Large Social Sites = Frequent Design Changes and Occasional Outages
I have told you in previous posts that I maintain a band in my off work time, and that our band uses a myriad of different digital music sites as platforms to reach audiences, again just a few we use - MySpace, Facebook, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Imeem. I know the audiences for independent and major label music are on these sites, so having a presence on them is crucial.
However, as much value as we get out of these sites because we are able to reach large audiences - it’s important to remember this - we would rather have my own hosted site for our band content. I would use the large social sites as points for discovering our band, and then drive the fans back to our own site.
And yet I still see a lot of independent bands skipping out on the creation of their own branded experience. Well that can expose bands to the many potential web design changes and service outages of these well trafficked social media platforms.
I look at what has happened over the past few days with our band page at Facebook as further evidence why we can’t rely on a large social media site as the primary space to connect with our fans. Design changes come often, and without our band’s input. And occasional service outages may crop up.
For instance, we rely on Facebook to host our band content, yet a outage over the weekend made several of our band’s photo albums unavailable. I knew an outage like this could happen at any time - as I said previously I would be glad to pay for a Facebook back up system!
I liked the old design of the fan page for our band on Facebook, because it gave us one single web place to point people towards - one spot where they could quickly read a brief band bio and listen to a few songs via a music player.
As you see below in the picture the recent redesign, moved the music player for our band way to the bottom of the page. And the redesign also took our band bio to the left hand side of the page, so it’s not as prominent as it used to be.
InsideFacebook, the source for all news Facebook, mentioned the Facebook fan page design changes will allow for a more dynamic conversation with fans because there is now a “news feed” for these fan pages, status updates, and a more prominent commenting wall. That all sounds good, and I hope the changes do create a more engaging experience for the fans visiting our band page. But for now, I will argue that the functionality of our Facebook fan page has been reduced. All we wanted was that simple landing page on Facebook with the band bio and music player. Again more evidence that if you want to create your own experience for your fans, you are better off finding a platform of your own, like Cisco Eos, to create a customized experience.
Posted by Chuck Fishman at 05:30PM PST
Shruti Bhat Mar 13, 2009
Chuck,
I can see you are worried about all the equity you have built on facebook - and rightly so! I wonder when - if at all - they will introduce the freemium model.
Also, while every band would probably love to have its own website, I’m wondering whether Eos actually provides different levels of features and services for what I see as the long tail of the music industry.
Shruti