SMO RAWKSTARS

So, like most people I’ve got a pretty strict morning ritual. I wake up, brew up some french press coffee, shower, watch CNBC and drive to work.

Then, at work it’s another ritual - swivel into my chair, drink more coffee, check my accounts from the day before and then the week or so before.  After that it’s off to the land of emails, blogs and RSS feeds that adorn my inbox & iGoogle.

This morning one really caught my eye - and it’s for a selfish reason - it involved Lollapalooza

I’d say I’m a pretty big music geek, so when I hear the mash-up of Analytics & a festival tour I get really excited!

Lollapalooza partnered with a GAAC firm to look at the SMO impact of the festival’s marketing. Looking to isolate (through event tagging) the effect of their SMO efforts on ticket sales & rev. generation; A very very interesting topic, esp. to a paid search geek like myself.

The study looked at which SMO sites were generating the most visits, which site resulted in the most brand exposure, rev. generation & viral views. This data, was then parsed 17-times-sideways and conclusions were drawn.

I won’t give away any more special sauce - you can read the article here.

What I feel is not valuable about this it that some segments of the offline world are actually getting the power of web analytics & marketing measurement. In the retail space there’s always been that “where did it come from” factor - trying to pin-point the which medias (or combination of them) resulted in an interaction & conversion.

It’s really great to see the music industry getting it, even if it’s only in the fringes at this point. I can only hope that one day the big-box labels get it…