It’s no secret that bands and music biz folks are early social media adopters – especially in today’s shallow-pocketed music industry environment, where getting the word out cheaply is the name of the game. That’s why it’s always interesting to see what the movers and shakers at the annual SXSW Music conference are doing to promote themselves and their artists, and this year promised at least one above-the-radar partnership that I was excited to see in action.
The most buzzed-about was probably the Foursquare /SPIN Magazine integration, which allowed users to unlock four branded badges by seeing specific SPIN-recommend shows, certain bands or specific numbers of shows. What piqued my interest in the collaboration was the potential proof that Foursquare’s appeal transcends the geek set and that physical rewards (in this case, two passes to SPIN’s annual Friday day show at Stubb’s) might be enough to keep the geo-tagging game at top of mind even at an event with a reputation for overstimulation like SXSW.
We pundits will have to keep on waiting for that proof though, since participation in both the SPIN integration and Foursquare’s SXSW program was low.
Let’s start at the beginning: Foursquare had announced 16 SXSW-specific badges so the anticipation of check-in frenzy was running high on Tuesday night. After all, the Interactive geeks were throwing down on their last night in town and the early bird Music geeks were getting their party started early. The Driskill bar was trending like whoa and all was well in nerd world.
But here’s the weird part – Tuesday seemed to be the height of it. If you take a look at the number of SXSW badges unlocked, it’s pretty low – of the 16 conference-specific badges, only 7 had more than 1,000 unlocked and only two of those were unlocked more than 2,000 times. When you consider that those numbers comprise both the Interactive and Music conferences, that’s not very many check-ins. While 7,000+ users unlocked the first badge, Austin Explorer, by checking into 5 venues in the city, only slightly more than 1,500 were still checking in at the airport on the way out of town to earn the Survivor badge.
Participation in SPIN’s program was even more dismal, with none of the four branded badges being unlocked by more than 50 users. Granted, they were challenging – see three shows outside of downtown Austin to earn the Trailblazer badge or see seven shows in one day for the Bands on the Run badge – but SPIN and Foursquare both dropped the ball by not making the rules of the SPIN game very clear. For example, seeing three bands with an animal as part of their name would unlock the Animal Collector badge, which isn’t hard when there are 2,300+ bands playing all over town. But well over half of the shows were unofficial showcases and day parties, which didn’t qualify Foursquare users for the SPIN badges. While the lines between official and unofficial events at SXSW are certainly blurred, neither SPIN nor Foursquare made it apparent that the badges could only be earned with check-ins at official SXSW events.
As with any new technology, there are growing pains. In the case of Foursquare at SXSW, clearer user direction would have made the SPIN partnership more compelling and probably raised the profile of Foursquare at the music festival.
