As many readers may know, yesterday (Thursday, March 22) was the day that the "Bum Rush The Charts" campaign was trying to get an independent song up into the iTunes Top 10.
It didn't work... at least in North America according to the latest info in iTunes.
At least, the song didn't make it up into the Top 10. Right now, iTunes shows me that the song is still at #67 on the US "Rock" list of top songs, which is where it was before I went to bed about 6 hours ago. Which isn't to say the campaign was a failure, because it actually achieved a great amount. But it didn't hit the stated goal of landing in the Top 10 in the US iTunes list.
Christopher Penn, one of the primary publicists of the campaign, has already written some excellent reflections about the relative success failure of the campaign and how it could have been done differently. I think they are actually great thoughts in general about "campaigns" that involve social media. I would, though, add two more points of my own:
1. Consider the name of the campaign
Maybe it's an age thing, but I found a lot of people (including myself, initially) were rather clueless about what the term "Bum Rush" meant... and that may have been a barrier. To a degree it's along with Christopher's comment that "edginess" of the campaign may have put some people off... but it's more that I just don't think people initially had any understanding of what it was all about. If you didn't understand "bum rush", the title meant nothing to you.
2. Ensure a common domain name/website in all publicity
When I was looking through the digg comments, I kept seeing (crude) comments about "the woman in the video". Yet given that I was looking at this web page, I had no clue what the comments were talking about. Well it turns out that there were really three URLs in use as part of the campaign:
- http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/bumrush/
- http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/
- http://www.bumrushthecharts.com/ (which redirected to #2 after a few seconds)
Based on Twitter msgs and, I think, some blog entries, I was going to #1, but the video in reference was at #2. So I think another lesson is to ensure that all references are pointing to the same web site.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents. As I said, I would really suggest reading Christopher's reflections, as they have a much broader applicability than just this campaign.
