It is a full house at the Social Networking and Music panel here at the SFMusicTech Summit. On the stage are:
Ali Partovi – CEO, iLike
Chuck Fishman – Cisco,Media and Entertainment Business Development
Geoff Ralston – CEO, Lala
Anthony Batt – CEO, Buzz Media
David Allen – (Moderator) Founder, Nemo Design / Pampelmoose
Patrovi: A social music discovery application that is a destination site, plugin for iTunes, widget, and one of the most popular application on Facebook. Has recently launched cross platform (twitter, facebook, etc.) and has created a turnekey solution for artists who want to create their own iPhone application running through the same backend.
In addition to his role on Cisco’s Business Development team, Fishman has a band and uses every social platform and network to find fans of related artists. BlastFM for connecting with fans, iLike for Facebook presence.
Ralston: Lala is a cloud-based music sharing application. It is one of the best in-browser listening and consuming application today. Lala incorporates the social elements by enabling users to follow others, like on twitter, and receive a feed on what they’re listening to without befriending them.
About Social and Communities
Batt: BuzzMedia builds a community with its users. Early on, BuzzMedia brought a community manager to help communicate with community members.
Ralston: From within the community, managers grow.
Patrovi: In our company every employee is a community manager. Ended up finding an engineer in the company who was very passionate about the community to take on that role.
Fishman: The role of community manager differs based on who owns the digital rights.
Patrovi: There’s a difference between old vs. new. iLike adopted the Zappos philosophy: every employee is a community manager.
About Networks and Differentiators
Ralston: You need to be where the people are. If you need a social network for specific purpose, find it. Lala is different from Facebook, for example. Lala has enabled the Facebook connect features—users’ music purchases can show on their feed in Facebook yet Ralston speaks more to the type of interaction each network facilitates.
Batt: We believe that the feedback loop and social environments are necessary if you want people to know what you’re doing. Not a trivial technical problem to solve.
Patrovi: iLike aggregates user views even if just using iLike to post to Facebook and provides metrics to users for free. Premium level stats are available, offering geographic breakdowns for $99/year.
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