Day: February 9, 2017

Fan Engagement: Zoe Keating

Carl Setzer

I’ve been a fan of Zoe Keating for years. Besides enjoying her music greatly, I’ve also been very interested in the way she interacts with her fans. She’s used today’s social media landscape exceptionally well to build her brand, and a career as a musician within a very unique niche.

Her main tools for engagement are:

What’s a bit more surprising to me are the tools she doesn’t use. Her YouTube channel is pretty spare, and not recently updated. Considering how much I’ve heard about video being “the” thing, looks like she’s experimented with it and has moved along. Now, if you search for her music there, you’ll find tons of videos, but that’s mostly uploads from fans, interviews and such. Also, her music has been uploaded to Vimeo, but, again, not by her. So, she’s present in the world of video, but not deeply so.

I’m also surprised she doesn’t have any campaigns on Patreon nor on Kickstarter. Now, her music is available on iTunes, Spotify, and many other online services. So she might not feel the need to have these income streams. Other musicians and artists in similar styles and viewpoints use them quite heavily, like Amanda Palmer.

Considering all that, it’s important to look at which of these avenues is the most profitable to her. As the chart below shows (created by the folks at Business Insider), most of her income comes from iTunes, Bandcamp and Amazon.

Graph of Zoe Keating's income sources
A look at Zoe Keating’s income sources

 

* Some thoughts on Fanbridge: I imagine it’s a great tool, and it is competitively priced. But it’s important to point out that Mailchimp is quite a bit cheaper, at least at the start. I also wonder if it interacts with any specialized CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools. That would certainly bump up the value of Fanbridge. Mailchimp plays well with several CRM tools. Also, some of the serious competitors, like Constant Contact or Salesforce have those tools fully baked in. With that, I’m unaware of Zoe using any CRM tools. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t, just don’t see anything.

Lastly, Ms. Keating speaks some to these point in the video below. Worth your while.

 

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Visio & Office Versions – Troubleshooting Fun

Carl Setzer

For some time I’ve been using Visio 2007. It’s worked fine, but it won’t let me import .dwg files (CAD files, if you didn’t know) that have been made recently. So, finally, we buckled down the budget and upgraded to Visio 2016. And, well, things got screwy.

I ended up with this error as I tried to install Vision:

I’ve never dealt with Error Code 30029-39 before. Turns out it was something simple, overlooking a basic issue.

Our version of Office was 2013. Now, I’ve been using Visio 2007 with Office 2013 just fine, no problems. But Office 2016 doesn’t play well with other versions of Office. I should’ve checked Office version compatibility.

So, now I was left with a choice:

  1. Upgrade the rest of Office to 2016 – or –
  2. Find some other way

In the spirit of cheapness, I spent time looking at ways to force Windows 10 to let me have 2 versions of Office. And, well, nope. I did find some ways to use a VM client, like Windows built in Hyper-V, but it started to get to a high butt-pain threshold and I went with option 1).

There are times that being able to get back to work is worth quite a bit.

Web Design Fail Of The Day

Carl Setzer

While researching an error code today, I found a site that documented the issue and posted a solution. However, the site kept popping up a “talk to an agent” nag screen about every 10 seconds. “No” I muttered, “let me read your f****ing website”. After a minute of so of this, I finally closed the site and started looking elsewhere.

Point: don’t make it impossible to interact with your content. Jeez!