The small labels are not happy with Spotify’s payment. Spotify pays 3 euros for 1000 album listenings. This according to Sakara Records is not nearly enough to support the bands. The representative of Sakara Records Label, which produces Finnish metal music, such as Mokoma and Stam1na, said that if people stop buying their records they’re going to have to stop making music regardless of the Spotify income, for which he used the word sad. He added on the Mokoma Facebook page comments that they can think of cheaper hobbies.

Would be interesting to know if all labels have similar payout schemes.

via Arctic Startup

Cost (Facebook 1 – Twitter 0)

Twitter and Facebook are the two most talked about marketing channels for brands in social media, but which one is better? Before I go to the quick & dirty analysis I did, I thought I’d give you the result: Facebook Page is about hundred times better marketing channel than Twitter channel (86 times to be more unscientifically exact). So there, the people who are too busy to read more than 140 characters can go back to Twitter.

To begin, how would you go about estimating the effectiveness of a marketing channel? Cost, reach, and effectiveness came to my mind first, so I used those. To make things simple, lets look at Facebook page and Twitter channel only, and forget the advertising formats Facebook has and Twitter hasn’t.

Both channels, the Facebook page and the Twitter channel, are often considered to be free; anyone can set up one without paying an other. However, someone has to update them, and therefore the real cost comes from the time spent by an employee or a designated agency working on the content. According to the social media gurus and their mantras Twitter account has to be updated very frequently in order to be considered good, Facebook page on the other hand needs to be updated more seldomly e.g. weekly. Thus, Facebook page must be cheaper to manage.

Reach (Facebook 86 – Twitter 0)

This is where things get interesting. Twitter has been the favorite topic of the who’s-whos of the social media marketing for a good two years, and it seems that Facebook hasn’t been at all as trendy. But, not surprisingly, when you look at the popularity of the brand channels the numbers are rude: Facebook stomps Twitter when it comes to branded channels follower amounts. Interestingly, however, profiles of (famous) people more popular on Twitter than Facebook.

Examples of fan vs. follower amounts:

Red Bull        1,562,380 vs. 21,210
Nokia              699,890 vs. 10,610
Nike             1,654,092 vs. 26,890
Apple            1,400,187 vs. couldn’t find an official Twitter channel (?)

Someone might whine about the niche nature of Twitter and how brands like Nike have more channels on Twitter than on Facebook, but this is wrong, there are many channels on Facebook as well. Furthermore, most of these niche Twitter channels lose numbers – as an example Nike Football on Twitter has 1954 followers, which can’t even be compared to Nike Football Türkiye which has 134,780 fans, let alone Nike Football global.

Best brand-channels on Twitter (non-media channels)

NBA                   1.5 million  (45th out of all twitter accounts)
Woot.com          1.4 million  (55th)
JetBlue              1.3 million  (71th)
Dell Outlet          1.3 million  (80th)
Threadless         1.3 million  (89th)
NFL                   1.2 million  (104th)

Best brand-channels on Facebook (non-pizza channels)

Starbucks             4.5 million (9th out of all Facebook pages)
Coca-Cola             3.7 million (13th)
Nutella                  3.3 million (16th)
Pringles                 2.7 million (20th)
Kinder                   2.6 million (25th)
Ferrero Rocher      2.4 million

Brand channels on Twitter have, very unscientifically questimated, 0.0148 times the followers of similar Facebook channels. Only the geekiest of brands such as Mashable and Techcrunch have found considerably more audience from Twitter.

Effectiveness (tie)

Estimating effectiveness of the marketing channels is tricky, since we don’t know for what reason the channels have been created, but in all simplicity if used in marketing the purpose can’t be very far from acquiring traffic or selling products. In acquiring upstream traffic, Twitter users seem to be in a browsing mode and are more likely to click links, but the sheer amount of Facebook fans might at the end drive more traffic. When selling products, Twitter has proven, at least in two cases (Twoot.com and Dell) to a concrete source for sales, and due to the lack of further statistics I’d say effectiveness is a tie.

All-in-all, it seems that Twitter works for people – the Ashtons of the world – better and Facebook for brands.

The guys at W.Steinmann challenged some small/medium sized Finnish ad agencies with blogs to reveal their statistics, and to our delight most agencies did. Here’s a compilation of the stats as well as my blog’s traffic details. There’s a striking similarity to the graphs, the similar “growth” can be explained by the temporary slump professional blogs have in readership over the summer and the volume of traffic may be indicative of the size of the pond in Finland. The bigger traffic volume on my blog must be direct result of the language difference and the resulting Google traffic, since it can’t be content related – I’ve been lazy lately and used Twitter instead of writing as good blog posts as, for example, Panu at maailmamuuttuu.fi.

I’d be happy to see more agencies sharing stats, media agencies welcome as well – Dagmar?

W.Steinmann:

Barabra:

Työmaa:

Avalon:

This Blog:

Couldn’t get the same view from WordPress.com, but here’s a weekly view. In the last quarter I had 13769 visits.

I’d like to introduce two fashion sites that are great testaments for full video sites. These sites don’t require 3 minute loading times and are very functional despite the good looking full screen audio visual content.

Uniqlo has done great websites before, and doesn’t disappoint  with their latest site either, in fact, it raises the bar to new heights. Their Tokyo 2009 collection site presents an interactive catwalk where, at first, you see all models walking and then you can pick individual models for a closer look. Brilliant!

Guðrun & Guðrun is a fashion label owned by two Faroese women, and this isolated location plays a role in both videos that roll on the background of the site. The two videos start randomly on the starting page, and for a more impressive experience, click refresh until you get the airplane hangar video. (via Roope Ruotsalainen/Dagmarin Aamusemma)

Every brand marketer should take notice on how to create inspiring sites, and not mere product catalogues.

Btw, if you’re interested in fashion and the social web @jonikukkohovi tweeted about an article listing social sites fashionistas should be aware of.

Simple, funny, and the product is in a key role. Great.

A worldwide trend of teens increasingly spending their time with games and internet instead of books, is very much true in Finland as well.  Thus, we were glad to plan a campaign for WSOY to promote reading in a cool way for the teens. The idea behind the campaign was to give away one thousand books in a nation wide treasure hunt. We planted 200 stickers (actually ADDLife did the guerilla activities) that had a SMS voucher activation to win 5 books per sticker.

The competition started on Saturday and most of the stickers have been found, but at the time of the writing of this post, there are still some book prizes waiting to be found, so if you know your way around Finnish cities check out the picture clues on the website.

Apparently Nokia ups the ante! Inside a week Nokia has informed us about the Nokia Booklet 3G and Nokia Money, but only today we’re seeing something possibly game-changing. Nokia N900 – with a new Linux based Maemo operation system and Mozilla browser. Nokia is back! And, thank god, with no Symbian.

Maemo operating system looks very promising and the friends who have tried the N900 tell that it actually looks, operates and feels good. See features: meamo.nokia.com.

Nokia N900, I want one. Here’s all the specs.

My man Jussi shows you the features, like panorama desktop etc.

Unilever has dropped Lowe London, who has been in charge of their Peperami account for the last 16 years, to hand the creative responsibility to people. Unilever is putting up a contest to create the next Peperami campaign at the ideabounty.com site, which is a community of freelance creative professionals. Unilever’s contest is open to everyone. The winner will receive $ 10 000 and the chance to participate in creating a global campaign.

Interestingly they say its not a one-off experiment, but crowdsourcing will replace the advertising agencies. Matt Burgess, who is among other things, responsible for Peperami brand, said that this is not a temporary solution but Unilever intends to pitch the future advertising campaigns in the same way. There is no plan to replace with the Lowe London office with a new ad agency in the future. - At this stage, however, we have no plans to use the same strategy in other brands. We must first see how this works, “said Matt Burgess.

[via Resume]

Nokia today announced the Windows based Nokia Booklet 3G, a mini-laptop device. Features: a 12 hour battery life, 3G/HSDPA and WiFi connectivity, HDMI port (for HD video out), 10″ glass HD-ready display and integrated A-GPS. The Nokia Booklet weighs in at 1.2 kilograms and is 19.9 mm thick. Market availability and pricing information will be announced at Nokia World next week.

Honestly, the aluminum chassis looks very good. Here – see for yourself in HD.