Social Visual Bookmarking Using The Hashtag To Redefine The Fan Relationship

Author Scott Perry, Sperry Media

Editor Antony Bruno, Community Manager, digitalmusic.org

Key Contributors Lee Hammond, Interscope Records Chris Mortimer, Interscope Records Nicole Poulos, Sideways Media Ian C. Rogers, Topspin Media Theda Sandiford, Universal Republic

Contents Introduction ...... 2 What Is A Hashtag? ...... 2 Benefi ts Of Hashtags ...... 3 Redefi ning The Hashtag In The Fan Relationship World ...... 4 2012: Year Of The Visual Web ...... 4 Repurposing, And The Future ...... 5 What We Need Moving Forward ...... 6-7 In Conclusion -- The Big Future ...... 8

Hashtag Promotion Examples Twitter Chats/Twinterviews ...... 3 Voting ...... 5 Hashtag Unlocks ...... 6 Retweet Promotions ...... 7 Showcase Fans’ Pics ...... 7 Simple Prizes...... 8 Bigger Prizes ...... 8 INTRODUCTION

Over the years, the relationship between the fan and the artist has been getting closer and closer. Fan mail evolved into email. MySpace and Facebook have enabled artists to enter fans’ everyday lives. Twitter has be- come a direct chat line between the artist and fan. Visual platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram have given artists a means to express their art without typing a word. YouTube enables fans not only to view their favorite videos, but also to emulate their heroes and post covers of their favorite songs. Even so, there has always been a wall between the artist and the creator. But bit by bit, that wall is coming down as artists are starting to incorporate fan art into their own work. Sure, other forms of media have been used, we’ve seen fan fi ction extend the life of a property, and asking for fans to submit their work for contests has been a long-running practice. But thanks to social media, the friction around the submission process has disappeared, so that fan contributions are more easily integrated into the artist’s work. This not only draws fans deeper into the collaborative process, but also creates incredible promotional and revenue opportunities for the coming years. This paper examines the current forms of fan/artist communication on existing social platforms, highlights best practices, and off ers suggestions to make future iterations of fan/artist collaboration smoother and more profi t- able, all through the lens of one component tying these various capabilities together—the hashtag. WHAT IS A HASHTAG?

A hashtag is simply a short-text code preceded by a # (pound sign), such as #biebertour or #mybestmemory. It’s a way of adding a unifi ed subject identifi er to a post of any sort that can be shared by any user posting thoughts or content under the same topic. This not only makes for easy search on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, but also aff ects Twitter’s Trending Topics chart, which adjusts in real time. Hashtags are used primarily on Twitter and Instagram, and as such, much of this paper will focus on use-case studies built on these platforms. However, other platforms may adopt hashtags as a means of curating content by subject over time and should not be ignored. For instance, Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, WordPress, and YouTube all support the hashtag concept, but do not require the “#” symbol. Currently, adding a hashtag to a Facebook post accomplishes nothing signifi cant, and as a result, search on Facebook yields extremely limited relevant responses.

ABOUT TWITTER'S TRENDS

THE HELP CENTER IS A GREAT RESOURCE FOR LEARNING MORE ABOUT TWITTER’S TRENDS: FAQS https://support.twitter.com/articles/101125-about-trends#

Page 2 BENEFITS OF HASHTAGS

Because most Twitter and Instagram users’ accounts are not private, these platforms act like megaphones, which has major implications when it comes to social search. Since the dawn of Twitter, the hashtag has been used to curate conversations, host pop-up contests, and to game the Trending Topics charts on Twitter. Not only does a fan’s post reach their immediate peer group, but also their posts are easily searchable by strangers who share similar tastes. That has been great for constant, almost daily contact with fans, whether to keep awareness alive for a new single, an upcoming tour, a new album release, or just a silly term that gets people talking about something funny. Say for instance a conference organizer wants attendees to share ideas from a panel titled “The Future of the Visual Web.” Simply creating the hashtag “#visualweb” not only allows attendees to post notes from inside the room, but also allows people outside the room to learn and even ask questions using the same hashtag in response. Same goes for concerts. Bands have been using hashtags to curate song requests or post tweets live on their screens for years. The next step is to encourage fans to tag photos taken at shows as well, so these shots can be viewed in a wider arena and used long after the show is done. As the communication circle between the artist and the fan becomes more of a feedback loop, we as an industry need to fi gure out how to best monitor, measure, curate, and repurpose this content for greater purpose down the road. In order to get there, it is important to start thinking of hashtags not just as short-term trending tools, but as a means of curating text and visual comments over a longer period of time, in order to recognize, reward, or re- purpose content. We have all been contributing to the social web en masse for nearly 10 years -- and yet, social search is still largely a manual process, in which you literally have to scroll through friends’ albums to fi nd the pictures you want. As of January 2013, search on Facebook has been extremely limited (ever tried to search for friends’ pics from last night’s Muse concert?), but the widespread launch of Facebook Graph Search will change that, even though its fi rst iteration is desktop-only. For a preview, go to http://tnw.co/11mJYme. Until mobile devices are enabled with smart-tagging technology, we need to encourage fans to manually tag still and moving images with hashtags -- not only to empower fans to promote artists’ endeavors, but also to have a way to curate content that can be repurposed for future use. We as an industry need to encourage fans to post content with the proper hashtag, as well as rethink the role of the hashtag as a long-term archiving tool. And companies within the entertainment industry ecosystem need to build tools to enable the monitoring, measure- ment, and collection of tagged content.

HASHTAG PROMOTION EXAMPLE 1

TWITTER CHATS/TWINTERVIEWS Owl City: ran six weekly hour-long chats in advance of the album ‘The Midsummer Station,’ tagged #OCTMS REDEFINING THE HASHTAG IN THE FAN RELATIONSHIP WORLD

If you wanted to post a picture or a text as part of a larger community, would you even know what hashtag to use? Is the tagged content you post part of a short-term topic or a long-term promotion? How many hashtag campaigns have you noticed that had any long-term relevance? And if you do post a text or a picture to a social network, what rights are assigned to ownership, compensation, or the reuse of that content? These are just a few of the reasons why the hashtag must step into prominence not just as a promotional tool, but also as a means of indexing content for social search and curation of content to repurpose it for artistic, pro- motional, and commercial purposes. 2012: THE YEAR OF THE VISUAL WEB

Last year marked the emergence of the concept of the “Visual Web.”

Hardware: • Tablets and smartphones began leading us towards a keyboard-less society, in which we tap on screens instead of keys to type out messages. • Tablets have high-quality retina displays, allowing high-res photos and video to be viewed in rich detail. • Smartphones are replacing digital cameras in the entry level market, with sales among the leading cam- era manufacturers down 10% in 2012 alone. (source: Velositer) Services: • Facebook, the world’s No. 1 repository for images (storing 240 billion photos, adding 350 million DAILY), adjusted their Timeline layout to accommodate larger image previews, and now offers a sync service that lets you seamlessly upload all your mobile photos to their platform. • Instagram—which Facebook acquired in April 2012—reached 100 million users as of November 2012, all without a fully-realized web browser-based viewing experience. (Think about that—in less than two years, nearly 100 million people registered to use a photo-sharing service used almost exclusively on a mobile phone). • Twitter, which has over 500 million total and 200 million active monthly users, evolved into a more image-based platform, with more than 35% of posts now including an attached image. • Pinterest, which is largely built around users “pinning” images to their virtual boards, rocketed to become the third largest social network in the U.S. (fourth if you include Google+) But for all these steps in a very exciting revolution, there seems to be a few items missing: • Full-scale search functionality • Sharper sortability/organization • Permanence • Clearly-defined terms of use

Page 4 REPURPOSING & THE FUTURE

The next level of hashtag campaigns involves taking content created by users and repurpos- ing it for promotional and commercial use. For HASHTAG PROMOTION EXAMPLE 2 instance: taking fan photos and incorporating them into album art, or using fan avatars to VOTING build a collaged image reveal. Some artists, Have fans tweet #team1 or #team2 and measure like Alicia Keys, are even taking fan images the number of tweets for a fun short-term competi- and incorporating them into music videos. See this video that Keys made from Instagram tion. For example, HBO encouraged fans to decide pics tagged #AKnewday; Ellie Goulding made a character’s fate by voting #killbill or #savebill via a lyric video comprised of fan pictures. Twitter. This says to the fan, “I see you. I get you. Thank you for sharing your art with me, now let me share your art with the rest of the world.” And since most fans own camera-en- abled communications devices, participation levels for photo-based promotions are much higher than a remix contest or a video cre- ation contest. This may increase as the tools to produce videos become easier and more prevalent (keep an eye on Twitter’s recently launched Vine app), but for now, participa- tion levels on still-image contests dwarf the number of entries yielded for video-image contests. A recent one-day Southwest Airlines / Viddy video promotion yielded a couple dozen entries, whereas the Alicia Keys still-image promotion yielded over 17,000 entries in a single month. Imagine collecting all the images from a tour, and building a souvenir program or recap video with fan-shot im- ages, thanking every fan by including their username in the credits of a DVD or movie, or having a slideshow on your site that shows fan-shot pictures from each stop of the tour (or having fans make videos for you, using pictures provided by other fans.) This kind of interaction gives fans a reason to constantly come back, because suddenly, they are part of the creation process.

Page 5 WHAT WE NEED MOVING FORWARD

For hashtag use to reach its potential, several tools and areas of cooperation are necessary. They include: • Rules, regulations and standards to protect the rights of the entrant and the entity reusing the images. • Dashboards that allow artists to pull photos from Instagram and Twitter marked with a particular hashtag, so that those photos can be displayed on the artist’s website, with a manual override so that off ending content can be prevented from showing up in the stream. • Ticketing agencies need to build an extra fi eld for promoters and managers to add a (maximum) 15-char- acter hashtag to each ticket and printout to prompt acts to think about how they name, promote and curate their tour/event. • Replace the concert “Photography is prohibited” mentality with the following: “By entering this event, ticket holder grants (promoter / venue / manager / label / artist) the right to reuse any audio / video / still imagery taken during this event for promotional and / or commercial purposes across all future forms of media in perpetuity.” • Social platforms must build archiving capabilities for users to easily fi nd and archive posts from the previ- ous months and years. For instance, Facebook needs to improve its search features (done, although Social Graph was not in wide release for review as of this writing), Twitter should add a long-term archive search, and Instagram could use a stronger browser-based viewing/search tool. • A hashtag registration service and database that collects registered hashtags, so that hashtags and any affi liated metadata can autocomplete based on time/space variables and the potential for opt-in meta- data autotagging services. • Metrics analysis and charts, such as: • Hourly, 12-, and 24-hour trends • One-, fi ve-, 30-, and 90-day trends • Geographic trends, such as post counts and eff ective reach measurement, retweet tracking, like/stars/pins measurement, reply counts, sentiment analysis, etc.

HASHTAG PROMOTIONS EXAMPLE 3

HASHTAG UNLOCKS Use hashtags to unlock content by encouraging fans to tweet a hashtag, then reward them by making unique content available to all when the number of tagged posts reaches a certain thresh- old.

St. Vincent unlocked album tracks when enough fans tweeted the term #strangemercy.

Page 6 The full potential of the visual web using hashtags as its organizing principle won’t be realized until the above steps are met. The long-term goal is the creation of a database for smart-tagging in future devices so that contextual metadata associated with an event is automatically attached to every post. A number of technology companies are working on tools that help us identify image-based content based on variables (Google Goggles and a number of augmented reality tools immediately come to mind). Time/place and geolocation are already a given, yet so many other variables can be added to the metadata associated with an image: movement speed, decibel level, venue, event calendar, temperature, author info, recommended tags based on surrounding posts/ social posts/photographers’ posts, autocomplete, etc.

HASHTAG PROMOTIONS

EXAMPLE 4 EXAMPLE 5 RETWEET PROMOTIONS SHOWCASE FANS’ PICS Recognize fans’ contributions by replying to Animal Liberation Orchestra recently show- or retweeting select tweets. A text or picture cased fan photos tagged #ALOtour on their is enough of a reward. Trey Songz recently Facebook page by using the tool Gramfeed. encouraged fans to post their #triggaface, then re-followed and retweeted his favorite pictures among his 5 million followers.

Page 7 HASHTAG PROMOTIONS

EXAMPLE 6 EXAMPLE 7 BIGGER PRIZES SIMPLE PRIZES Jason Mraz fl ew 25 winners to an event To promote the fi rst single from the album in New York City and gave them each a ‘#willpower’ (note that the hashtag is incor- signed canvas version of the photo submit- porated into the actual title), Will.i.am gave ted to Instagram for each entrant’s interpre- away 10 signed InstaCanvas prints to en- tation of his single, tagged #iwontgiveup. trants who posted pics marked #thisislove.

IN CONCLUSION -- THE BIG FUTURE

All the points discussed throughout the paper are carrots that creators can dangle in order to encourage fans and participants to manually tag images. But all of this is just a small piece of a very large puzzle that big data companies should be addressing as we build out a semantic web that marries computer learning with human input, with a dash of Wikipedia-style editing. Google has come a long way from indexing what was once a million diff erent destinations, helping us fi nd ex- actly what site we were looking for in fractions of a second. And now we are at the beginning stages of tagging each individual’s own contribution to not just the web, but a worldwide database of life itself. The tiny steps we take to improve our own eff orts within our own tiny industry go a long way towards building and defi ning much bigger social vista indexing initiatives. As recognition tools come into play, how this metadata can be used by myriad technologies and machines (social sharing, ad-serving, etc.) must be considered in the years to come.

Page 8