Mozes provides mobile marketing miracles for mobs.

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Last week I attended the “Detroit” (read: Auburn Hills) stop of the Martina McBride & Trace Adkins Shine All Night Tour, which was, as any country fan can imagine, a helluva show, to say the least. Of course, it wouldn’t be a show in the Metro Detroit area without a special appearance by everyone’s favorite local concert crasher, Kid Rock, who did a duet of “Picture” with Martina in her encore and then a song of his own.

This is not a review of the show. (I’ll write one of those later if you want.)

This is a post about a cool service that I signed up for a few weeks ago that I finally got to see in full action at the concert. It’s called Mozes, and it’s a mobile marketing powerhouse of awesome.

When I first discovered it a few weeks ago, I signed up as a fan to receive mobile marketing content from some of my favorite country artists, like Brad Paisley, Sugarland, Lee Ann Womack, and yes, Martina McBride. When you sign up, you join a “mob,” which is short for mobile list. It’s totally opt-in and since I signed up for all those things it was never once spammy. From the Mozes site:

When you sign up for a mob, you receive exclusive announcements, offers and content from your favorite band, brand, team, event or organization via the mobile phone. You can communicate back using either text or voice messages and can opt out of a mob at any time.

When I signed up for Lady Antebellum’s mob, I received a wallpaper for my phone and the option to hear a special voice message from the band. I thought that was pretty nifty, but I didn’t think much beyond Mozes until the Martina McBride show last week.

That’s when I saw the true power of Mozes. There were screens on either side of the stage that you could text messages to, using the Mozes service. If you texted the word “shine” plus your message to 66937 (that spells “Mozes”), as long as it got by the invisible moderator, your message would appear on the screen. Every text you sent also entered you in a drawing to win front row seats or something else. (I didn’t win anything but my date won a free 3 month subscription to Martina McBride’s fan club — which he’s giving to me.)

As you can imagine, people had a lot of fun with this. Aside from a lot of “pick me! pick me!” texts, there were a lot of cute messages like “Our kids got us these tickets for our anniversary … and we’re in the nosebleeds!” and “Hi Mom!” type things. (Unsurprisingly, my own message: “how about that $15 parking fee? Now I can’t afford a t-shirt!!” didn’t make it up to the screen.) There were also a lot of marriage proposals, such as “Kristie, will you marry me?” which got me wondering how many Kristies were there that night with their boyfriends who were not the intended recipient of the proposal and accidentally said yes, thus creating a lot of awkward moments.

But I digress.

Mozes is not just for music.

Yes, musicians seem to be the ones embracing it most, but there are endless possibilities for this service. On their site, they list a few ideas on how it could be used with sports, such as sending text updates with game stats; for brands and agencies, such as running in-store promotions such as text-for-info providing consumers with additional product specs; for causes and non-profits, such as integrating data captured, including issue and opinion data or extended contact information, into your supporter database; and my favorite, live events, where you could connect with attendees via pre-event announcements, poll the audience and see live voting results on-screen in real-time, and even send post-event thank you messages, coupons or links to images and videos … really, the possibilities are endless.

Of course, like everything these days, Mozes is integrated into all the major social networks and sharing options, and what I think is the coolest about it is the ability to target your messages very specifically by age, location, gender, likes and dislikes, and more, PLUS you get instant analytics on engagement/ROI.  Above the standard level, which is free for a month and then only $10 a month after that, all pricing is custom depending on your needs.

Example of real-world application for non-real rock stars

Most people are not real rock stars (or country stars, for that matter). So let’s say you were a person in charge of marketing the conference du jour, and you were aiming for people from all over the region to attend. You’d go with the Group Edition, which allows up to 25,000 messages and many more features and options than the basic. Once people signed up for your mob, you could send them a text or voice thank you, custom ringtone, and/or wallpaper of the conference’s brand.

Then, closer to the conference, you look at your stats and realize you’d really like more people from Ohio over 30 to attend. You could narrowcast to everyone in your mob over 30 about a promotion that if they referred two colleagues to buy tickets, they’d be entered to win something special – a conference package upgrade, hotel discount, whatever.

And then, at the event (which would have plenty of people over 30 from Ohio, thanks to your previous efforts), say you had a Q&A session with your keynote speaker. Attendees could text questions that could appear on a screen (or not) and there wouldn’t be any need to pass the mic, or have them stand in line, nor would there be any loose cannons that end up on CNN spazzing out and getting tased.

Or maybe you wanted to have a poll. Instant results could appear on your screen.

Or maybe lots of people at your conference were taking pictures with their phones. You could have them send those pictures to your screen at the event instantly.

My point is that this service is absolutely, amazingly flexible and the possibilities are endless. Have you used Mozes before, as a fan or as a business? What were your experiences like? I’m curious to see what kind of creative ways people are using it!

Musical Monday Edition | Show review: Amy Millan at Pike Room

Keeping true to my obsession with semi-obscure Canadian independent music, last week I was lucky enough to find myself on the guest list for one of my favorite alt-country/folk artists, Amy Millan, when she was in town at the Pike Room, a swanky dive upstairs from Pontiac’s Crofoot Ballroom. Now, it should be said that playing in the Ballroom downstairs that night was this angry-guy band that sounds like every angry-guy band — extremely loud, obnoxious, and with a cool sounding name like Five Finger Death Punch, which was was so loud that we could both feel and hear it over our nice, intimate, folky show of about 60 attendees.  Oddly enough, in my Harley Davidson jacket I could have easily slipped into the other show and not looked out of place, but any band whose name sounds more like a concoction prepared by a goth mom at a Halloween party and whose album is entitled “War is the Answer” can safely be assumed to be the very antithesis of the very Canadian, very folky music that I love and came to see.

Opening the show was an interesting fellow named Afie Jurvanen, who also goes by artist/band name Bahamas, for what reason I have no idea except to perhaps convey sheer irony in being a Finnish guy from Canada. I was pleasantly surprised, however, as he opened with a beautiful ballad called “Hockey Teeth” and instantly won me over. His drummer was missing, but his goofy demeanor and commanding stage presence made him make going solo look easy. His vocals are reminiscent of Jack Johnson but he can play a mean stratocaster.  Always one to support the opening act, I bought his CD, Pink Strat (affiliate link), and encourage you to check him out and support him, too. He’s really, really good.

Now, onto Amy Millan. The best way for me to describe her sound is the bastard child of musical Williamses – Dar Williams, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams, and Hank Williams – somewhat folky, somewhat breathy, somewhat twangy, somewhat depressing, but everything she plays sounds instantly classic. She opened with a strong “Losin’ You,” the lead song off her first solo record, Honey from the Tombs (affiliate link), followed by a steel guitar-infused cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” From there she played a mix of songs old and new, this tour to promote her latest album, Masters of the Burial (affiliate link), which has a slightly sad tone but is nonetheless beautiful. 

Any band who can play live with a steel guitar, an upright bass, a mandolin, a ukulele,  and a trombone and make it sound AWESOME earns MAD RESPECT in my book. (The only thing that could have made it better would have been a successful accordion accompaniment, but they can’t all be like Cowboy Junkies.)

Highlights of the show had to have been a spunky version of her Rolling Stone acclaimed hit “Skinny Boy,” and a bluesey, almost-jazzy “Bruised Ghosts,” which is her first single off the new album. For her encore, she played my request of the song that made me first fall in love with her music years ago, a very country-esque “He Brings Out the Whiskey in Me,” that rings like a classic country song a lá Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn.

Having been disappointed with my new iPod Nano video’s lack of ability to record well in loud, dark spaces, I decided to try shooting some video with my BlackBerry instead, and surprisingly, the quality wasn’t too bad, save for my obviously-shaky hand. Below is my shaky capture of “Bruised Ghosts” from Amy Millan at the Pike Room, October 15, and you can find a few more at my YouTube channel.

blip.fm adds YouTube videos, indie musicians benefit BIG TIME

Once in a while at night while super multitasking (read: not being all that productive because I’m trying to do too much at once), I’m known to blip. For the uninitiated, blip.fm is known as “the Twitter of music,” in that you can play (or “blip”) songs while attaching a little message to them, and you can follow (they say “subscribe”) to other users (“Blip.fm DJs”) much like on Twitter.

A blip on blip.fm:

And to pile on top of all that, you can even integrate it to your Twitter account so that what you blip is tweeted and not just seen by your BlipDJ friends, but by your Twitter followers as well.

A blip on Twitter:

Talk about integration — earlier I decided to blip because I had a song in my head, and suddenly the some of search results had these little TV icons next to them. I didn’t notice at first but HOLY COW is this cool.

This is why it’s important to tag your content.

I have a lot of musician friends, and I don’t upload a lot of stuff to my YouTube channel but when I do, I make sure they’re able to be found with appropriate tags. Case in point, a band that is like family to me, 60 Second Crush:

Three of the first five videos that came up in the search results for them are mine, and all of the results are their band.

So what does this all mean?

This means serious, never-before-reaching exposure for independent musicians like my buddies.

In fact, I found myself blipping quite a few of my friends’ songs that weren’t previously on blip.fm but were on YouTube (including some of my own videos), and are now on both. Blip.fm’s audience is older and spans much farther across the globe than MySpace’s, which had been indie artists’ saving grace until a year or two ago, and I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that MySpace is now in serious danger of dying.

Not to mention that the audience likely has more money (I don’t have figures for this and it’s late so don’t expect me to look them up right now), which means increased sales. Which brings me to another feature I noticed — now if you blip an artist and they’re also on iTunes, there will be a little ad that tells you which album the song is from and a link to buy it from the iTunes store.

(OK, so I know that Natalie Merchant isn’t the best example for a screen shot here but it’s 3:30 a.m. and I’m working with I already had. Trust me — if you’re a smart indie musician with all your ducks in a row and are found on YouTube and/or blip.fm and hooked up on iTunes, it’ll work.)

The only bad thing I noticed, which may have been my own fault, was that the YouTube integration seemed to freeze up my Firefox a few times, which was a real pain in the butt because this is the third time I’ve had to write this paragraph & my auto-save wasn’t auto-saving fast enough. Somebody else on Twitter mentioned that she had trouble with her browser in this, too, but it was pointed out to me that it could be a noscript or script blocking extention I’ve got installed. I’m going to have to check that out but I’m sure it can be resolved easily enough.

Keep in mind that these new features aren’t just great for artists, either. Now that there’s video involved, it’s great exposure for professional music videographers, as well as those who just like to shoot live music for fun.

In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty passionate about supporting local and independent musicians (and always have been). The internet has really leveled the playing field, if not given them an advantage over the “big dogs,” and if social media strategies are executed properly, the possibilities are endless. This new cross-platform integration is pretty exciting, and I can’t wait to see what happens.

I know I’ve got some indie musicians and their fans reading this, what do you think? Lots of potential or just lots of hype? Blippers, has your browser been crashing, too?

(FYI, some more technical information about the changes and how they came about can be found at gigaom.com.)

I’m a guest reviewer — that means somebody cares what I think!

(I forgot to post about this last week.)

I was asked by my friend Jackie at The Book Blues online bookstore if I would be the guest reviewer for this month, so I chose to review World Wide Rave, latest from my favorite author, David Meerman Scott.

I’m not going to repost the review here, but if you care to know what I think about it, head on over to The Book Blues and find out. You can also find out how you, too, can become a guest reviewer, and if she picks you, she’ll send you something cool.

Support independent bookstores, online and off.

What do they have that Amazon doesn’t? Personality.

A nice alternative to Google Reader (for Mac users, anyway)

I know that according to some of you, I may be committing blasphemy when I say this,  but . . .

I’m not a fan of Google Reader.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. I know it’s the most popular RSS reader, yada yada yada . . . but I prefer something else. It’s this awesome little freeware program called Shrook.

Why do I like it so much?

Well, for starters, you don’t need a browser to read your feeds. Sometimes, I have so many browsers and tabs open that I really don’t want any more. So Shrook puts all your feeds into one nice, neat little multifunctional package.

You can easily organize your groups by creating groups on the far-left panel and then just dragging and dropping. For example, you could have groups of feeds for Social Media, Favorites, News, Writing, Local, whatever. You can get as creative as you want, and yes, one feed can belong to more than one group.

But, if you really want to see the actual page that the entry you’re reading is on, a push of a button and suddenly you’ve got a mini-browser right inside of your application:

So now I can read Chris Brogan and look at his smiling face without opening yet another browser tab. A click of the same button and the mini-browser function collapses and you’re back with the XML.

Another favorite feature I have is the flag option, which is indicated by those diagonal red lines next to some of the entries above. I flag items in all sorts of feeds, usually as reference points of things I know I’ll need to return to in the future. (I know Google Reader has that option, too, but I like it better in this app.)

Shrook also can synchronize with the web, so that if you’re without your computer and in a computer lab at school or something and still want to read your favorite feeds, you can login to Shrook.com and read them there, so you’ve got the flexibility and portability of Google Reader, as well.

Something else that I think is cool about it is that you can subscribe to podcast feeds with Shrook, and when it finds a new podcast, it will download it, add it to iTunes for you, and when you sync your iPod, Shrook will grab the text from the podcast and that will appear on your iPod’s screen for you, with links to the audio and everything.

Other fun features about Shrook, from its site:

Instant Notifications – Built-in support for Growl

Spotlight support – Shrook items appear in Spotlight search results.

No Browser Required – View webpages directly in Shrook.

Smart Groups – Define almost any combination of rules to pick out items you want, all updated in real time.

Scrapbooks – Save individual items to look at later.

Blogging Integration – Use external blog editors directly from Shrook

Real-time search – Enter a word into Shrook’s search box, and the list of channels or items instantly reduces to those matching the search.

Secure access – Shrook provides access to private channels via HTTPS encryption (including self-signed) and password protection. Passwords are stored securely in your Keychain. It also shares credentials with Safari, so if you log in there you can read private channels in Shrook.

Channel Guide – Shrook comes with an integrated channel guide to help you find new channels. It’s loaded from the web, so it’s always up to date.

Quick subscription – Shrook supports feed: links, which allow you to add a channel to Shrook just by clicking a link on a web page.

Sadly, this fun little application is only for Mac, so if you’re a PC person you don’t get to play. But for my Mac user friends, I highly recommend you give Shrook a spin. When I first tried it I was skeptical to say the least, but now I love it and wouldn’t use anything else.