Musichype.com has retired

You may have missed the retirement of MusicHype.com at the end of last week. It’s now official and complete.

Please see our blog post “Hello New Horizons” for more details about our decision.

If you have any questions please get in touch: support@appreciationengine.com

Thanks for all your support and happy March!

 …

Hello new horizons

2013 is starting off with new and exciting adventures for our team. Our new service, the Appreciation Engine, is taking off. 

If you visit the Appreciation Engine you’ll notice it looks a little familiar. The engine that sits underneath MusicHype.com has been split off to help businesses & brands create powerful customer profiles based on social activity. 

Unfortunately it’s also a bittersweet time for our team because on February 28th, 2013 MusicHype.com will be closing its doors.

We’re sad to say farewell to our beloved site and customers like you who’ve communicated, loved and rewarded your fans.…

Incentivize Your Fans Without Creating A Spam Machine

Incentivizing fans to take specific steps & actions is a key part of any business, after all we all need to make money. Social media channels now give anyone the power to really dig in & see what their fans are doing, without creating unnecessary social spam.

We’ve worked with bands, labels & management companies over the past three years to run a whole range of campaigns. Based on our experience the most effective and least spammy way to interact with fans is through key social network messaging, and one of least effective can be a “task-based campaign.”

Mission or task-based campaigns usually sit on a stand alone page and show everything the fan needs to do to win the big prize.…

We’re feeling particularly innovative today

It’s such lovely news today, our sister site MusicHype.com is a finalist for the Innovator Awards 2012.

We’re privileged to be up against some very stiff competition in our category. Congratulations to Booktrack, Jumpshift & Smallworlds for being our fellow finalists.

Our core technology, the Appreciation Engine, was born & built in New Zealand, so we couldn’t be prouder of the recognition in our homeland.

Best of luck to everyone in the awards and way to go Kiwis!…

1 Ping Only

Just like the mighty Soviet navy we’ve launched new tech to help you focus on the fans that matter. We’ve called it a PING.

Each week we’ll notify you when a fan has been highly active

We send you an email showing who these fans are and how many points they’ve earnt over the last two weeks. You can use the links in the email to communicate directly with these fans.

Your fan message page filters to your very active fans & lets you communicate via Facebook, Twitter or Email

You use our page to tell your fans via email, Twitter or Facebook:

• thanks!

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We Used Prefinery to Manage our Beta Sign Ups

I’ve gone through beta a number of times, with different companies. It’s always stressful getting ready to launch and figuring out how you’re going to manage & collect beta testers.

This year we discovered the beta system Prefinery. These guys have built a site that handles your beta submissions & management. Yes, we did high-five each other at the MusicHype office – we didn’t have to build our own beta management system on-top of our product.

Prefinery gives you all the customizable forms & emails you need to manage beta testers & invite.…

Fan Drive Winners

Our two big winners of the Fan Drive are Wellington & Archie.

They’ve both won a 6-month free plan on MusicHype, plus they get to give two of their lucky fans a year-long subscription to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer.

And don’t worry we’ll be having another fan drive later on this year.

 …

Don’t pitch your start up – tell a story like Jim Henson

We all get told to practice our elevator pitch and many of us have spent hours on our detailed, yet high-level, 10-slide investor pitch decks (a painful process I know!). After all that you’re armed with those short sentences and a pdf deck, so you can wow Kevin Rose when you accidentally, on-purpose trip over his foot at a conference.

While I agree it’s important to clearly articulate what your business does, I’ve always felt that putting yourself in the “pitcher” mindset is the wrong analogy.…

Many Light-Weight Interactions

 I can’t tell you how often I hear from a band, label or management company they want to:

• sell more albums
• sell more tickets
• get more listens on Spotify

Of course they do. This is what any business needs to survive, money in the door.

The only problem is these goals are what Paul Adams calls “heavy-weight interactions,” and they can’t live in isolation.

Imagine you’re in a record store and you notice a buyer picking up your LP and flipping it over to read the back.…

Beta, Be Gone!

Hurrah, we’re out of Beta.

It’s been a very busy seven weeks for our team: updates, bug tweaks, new features and the odd Friday beer.

It has been a pleasure to work with all 450 members who’ve joined us. Wow – we can’t really believe so many of you joined in.

Every time an artist signed you’d hear Hurrah, Oh Boy, or Yippee uttered at our office. It literally means everything to our business that you’ve all taken the plunge. THANK YOU!…