San Francisco Music Tech Summit - Part 2
(Left to Right: Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, Chuck Fishman, Cisco Media Solutions Group, Geoff Ralston, CEO of Lala at the San Francisco Music Tech Summit; Photo Credit - Julie Blaustein)
I already posted an overview of the San Francisco Music Technology Summit, which included a great video wrap up of the conference by NBCBayArea.com. Yet I promised to come back with another post revealing key takeaways from this conference that focuses on digital music business models, technologies and services. Social media played a big role in helping me put together a comprehensive review.
Getting Information out of Conferences After the Fact via Social Media
I admit it, I’m very late in getting to my part two of my post on this digital music conference. The San Francisco Music Technology Conference now was three weeks ago (at the time of writing this post)! I guess the work here at Cisco Media Solutions Group has kept me too busy and I haven’t been able to collate all the highlights from the conference’s great digital music discussions.
Venture capitalist and technology leader Fred Wilson recently lamented he doesn’t like attending conferences, mainly because of the travel. Well the great thing is conferences now seem very virtual because of social media, so maybe you can cut your travel by reading up online about a conference you wanted to attend. Also, conference content seems to lives online in perpetuity and it’s easier now to find because of the volume of social media content generated by attendees. For instance, using the search engine Social Mention - I can easily find all blog posts, micro blogs (e.g. Twitter), images, videos, articles, podcasts, and more related to the San Francisco Music Tech Summit. How? Because San Francisco Music Tech conference organizer Brian Zisk designated a hash tag (read definition if you need it) for bloggers and attendees to use. They could label the conference content they generated with the hash tag #sfmusictech. So as I try to bring you the best parts of the conference, I know I can go back and review the content using a search tool like Social Mention. Search the #sfmusictech conference discussions along with me right here.
Social Mention search for content related to “sfmusictech” - Using Social Mention you can even see which web users talked about the conference the most, and popular related hash tags.
Want to see only video of the conference instead of all search results? I also suggest going over to Youtube and entering the “sfmusictech” hash tag (the # character is non essential). There is plenty of video from the conference - see the search results here.
Don’t worry - I won’t crib from the content that other people wrote about the conference in order to share insights - but there are some good conference review blog posts in the Resources section following. Fortunately, I did find some time capture some conference video using the Flip Mino HD so let me share some of the highlights from the video. I was excited to use the camera as the maker of Flip, Pure Digital, is now part of Cisco and I like to know how of our products and services work. Ok, now on to the conference material….
Social Media and Music
The first panel of the day I attended was titled “Reaching Fans”. Jeremy Welt, Senior Vice President of New Media at Warner Bros. Records (bio link) made several points on the panel which I’ve previously discussed on the Cisco DigMediaRev blog. For instance, I discussed the many reasons why musicians should maintain their own branded web property apart from social networks like MySpace, and Facebook. Jeremy Welt concurs…
“Your little lego block world” is how Jeremy Welt dubs the various social media platforms - musicians use them to build up an online strategy ; this strategy, with the branded artist site in the center as the hub, was illustrated in a flow chart in a previous Cisco DigMediaRev blog post.
Sure you can have your own hub but it’s still critical to utilize the different social media platforms, like MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Last.fm, ReverbNation, etc, in order to discover existing fans, win over new fans, and engage in a conversation with them. Eventually by creating a deeper conversation across the web, you drive fans over time back to your branded site. But how do you speak directly to fans on these various sites because each site may have a different audience, or different method and medium as far as fan engagement. Jeremy Welt addresses this question ...
You can read the rest of Jeremy’s thoughts from the “Reaching Fans” panel at his site JBlogg.
Later in the day I spoke on a panel titled “Social Networks and Music”. The panel was hosted by Dave Allen, one of my favorite bassists of all time from the post punk bands Gang of Four and Shriekback. Dave has a long history in digital music, having worked at eMusic and also at Intel - you can read Dave Allen’s bio here. Also on the panel was Ali Patrovi, the CEO of iLike, a social network based around music content. iLike also currently powers Facebook’s “music” service and offers tools for musicians to syndicate their content across other social media platforms. Geoff Ralston is the CEO of LaLa, which has social networking features, but I consider it to be more of a music service than actual social network. Anthony Batt is the founder of Buzz Media, a network of popular blogs, many related to music like one of their owned properties, Stereogum.com. I represent Cisco Media Solutions Group and our platform Cisco Eos which is built for media and entertainment companies to quickly launch branded sites (for instance music sites like Sean Paul’s - http://allseanpaul.com). Yet I also have perspective in terms of how bands use social media to extend their reach as I am the leader of an independent band.
Bottom line - all of the panelists here have different perspectives on social networks and music content. When we kicked off the panel, Dave Allen, our fearless moderator, wanted us to define what a “social network” actually is (for reference, my colleague Scott Brown provided some guidelines in a previous post). Dave exclaimed that Twitter is not a social network; I felt Dave’s question about the definition was a tad too semantic. Instead I offered that all sites, whether they are true social networks or not, offer bands the chance to find new fans. I blogged about the sites importance previously, and Jeremy Welt echoed their importance earlier in this post.
Video Credit - Matthew M. Gonzales
What else did I say on the panel, and what other takeaways did the panelists have for the audience? Sometimes we get so wrapped up in networking, and talking, we miss all the good points at a conference and forget to take the necessary, exhaustive notes. Fortunately a blogger I’ve never even met before - Ravi Lichtenberg - captured the highlights of our panel, right here in a post.
As I mentioned before, I really have been enjoying using SocialMention.com to search blog posts, tweets, videos and other content. So I went on SocialMention looking for the best of the conference review blog posts from SFMusicTech and I share them below here in the resources section.
CNET.com - San Francisco Music Tech Summit Slideshow:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-10245189-49.html
PBS MediaShit - MusicShift Column by Jason Feinberg - MusicTech Summit Breaks Through Tired Memes of Music Confabs
Fusicology Blog - Review of San Francisco Music Tech Summit:
GigaOM Blog - How the Semantic Web Will Redefine Digital Music (thoughts on the conference):
http://gigaom.com/2009/05/19/at-sfmusictech-the-semantic-web-sneaks-onstage/
Zed Equals Zee Blog - Conference Review
http://zedequalszee.com/2009/05/21/sanfran-musictech-summit-roundup/
Boothism Blog - Conference Review
Content Now Blog - Conference Review
http://contentnow.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/sanfranmusictech-hotel-kabuki-1625-post/
What About the Music? The Music Man!
Yes there was music at the conference! Justin Timberlake has a record label called Tennman Records, and his artist Matt Morris was at SFMusicTech and put on a show (with some funny comments on social media in the song):
Video Credit - Matt Morris / Tennman Records
Posted by Chuck Fishman at 04:15PM PST
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