by Michelle Lentz

Cincinnati has a surprisingly huge social media community. Maybe not surprising. I suspect, due to P&G, we have more marketing agencies per square mile than anyone but Madison Avenue, and a lot of them are embracing social media. Today was our 5th social media breakfast, which sold out in under an hour, and it featured Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. You can view our Twitter stream and see Tim’s 55 minute presentation on UStream

Pandora is that amazing internet radio project you have on your iPhone and quite probably on your computer. As you might know, they’ve recently added ads to their stream. The ads are extremely targeted and you can get rid of them for $3/month.

Their new advertising stream is very very targeted. If they wanted to, they could target 35-year old women in Cincinnati who enjoy Weezer (i.e., me). They are thinking about branching out with this. For instance, would you like to opt-in to an email that tells you your favorite band is playing at your local club? Taking that one step further, what if it also told you that a band you might like is coming to a club near you? Pandora does have the recommendation thing down, although they see themselves as a radio product, not a recommendation engine.

I was also intrigued to hear about their fight with the government over radio fees. Remember the big uproar back in early August? Tim had told The Washington Post that Pandora had a real possiblity of shutting their doors for good as the government had raised the fees on Internet Radio. Well, apparently enough of you got upset and wrote your congressmen. In fact, email accounts and faxes on Capitol Hill were jammed enough that it made a difference. Pandora, and other internet radio stations, are currently wrapping up a second round of talks with Congress. Grassroots worked.

Here’s a few more tidbits I learned today:
- Pandora was the most downloaded iPhone application of 2008. (Okay, I knew this, but thought I’d re-share it.)

- When they launched the web site in November 2005, they rather quickly ramped up to 50-60K new users per day.

- They’ve done virtually no marketing, but have grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, they grew by word of mouth, using occasional Google AdWords. Tim has also traveled in the last 2 years, conducting over 200 town halls across the nation. One of his first, in NYC, attracted 2 people, and a recent (albeit canceled) one in NYC attracted over 1000.

- Of the 600,000 indexed songs, 85% are played every day.

- They see every communication (email, tweet, etc) with a listener as an opportunity, not a cost. In fact, they respond to all communications with their listeners.

- Pandora is going to be everywhere. For example, Ford is integrating Pandora into their cars via SYNC.

My friend Krista Neher was there, brilliantly snapping photo after photo. So as Brian would say, I’ll let the photos tell the rest of the story. View Krista’s entire SMB5 Photostream on Flickr.

SMB Founder Bryan Person and our local SMB impressario Kevin Dugan

The early morning crowd at LPK for Cincy Social Media Breakfast #5

Tim Westergren

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora

Our Social Media Breakfast was sponsored by Lucrum and LPK.

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Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
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Nominee for City Beat’s Best of the City: Vote for My Wine Education under Public Eye > Blog:
http://www.bestofcincinnati.com/

by Michelle Lentz

There’s all sorts of news out there today centering around iTunes and the App Store.

Apple’s Best of 2008: Apple has created a special section of the store with the Best of 2008 in everything it carries. That covers movies, music, audio books, podcasts, free apps, and purchased apps. Not only is Apple offering the best-of in what was downloaded/purchased the most, but they’re also giving their own editorial opinion on several of the options.

Pandora: Everyone’s favorite music app for the iPhone, Pandora, has reached a milestone. Yesterday morning they recorded their 2,000,000 registered user. That’s right – 2 million registered Pandora users on the iPhone. Pretty exciting, yes?

Amazon Mobile: Amazon has released a free iPhone app. I was a little surprised by this. I often use, and have always been impressed by, Amazon’s iPhone site. But this app takes the site even further. The new and “experimental” feature called Amazon Remembers lets users take a photo of a product out in the “real world.” The photo is then uploaded to Amazon and the folks working in the Mechanical Turk program will try to match the product with one from Amazon.com. Don’t get your hopes up too high – the results will take between 5 minutes and 24 hours. But at least you can get price comparisons on the go.  You also can easily use your 1-Click shopping settings, search Amazon partners such as Target and Macy’s, and access your wish lists.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

by Michelle Lentz

I promise that bub.blicio.us is not turning into an iPhone blog, contrary to a fair number of posts you’ve seen here lately. What has happened, however, is that with the launch of the App store, the iPhone has turned into a viable mobile computing platform, a personal computer that fits in your pocket. We’d be remiss not to cover some of the excellent applications that are now available.

One of my personal favorites is Pandora, which creates personalized radio from the Music Genome Project. You may have played with the online version of Pandora, which works in the same way.

Once you have installed the iPhone Pandora app, it’s a matter of minutes before you set up your universal (accessible from your desktop and your phone) account. Once your account is set up, you can create your own radio stations. Enter the name of an artist or song you like. Pandora, using the Music Genome Project, analyzes the song and discovers similar songs. The end result is a radio station that plays everything you like.

The Music Genome Project analyzes songs based on rhythm, harmonies, and all sorts of things that all go into a mathematical algorithm. Similar songs have nothing to do with genres or artists. It’s fascinating, and it creates great radio.

You can help Pandora learn your preferences by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to each of the songs it plays. You can also bookmark the song or artist to hear them again, or purchase the song directly from the iPhone iTunes store.

Pandora runs over EDGE, WiFi, and 3G on the 3G and original iPhones running 2.0 software. It’s a free download from the iTunes App Store.
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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.