video interview of the Gigi Girls from Bob Collins.

Editorial note: How cool is it that Grunstein and Gurtman, as college undergraduates, created a company. Geez, when I was at Kenyon College, I was more interested in the finer points of partying as well as debating the relative merits of punk, ska, reggae, and new wave bands. Starting a company? Yeah, right… Congratulations to the GiGi Girls for creating success.

Don't ruin your great YouTube video with too-slick Madison Avenue packaging

Readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of YouTube videos created to spread an idea or story. When people share your ideas and stories with their friends, family members, and colleagues, and there is a small rub-off on you, that's just terrific. There's no better way to market. (It sure beats advertising).

Consider the video called The BBQ Song, sponsored by Alka-Seltzer and performed by Rhett & Link (with backing from the Homestead Pickers). Kyle Matthew Oliver, who pointed me to this soon-to-be-classic calls it the "funniest and most delicious-looking music video I've seen in a long time."

What a hoot. Check it out now and then read the rest of this post…

Did you watch it? Cool, right?

What I like is that it has a homemade sort of feel even though it was probably professionally shot. And, although the Alka-Seltzer brand is in there three times, I think it is not too heavy handed. (We saw the Alka-Seltzer name on the sign in the very beginning, then "Speedy" makes a very brief appearance for a moment in the middle and finally less than ten seconds from the end we see Speedy again.)

Imagine how crappy the video would be if the Alka-Seltzer name was in the song itself like a jingle or if Speedy was seen throughout or some other forced branding method.

Anyway, as great The BBQ Song is as stand alone YouTube video, I think The Alka-Seltzer Great American Road Trip site that houses the "campaign" is just too slick and predictable and therefore probably a failure for Alka-Seltzer. Some well-paid Madison Avenue advertising agency likely built the site for Bayer Health Care (do we really care that Alka-Selzer is owned by Bayer by the way...). This Web site "campaign" digs deep into the standard playbook and thus falls flat.

In my opinion, one of the reasons that videos spread is the homemade quality. (There are other reasons YouTube videos spread and I share some here.)

People are advertised to thousands of times a day. We see countless commercial messages all the time. We crave authenticity. We want to get away from advertising to something interesting and real.

The BBQ Song video is terrific but the site is not.

What do you think?

How egocentric are you?

I am a huge fan of interactive tools as a way to generate a World Wide Rave (when people are talking about you and your company). The best interactive tools tend to be free, are easy to use, and provide meaningful data. And when they do all those things, people talk about them and share them.

For example, HubSpot has two great tools, Website Grader and Press Release Grader. The simple and free tools have been used to grade hundreds of thousands of sites and press releases. And tons of bloggers have talked about the tools, generating thousands of inbound links.

Last week, Douglas Karr released on his Marketing Technology Blog a Tuned In Calculator. The idea is deceptively simple. It takes your RSS feed and analyzes it for how often you use egocentric words like "we" and "our" compared to how often you talk about your readers, your buyers and their problems. As Douglas says, "If you're always talking about yourself, you may not be Tuned In!"

Here is a link to the Tuned In Calculator.

When I first tested this blog, I got a 9 (awesome). But a few days later when I tested, I scored an 8 (caring). I'll need to figure out why the difference! Maybe Douglas tweaked his algorithm yesterday.

Thanks Douglas, for taking an idea in our book Tuned In and creating such a great tool.

Conflict. To make your marketing much more interesting, add conflict

I was fortunate to have taken a bunch of fiction writing classes and spent a lot of time writing fiction prior to starting this blog and writing books about marketing.

Something you learn very early in creative writing classes are the various elements of the craft like plot, dialog, characters, setting, and the like. But what I always recall as being a particularly important element in fiction is conflict.

According to Wikipedia, conflict is "a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests. A conflict can be internal (within oneself) or external (between two or more individuals). Conflict as a concept can help explain many aspects of social life such as social disagreement, conflicts of interests, and fights between individuals, groups, or organizations."

My first book, Eyeball Wars, was a thriller. There was conflict on virtually every page.

Think about it. At a fundamental level all film and all fiction is really just about conflict. Usually it is one character in conflict with others (Batman against the bad guys). Sometimes it is a character in conflict with himself (I really shouldn't go into this bar, but…).

One writing teacher told me "writing without conflict is propaganda."

Here is a classic conflict driven plot line of countless books and movies:
Boy meets girl.
They fall in love.
Boy loses girl.
Boy (and sometimes girl) are miserable for most of the action.
They finally get back together
They get married.

The conflict involved was how and why they broke up and then what they did to get back together.

But how interesting would a book or movie be that had this plot:
Boy meets girl.
They fall in love.
They get married.

Yuk. How boring! This is propaganda.

This sort of propaganda is how most marketing is organized. I see tons of this stuff: "Here’s our product. It is great. Here are customers who say it is great. Now buy some of our product." Sadly, this classic propaganda-driven marketing crap is everywhere.

Think about your own marketing, How can you introduce some conflict into your work? How can you make it interesting?

Have you seen the Budweiser Clydesdale spot that originally ran during the Super Bowl (I don’t remember what year)? It’s the one with Hank the Clydesdale. I've seen it running on NBC during the Olympics this week. This ad is great because it introduces conflict. Hank doesn’t make the team. He's dejected. He works to become stronger. And then he's successful the next season.

How interesting would the same spot be with all the existing elements of cuteness and location in place, but with one change? What if Hank made the team the first try? (I think it would be dreadfully boring!)

In my most recent ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free I introduced conflict in the opening paragraphs. Perhaps that's why this ebook has been shared by so many people, resulting in a quarter of a million downloads. This is how I open:

"Imagine you're the head of marketing at a theme park, and you're charged with announcing a major new attraction. What would you do?

Well, the old rules of marketing suggest that you pull out your wallet. You'd probably spend millions to buy your way into people’s minds, interrupting them with TV spots, billboards by the side of the highway, and other "creative" Madison Avenue advertising techniques. You'd also hire a big PR agency, who would beg the media to write about your attraction. The traditional PR approach requires a self-congratulatory press release replete with company muckety-mucks claiming that the new attraction will bring about world peace by bringing families closer together.

That's not what Cindy Gordon, vice president of new media and marketing partnerships at Universal Orlando Resort, did when she launched The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Other large entertainment companies would have spent millions of dollars to interrupt everyone in the country with old-rules approaches: Super Bowl TV ads, blimps, direct mail, and magazine ads. Instead, Gordon told just seven people about the new attraction."

By using conflict, I introduce what Cindy Gordon could have done. I show what was expected, and then in a twist she does something completely unexpected. (Read the ebook for the rest of the story.) It was the element of conflict that made this story in the ebook great.

Conflict. It's an important, yet overlooked aspect of all good marketing.

How can you add conflict to your marketing? Got any good examples you want to share?

55,000 free hotdogs and a dozen free videos

There's been some debate recently about totally free content vs. gate content. On one side are people like me who say put your stuff out for free (my ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing that has been downloaded around a quarter of a million times in 2008). On the other side are people like Bob Bly who believe that gated content (such as white papers that require an email address to download) is the way to go. Many people suggest a combination.

Last week I was in New York spending time with my publisher at Wiley. After work, we went to see Canadian indie band Wolf Parade. But in order to get into the proper mood for the show, we first hightailed it up to Rudy's Bar & Grill in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City.

Rudy's serves free hotdogs. A lot of free hotdogs. In fact last year they gave away 55,000 free hotdogs. They also sell a hell of a lot of (cheap) beer. The place was packed when we were there.

I was wondering as I ate my second dog and drained my third pint if we’d have been there without the free hotdogs? And I wondered if I’d be seeing Wolf Parade without checking out their music for free on MySpace first?

Here's an Editorial Review for Rudy's Bar and Grill – by Rose Martelli

The Scene
Rudy's is one of the last bars in Manhattan where suits, slackers and lifetime ne'er-do-wells commingle in a laid-back, beer-laden haze. It's always loud and crowded, even when the backyard "garden" is open. And when you're ready to date out of your comfy little social circle, slap on your sluttiest lipstick or your spiffiest blue jeans and head here. Chances are you'll cozy up in one of Rudy's little red banquettes with someone new before long.

The Draw
Heated on one of those fast-food rotisseries and served with a plain white bun and a little mustard, the full-sized hot dogs are always free and always available--so long as "the hot dog guy" is behind the bar. The blackboard lists about 12 brews on tap, from Bud to Checker Cab Blonde Ale; Rudy's Red, the house brew, is dirt cheap but rather weak.

Wolf Parade at Terminal 5 on July 31, 2008

Business-to-business ebooks: Spreading your ideas for free

Readers of this blog know that I am a huge fan of ebooks as a way to show the world that you're smart and worthy of doing business with. Ebooks have potential to spread your ideas far and wide. For free. My own most recent ebook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free, released in early 2008, has been downloaded a remarkable 250,000 times.

E-books have become a very significant medium, partly because people can instantly see the value of a product that looks like for-purchase content but can actually be downloaded for free. In my opinion, e-books should be material people want to read, compared to the dense and usually boring white paper, which our buyers feel they should read but often don't.

Many of the ebooks I've written about in the past such as Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex are for consumer markets.

For business-to-business companies used to the more traditional white paper, an e-book is a radical departure for one simple yet revolutionary reason: the goal. An e-book is about spreading ideas. But for most companies, a white paper is about generating sales leads.

If you've created and published a white paper for your business before, it's highly likely that you put all sorts of controls over its dissemination. If you offered it online, you probably required readers to fill out a Web form before they could download it. The form required them to supply their name, affiliation, email address, phone number, and perhaps more details like the size of their company. Most companies apply the same "give to get" philosophy to offline white papers, requiring interested readers to supply a business card or fill out a reply form.

An e-book is different, or at least should be. Make the content totally free with no registration requirement at all so people are more likely to download it and share with colleagues.

For example, an e-book called The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata from Dow Jones Client Solutions, is written for information professionals. It is a creative way to communicate about some complicated concepts like information tagging and metadata use in large organizations.

The ebook has been very popular with the corporate librarian buyer persona - a major target market for Dow Jones Client Solutions - who find the ebook through partner links on Association sites such as the Special Libraries Association, and events such as the Semantic Technology Conference, Taxonomy Boot Camp, Enterprise Search Summit, and KM World.

Disclosure: I've done consulting work for Dow Jones and have spoken at many of their events around the world. However, I did not work on the Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook.

A viral marketing story suitable for bedtime

Perfect for a summer weekend, check out this ebook of Seussian commentary on the difficulties YOBI CIO Jen O'Meara encountered with "new marketing".

Then, watch as Jen uses YouTube to explain what to do when viral marketing just doesn't work.

(She even bangs her head against her desk…again.)

Here is a direct link to the YouTube video

Cisco debuts "Disconnected" Life of Don DeLay Web sitcom

As many readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of humor in corporate videos and am particularly fascinated with large, well-known technology companies that can poke fun at their business.

So it is with pleasure that I introduce you to a new Web sitcom video series debuting this week from Cisco. I have high hopes for this to be as good as the classics of the genre such as Greg the Architect from Tibco.

Follow Don DeLay, a well-intentioned and affable guy whose basic efforts to communicate are hindered by his misguided technology choices. The knuckleheaded Don selects a cheap internet provider and that may just unwind his marriage. Don and his wife Rhonda really want their marriage to work and are seeking professional help.

Here is the "Disconnected Life" Web Sitcom homepage

Here are some direct YouTube links
Meet Don DeLay
Meet Rhonda DeLay
Webisode #1

Grade your press release (for free!)

HubSpot's Press Release Grader is a free application that evaluates your press release and provides a "marketing effectiveness score". The score is based on the language and content of the release, plus advanced factors from Internet marketing experts at HubSpot such as links and search engine optimization characteristics.

Wow. This is such an awesome tool. You’re hearing about it here first, but my guess is that this will become a popular little application in PR circles.

Press Release Grader is totally free. All you do is copy and paste press release text into the tool, add a few other things like your company name and URL and it takes just seconds to produce a score. But you also get detailed suggestions for improvement.

Press Release Grader even checks for the gobbledygook words I identified in my Gobbledygook Manifesto. How cool is that?

You can watch a short video on the site to learn how it works.

I asked two people from HubSpot - Dharmesh Shah, Chief Software Architect & Founder and Mike Volpe, VP Marketing - why they created it.

"It's unclear whether press releases are effective these days. But, if you're going to be creating press releases and putting them on the web, you might as well get the most value you can out of them," says Dharmesh Shah. "Press Release Grader checks to see if you're (generally) doing the right things. It was created with the same general motivation as our popular WebsiteGrader.com tool. Help people get a quick sense for where they're deviating from best practices. Press Release Grader will not make your press releases more interesting -- but it will hopefully give you some quick tips for getting more value out of them."

"The best way to grow your business today is through inbound marketing – creating remarkable content targeted at your buyer personas, and enabling them to share that content with others," says Mike Volpe. "We have no idea if Press Release Grader will be a big hit, but under the new rules of inbound marketing, you act more like a publisher - create lots of content knowing that some smaller portion of it will be a big success."

If you write press releases, you need to check this out.

(Also note what a great viral marketing concept Press Release Grader is for HubSpot).

Disclosure: I am on HubSpot's board of advisors and I am speaking at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Conference in September.