Rock… No… ReTweet the Vote!
The use of social media during a political campaign has been very well documented over the past couple of years. The Obama campaign and his social media chief, Chris Hughes, broke some huge barriers and set an example for political campaigns going forward.
One of the more recent, highly publicized examples, was San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s announcement of his bid for California Governor via Twitter and then Facebook and YouTube. Like Obama, he is rallying support for his campaign through the main social media outlets online, and even making his followers on those sites the first to know (yet another blow to traditional media!).
But what’s different about the Mayor’s social media efforts, and most likely those of other politicians in the coming years, is that his Facebook and Twitter accounts were not started solely for the purpose of his campaign for governor. Rather, he’s had these accounts for a while and has been building his group of core followers ever since.
Politicians now have the opportunity to start early and gain loyal followers throughout their entire political career through channels that are constantly feeding them information and enabling supporters to interact and be far more engaged than any email list or static website. It’s a build-up over time, a growing froth of political support.
These people can easily become evangelists to their collective group of friends and followers — a massive broadcast channel that did not exist several years ago and may begin to play a much larger role in the outcomes of elections, especially in tech-savvy cities like San Francisco or New York.
And Gavin knows it too. He used his last 6 characters of his 136 character gubernatorial announcement to ask his Twitter followers one simple yet potentially powerful request: “ReTweet.”
How Lala.com Got Me to Buy Music Online
Pirates have been in the news quite a bit recently. From the more traditional Somali pirates to the Pirate Bay trial, I haven’t thought this much about those swashbucklers since the movie “Hook” first came out.
The Pirate Bay trial, which recently returned a guilty verdict, is only the latest in the music industry’s war against music pirates. The litigious RIAA was voted The Consumerist’s “Worst Company of the Year” in 2007, narrowly beating Haliburton. Although this year’s contest is still underway, the RIAA didn’t even make the sweet sixteen – they changed tactics in December of 2008, and now no longer blindly sues individual file sharers (in one case, the RIAA stayed a case for 60 days because the defendant had died and they wanted to give the family time to grieve before proceeding).
The Internet has thrown a rather large monkey wrench into many business models, from the music and movie industry to newspapers and magazines. How do you get people to pay for content when they can just get it for free? For me and music, the answer is Lala.com.
I always found file sharing to be a rather time-consuming, inexact and oft-confusing endeavor. At first, I went through with it anyway because I had a lot of free time, and who wanted to drop $14 on a CD that would have to be ripped on to a computer anyway? When iTunes came along I would buy a song here or there for expediency, but who could afford to build a substantial collection of music at $1 a song? And there was always the issue of listening to my personal music collection on my work computer.
Then, on what I’m sure was a terrifically sunny day, I found Lala.com. Lala is pretty much the perfect compromise, one that pleases both the record labels and the music lovers. Here’s why:
- You can listen to any song (or album) in its entirety once. Feel like listening to the new Neko Case album but don’t want to commit to anything just yet? You got it.
- If you like the Neko Case you can either: buy the Web album for about $.80, or buy the mp3 version for about $7.50.
- You can upload your entire music collection to Lala.com and listen to it from any computer, as long as it has an Internet connection.
- You can be lazy and have Lala make an hour-long Pandora-esque playlist based on your favorite artists.
- And of course, you can do all sorts of social media stuff like follow your Lala friends.
I’ll be frank – Lala has completely changed my relationship with music. Whereas before I would listen to the same tired album over and over, I can now listen to all sorts of music once, and then, if I’m even a little into it, I buy the Web album for $.80. It’s like magic. Legal, sensible, fair magic.