Last weekend, my band, Revengers kicked off the release of our new album Scraps on the Badlands (soon to be available on iTunes) with a CD release party, at Hell’s Kitchen, in Tacoma, WA. I’m happy to report that the show was a rousing success. We recouped all of our production costs, and I made enough money to fund my Dawg Bites Smoothie addiction, until the end of the quarter.

Leading up to the release, mounted a local press blitz that included inteviews with the Tacoma News Tribune, The Weekly Volcano, City Arts Magazine, and KCCR. Because our record is self released, all of the advertising and promotional work is our responsibility, which has been quite the learning experience. I am excited by the positive buzz that we seem to be generating. Check it out:

Beat Poetry Dirges – Weekly Volcano

Revengers Strike Back – Tacoma News Tribune

From: MuppetsStudio

RT @equalman ‘When asked about ROI of Social Media sometimes an appropriate response is: What’s the ROI of your phone?’ http://bit.ly/yi5pC

Cheers!

Loyaly Beyond Reason: Michael Arrington and Mark Pincus on Social Gaming and CPA Ads

via: WPN

When TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington posted the first story in a series of articles outlining the questionable lead-gen and subscription practices of social gaming networks, he cued a chorus of righteous indignation, hyperbolic accusations, instantly generated statistics and ad hominem attacks –the sort of thing that reminds you why you fell in love with social media in the first place.

While, I don’t feel qualified to comment on the professionalism of any of the involved parties, I do believe that Micheal’s articles address some of the more macro questions about the monetization of social media. As with previous emerging web-based technologies, there seems to be this wild west mentality surrounding social networking and social gaming in particular. It should come as no surprise that in a burgeoning, lucrative, self-regulated (read: unregulated) industry, we should see a race to the bottom mentality when it comes to getting a slice of the 600 million dollar pie. Arrington points out that, at some point, someone needs to look out for the consumer. If sites like facebook and myspace play loosey-goosey with their policies against unethical lead-gen practices ( like the surreptitious SMS subscriptions) and social gaming companies choose to overlook shady advertisers, a downward trend will continue, at the expense of the consumer.

In spite of the flippant reply of Offerpal CEO, Anu Shukla, it would appear that someone is indeed taking Michael Arrington seriously. In a recent blog post, Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus offered a candid and expeditious response to the TechCrunch articles:

We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers. In fact, the worst offender, tatto media, referenced in the techcrunch article, had already been taken down and permanently banned prior to the post. Nevertheless, we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks. We have also removed all mobile ads until we see any that offer clear user value.

At zynga, we have faced a similar challenge in providing customer support to millions of users of our free games. Six months ago we were overwhelmed with our ticket volumes and faced an F rating with the better business bureau. We made massive efforts to address this, getting our maximum response times for live email and phone support down to 72 hours and raised our rating to a B+. Even today we realize our customer support isn’t at the level our users expect and we continue to work on it.

Read the entire post, here.

I believe that this prompt and frank response demonstrates a tremendous act of good faith on the part of Zynga. I’m sure there are some of a more cynical ilk that will see this as just another instance of corporate spin and I suppose only time will tell  if these multi-million dollar companies are serious about protecting their user-base, or if further oversight and regulation will be necessary to enforce higher standards across the board. I have a feeling the fireworks are not over. Stay tuned!

“I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps, year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.”
-Henry Rollins