very brief tonight:
our music contest page is FINALLY live!
http://lightninginabottle.org/contest
thank you to the undaunted mr. shaw for getting it to work.
[LIB07] what the hell is a strategy, anyway? #2
i’d like to say a few words about how horrifyingly, dismayingly, pitifully, AWFUL our purchase page is. we didn’t design it. it’s what our ticketing company is making us use, and we can’t change it and it’s totally driving me crazy!
yeah, THANKS, inticketing!
yeah, i know you’re green, and use soy-based ink, and recycled materials, and that’s all great, but…what are you thinking with your web services?
check it out:
THIS is our website that the Do LaB designed:
THIS is our purchase page from inticketing:
…..i think i might cry.
like are you kidding me? who okayed THAT from an experience design standpoint, huh?
yes, dear, customer, you’ve come this far with us. we have reminded you of how awesome LIB was last year, we have managed to convey some hint of the kind of crazymagic experience that awaits you this year, and just at the point where you are really ready to make the commitment to join us on the LIB adventure, the point at which, you are essentially trying the ticket on in the dressing room, asking us, “what do you think? does this look good on me?” what does inticketing do?
oh, it throws the lamest looking webpage with a whole lot of T+C bullshit at you.
well, you know….. those tickets do kind of make your butt look sort of big.
oh… this is making me so frustrated, i’m considering just getting our programmer to hack the freakin‘ thing. at least put some pictures on it, for god’s sake! move the T+C crap BELOW the credit card info part. or, better yet, just keep the “i agree” checkbox, and say “click here for terms and conditions.”
bad experience design is bad customer service, inticketing!
from the standpoint of an experience creation company, this makes me feel like we’re actually MISTREATING our potential attendees.
like, no, really, our event is WAY better than this lame purchasing experience.
we promise!
sigh… anyway…
miraculously, even in spite of all of that, tickets are starting to pick up this week. in the past three days alone we’ve acquired guests from utah, ohio, and texas! we probably have about 15 states represented at this point. including hawaii, oregon, colorado, new york, and my home state, massachusettss—woot!
the word is definitely getting out there.
[LIB07] what the hell is a strategy, anyway? #1
people keep asking me what i’m up to these days. people that don’t know that my life has been completely taken over by Lightning in a Bottle. and i try to explain something about how there’s this 3-day greeen music festival, and how i’m directing the whole marketing strategy for it, and how that involves managing everything from our email communications, website updates, street promotions, pr efforts, and to all kinds of other initiatives… but the truth is that when you’re so in the thick of it, it’s really hard to step back and gain enough perspective to really be able to articualte ANYTHING that you’re doing. it’s hard to comment on the state of the battle from the trenches.
so it’s dawned on me that i should have started this months ago. but what the hell, 4.5 weeks out is better than not at all, right?
at this point there’s new moves happening fast and furious, and i figured this could be a good place to document the LIB07 marketing & communications strategy process. it’s also the process through which a grassroots organization is transitioning from the underground to the spotlight, elevating both its community of fans and network of creators with it.
here’s what’s happened within the past few days in the land of LIB promotions:
– LIB + worldchanging = : worldchanging is an online hub that aims to connect innovative, forward-thinking people who are doing things now to create profound, positive change for a better future. i thought they were great even before that fortuitous introduction to alex steffen at sxsw that resulted in this great little piece. turns out worldchanging digs us too: we’re now officially the “coachella for environmentalists”! awesome!
– what lucent dossier really wants to know is… : met with dream this weekend about really kick-starting community interaction among lucent’s 16,000+ myspace friends. we’re so excited by all the great response we’ve gotten already that we’re planning to continue stirring up conversation among that community on a very regular basis leading up to LIB. (taking cues from gnarls barkley on this one, for sure. 😉 )
– the santa barbara news press, which did an article on LIB last year wants to know what’s new about LIB this year. they’re saying that unless there’s something drastically new it probably won’t warrant extensive coverage. so what do you say to that when you know that the santa barbara community digs us hardcore for what we are, not for any gimmick we might be doing differently?
i say:
“last year it was the first time we’d ever done an event in s.b. we have a devoted following in l.a. but we had no idea how people there would react to it. whether they’d even care. the response we got from the people there was really overwhelming. we kept hearing over and over how excited they were that we had brought an event like this to santa barbara. people really loved this festival.
so the big difference is that while last year our venture into s.b. was somewhat of an experiment, the genuine enthusiasm for LIB within the santa barbara community (the same community where “earth day” originated) is what’s giving us the support to bring LIB back on a larger scale in all areas in 07.”
– “hi, i’m an awesome video of Lucent L’amour that no one’s seen before”:
david starfire, one our mainstay event djs, and on the lineup for LIB, turned us on to this really great video of an event we did in february 2006 (yeah, that’s how long it takes us to catch up here, at the Do!) anyway, we contacted the creator, and are considering using this video in the Spring issue of the Do LaB Artist Network email blast, which is going to be all about videos, especially music videos. he says he’s got footage from LIB06 as well, maybe we can find some way of convincing him to edit that too…- lots of other bits and ends going on, and in the works, including that ad in Plenty Magazine, now on newsstands, gonna be getting some coverage from bijoubreaks.com, the San Luis Obispo New Times is gonna be doing an interview with some our crew–jesse, dream, and shena, i think. brian shaw is hopefully programming our music contest as i type, i think…brian? are you? will we be able to announce it to the bands that sent in submissions soon? ….
and then there is, of course the constant construction and preparations going on for another little festival called Coachella where the Do will be producing an acre-big installation with full performance stage and sound-system just two weeks before LIB…. so that’s going to be madness….
i think this is all i can think of for right now…. not sure how often i’ll be making these “what the hell is a strategy?” posts, but i’m positive it’s a good idea that i started.
Lightning in a Bottle 2007
It’s the beginning of April, and The Do LaB has been in production on our Spring festival, Lighting in a Bottle for over two months now. I realized about a month ago how huge an oversight it was that I hadn’t written a single word about LIB here, and this is the first moment that I’ve been able to steal 15 minutes away to give this amazing, overwhelming, inspiring project a little mention.
So what’s the big deal about Lightning in a Bottle? Well, in addition to the 40+ musical acts on 3 stages spanning 40 acres of Santa Barbara forest ground, the whole to do is being powered almost entirely by solar, or otherwise renewable energy, and incorporating green production practices from top to bottom.
Having worked with major music festivals like Coachella and Vegoose through the Do LaB for years, we witnessed the massive amounts of waste these events generate. There’s something about crunching over an entire polo field of plastic water bottles at 12:30 am on Coachella Saturday and realizing that after the bulldozers come in to shove it all off to a landfill, the whole thing would repeat the next night, that really fills you with a bottomless dread for the future of the world.
So when it came time for the Do LaB to create our own festival, we knew we had to do it differently. With LIB we are setting out to not only produce an unforgettable experience, but to create a model for sustainable large-scale live entertainment.
My role on this team is directing the full LIB marketing campaign, which incorporates everything from structuring the communications strategy with our community, to sponsorship and press, and back to all manner of word-of-mouth building initiatives–for an organization that built its reputation in the underground, word of mouth is still what drives our events–and stirring all the ingredients together in the magic marketing cauldron to produce a strategy that optimizes each of its various components.
That’s where my head is at these days in an all-consuming kind of way. I am loving the team we’ve got at the Do LaB, I am loving the process and our creation. And I’m loving the work. Which is a very good thing, since there is a ton of it!
OK. Time’s up…. Back to work.
Passion for Interaction
For a Marketer who doesn’t identify as a Geek, going to SXSW Interactive is pretty similar to getting sucked into a passing acquaintance’s personal blog. It’s full of curious information, titillating details, and makes you feel an undeniably voyeuristic amusement in the certainty that the author wasn’t really prepared for you to be reading any of it quite so out of the context within which it was written.
This may sound like a sort of far-fetched analogy at first. After all, half the premise for interactive media is exposure. You’d expect those most deeply involved in its development would be aware that their industry isn’t a filtered post. And you’d be quite surprised at what you’d inadvertently discover.
– – –
SXSW is a conglomeration of festivals. There’s the Music one, which everyone knows. There’s the Film one, which heard that music was throwing a party while its parents were out of town and showed up too. And then there’s interactive. The little orange kid on the right, waving his hand, going, “Hey! Me too!”
People get really passionate about movies, and people get really hardcore passionate about music, but “Interactive” refers to a kind of tool that enables a process. For most people, it’s not the tool or the process of Interactive that gets them all hot and bothered. It’s the experience!
And yet it’s the experience of interactive that seemed to go almost unnoticed at SXSW-Interactive. Your favorite movie is not a choose-your-own-adventure, and your favorite band is not going to let you sit in on gigs. Interactive holds the promise of precisely that kind of meaningful, resonating, participatory experience you’re craving with all that has previously been inaccessible, but all it wants to talk about is the application.
At the event’s opening remarks speech, the audience was split up into key populations. First the designers in the room were asked to stand up. Then they sat down and the programmers were asked to represent for their team. Next, the “money people” were asked to stand. They got to stand up for longer than the other two groups so that everyone could remember who they are better.
And that was it.
That’s apparently all there is to interactivity. There’s the design of the tool, there’s the development of the tool, there’s the funding of the tool, of course, but as far as an understanding of the people who use the tool and the impact of how they’re using it and what they’re using it for–what would that have to do with a conference about interactivity?
It’s kind of like a camera festival with movies thrown in for bullet points. Or an amp festival with rock and roll as a liner-note afterthought. I mean, hey–there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting excited about cameras and amps, but if you were actually interested in creating an opportunity for a lot of forward-thinking, curious, innovative individuals to converge (“convergence” is the new “2.0”), wouldn’t it make sense to develop the focus of this meeting ground into more than just about… uh… equipment?
You don’t need to be a filmmaker or a musician to appreciate movies and music. Why should you be expected to be a technologist to appreciate interactive media?
Ok, ok, you get it. Fine. Enough bashing Interactive for missing the point while busily staring into the source code of its navel. There’s another culprit here as well that’s just as guilty.
That’s right, Marketing, I’m talking to you!
Watching the panelists on “How to Build an Online Fanbase” describe their personal discoveries of promotional strategies as if they had individually invented the wheel of marketing, it was difficult not to feel frustrated by the evident segregation keeping the two industries apart.
John Batelle, of Federated Media, hit the nail on the head during the panel on “Why Marketers Need Conversational Media,” when he said, “Marketers are scared of not being in control.” Considering that this interactive tool and the process it enables seem to accomplish something that is completely anathema to the industry that invented “Spin Control,” of course Marketing would be reluctant to play nice with Interactive.
Well….Deal with it, Marketing. Interactive’s not going away, so why don’t you go and hang out with it? Maybe go check out a festival or something. Get drunk together on free booze, and make out with it in some dark corner of a crowded club. Might even be fun!
And that way maybe next year Interactive will even consider asking the marketers to stand after the “money people” sit down.