I have written a bit on the uses of Twitter, including marketing.  Here is a marketing example that uses Twitter and a variety of other social media to promote, Moogis, an Allman Brothers inspired music site where you can see concerts among other things.   I watch too many YouTube videos so this drew my interest. The Moogis web site and the marketing campaign were both implemented by Wyndstorm. I covered Wyndstrom as a software platform on the AppGap, (see Wyndstorm Builds Web Communities In A Variety of Markets) but I want to go into more detail on the social media marketing aspects here.

I spoke with Marian Sabety, the President and CEO at Wyndstorm. Marian said that since social media is still new, many of their clients need help with social media marketing, as well as building social media web sites. So Wyndstorm now provides business strategy and marketing services to go along with their web site construction.  With the Moogis project, they first helped Moogis define their business objectives and target market. The primary goal of the marketing campaign is to expand the number of paid subscribers to the site.

It was likely that many of the Allman Brothers fan base are not avid social media users.  So they reached out through social media to the people who know have a strong reach to this audience such as Twitter followers of Rolling Stone magazine, bloggers and PR people in the music space, message boards in social networks that fit the demographics of an Allman Brothers fan, and the web communities of similar bands. They began Twitter conversations (through twitter/moogis) with 50 people in this space that also included NFL radio stations, TV syndicates and IPTV sites, as well as retail ticket sites. After this Twitter campaign and the other social media efforts, 58% incoming traffic to the Moogis site came from sites where they did not have ads and this is not typical.

They also set up profiles on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo and Flickr, as well as 40 other content channel and social bookmarking sites. See for example (http://myspace.moogis.com and http://facebook.moogis.com). The Twitter and YouTube pages have a significantly lower bounce rate than industry averages (see below for more on YouTube). The bounce rate for the Moogis site itself, at 30% is also below the industry average of 45-55%. The MySpace visitors stay on the site almost 1 minute more than the Moogis site average which at 5 minutes, 31 seconds is already much longer than the industry average of 1:30-2:25.  I think the power of videos and engaging content for their niche audience are drivers here. Also, over 25% of visitors return to the site between 6 and 19 times. The industry average is roughly 1/10th of this.

Wyndstorm also worked with the Allman Brothers band members in releasing some of their music videos for free on YouTube and similar venues, as part of their social video campaign.  So now you can find a stable collection of Allman Brothers videos on YouTube. This is much appreciated. There are many interviews and great live videos including Highway 61 Revisited” Allman Brothers Band w/ Johnny Winter. Just search for Moogis within YouTube and you will find these videos along with Moogis promotions (see Allman Brothers Anthology on YouTube).

Once the Allman Brothers’ Beacon Concert series was underway in March, Wyndstorm drove interest to the site in these same venues with fresh material from the concerts.  The online Marketing foundation that was built in advance enabled the excitement and buzz from the live concert to drive traffic spikes to the site, with conversion rates that ended up exceeding the business plan by over 25%.  This demonstrated the power of laying a strong social media marketing foundation from which to grow.

The Moogis YouTube’s bounce rate is 9% which 40% lower than industry average bounce rates for YouTube. The general YouTube rate is already much lower than averages for other sites. I guess once you see a video you want to see more. I find to hard to just watch one YouTube video and this helps explain the general YouTube low bounce rate, but they have taken it a step farther with the Moogis content.