Archive for the ‘Bloggers’ Category

Client Launch: TuneUp intros killer iTunes Companion

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

The music lovers at TuneUp Media, a client based here in San Francisco, launched their iTunes Companion software today. Here’s an overview of what they are doing:

What’s the one problem most people have with their digital music collections? They’re msesy, err… messy. They’re missing albums, artists, or track names (Track01 ring a bell?). For most of us, this is something we tolerate because we don’t have the time to fix songs one by one, and previous tools are too complicated or ineffective to bother with.

TuneUp Cleaning MusicIntroducing the new TuneUp Companion for iTunes. TuneUp plugs into your music collection and automatically fixes your mislabeled song information. It takes the audio “fingerprint” of a song, compares it to over 90 million songs in the Gracenote database, and fills in the missing info. No more “Track 01’s”. No more Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, and TheStones. No more headaches looking for music on your iPod or iPhone. We like to say, “It’s your music’s new best friend.”

TuneUp also automatically finds missing cover art for your albums and lets you pick from up to 4 options so if you really want that import cover, you got it. You can even save all of the album covers at once with a handy “Save All” button.

So you’ve cleaned your music, found your cover art, what’s next? TuneUp integrates seamlessly beside iTunes to present the web’s best content in the “Now Playing” tab. Every time you hit play, TuneUp searches the web to provide music videos from YouTube, merchandise from eBay, song/album recommendations from Amazon, and news from Google for the artist and song you’re playing.

Additionally TuneUp lets you know when artists in your collection are coming to town with a “Concerts” tab. Even better, they pull information from both national and local sources so you won’t miss the next Justice concert, or the next show from local artist Sean Hayes.

TuneUp has something for everyone, and you can try cleaning your first 500 songs for free at www.tuneupmedia.com.

Useful links:

Coverage so far (will be updated throughout the day):

Posted in Bloggers, Clients, Marketing, Press, Social Media | No Comments »

Hey bloggers, tell us how to pitch you!

Friday, May 9th, 2008

Over the past few years as “the blogosphere” has grown and evolved, we’ve seen many bloggers move from “desperate to get attention” to “so ridiculously swamped they can’t take pitches anymore”.  Tom Foremski and Scoble both tried a Facebook-only pitch mode for a while (neither lasted), Marshall Kirkpatrick recommends RSS pitches (read Matt Craven’s thoughts and our own response here) and Mashable has their “what not to do” list as well.  This is all part of dealing with new media technologies and PR, which are generally at inherent conflicts with each other.

Until extremely recently, PR was mostly about using lists of press and blasting them with updates.  Relationships were always key, but the system of Draft Release, Create Embargo, Blast tended to work pretty well.  Today, it’s clearly not that easy.  There is so much noise out there it’s almost impossible to distinguish yourself, even when you have interesting news (hence my post on positioning).  Relationships are more important than ever, and doing The Blast is more likely to backfire than it is to independently generate widespread awareness.  But the blame for all this should not just be aimed at the PR firms, I believe bloggers and journalists have some responsibility for the quagmire as well.

Most blogs have some form of “contact us” or “send us news” page or email address readily available.  The reality is those emails tend to get put into the lowest priority bins, if not ignored altogether.  And that’s hardly fair.  In my opinion a news organization, be it an individual blogger or a mega publication, has the duty to receive incoming pitches from anyone.  But they also retain the right on their preference of the nature, content, and style of those pitches.

In addition to some of the examples above, I believe Stowe Boyd’s request for “being twitpitched” is an excellent way to step up to the table.  He labeled the post “how to pitch me” on his blog, and as a result, anyone who wants to pitch him now has a simple and straightforward mechanism to do so.  In order to practice what I’m preaching, on my LIVEdigitally blog I just wrote a “How To Pitch Us” page, and added it to my primary navigation links.  I hope to see many other bloggers follow this type of a path, as its so easy to complain about the noise yet IMHO equally easy to do something about it.

Posted in Bloggers, Blogging, Outreach, Press | 7 Comments »