{"id":503857,"date":"2010-04-01T18:45:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T22:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"tag:betanews.com,2007:article-1270161686"},"modified":"2010-04-01T18:45:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T22:45:54","slug":"how-do-you-follow-up-after-your-app-is-a-smash-hit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/503857","title":{"rendered":"How do you follow up after your app is a smash hit?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tim Conneally<\/a>, Betanews<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Shazam
\nShazam is a brilliant application. If you want to identify a piece of music that is playing, all you have to do is hold up your smartphone, and the Shazam app will tell you what it is based on its “audio fingerprint.” It’s simple to use, handy to have, and available on most mobile platforms. Though the idea behind Shazam wasn’t exactly new<\/a>, it arrived when the app store craze took off, and has since climbed to impressive heights.<\/p>\n

It has 50 million users in 200 countries and has enjoyed a sustained growth of half a million new users per week for more than a year. Shazam has been downloaded more than 1 million times from Nokia’s Ovi store, it was the #1 application on BlackBerry App World’s launch date, it’s Android’s third most-downloaded app of all time, and it’s Apple’s biggest reseller of iTunes music on mobile devices.<\/p>\n

But Shazam has been pretty limited thus far. You can identify (“tag”) songs, organize and share the tags, and link to related information about the artist or song. It’s handy, but it’s still an app that applies just to the music industry and music consumers.<\/p>\n

What do you do with your single-purpose app after you’ve got consumers eating it up with a spoon?<\/p>\n

Apply it to the advertising industry, for one thing.<\/p>\n

During the most recent Super Bowl, we saw Shazam’s first pilot advertising tie-in with men’s clothing company Dockers. If users “tagged” the advertisement in Shazam, they were entered into a drawing to win one of 5,000 pairs of pants the company was giving away.<\/p>\n

Alex Musli, Vice President of product marketing for Shazam told Betanews that we’re going to be seeing a lot more interactive advertisement in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

“We think it’s a big deal because what comes out of the house with you?” Musli asked. “Your wallet, your keys and your cell phone. The beauty of this is that if you’ve got a 99\u00a2 burger promotion or a 2-for-1 pizza offer, those promotions exist on your cellphone until the merchant expires them, so it can live forever and a day on your cell phone and you’re taking it out of the house. So as long as you remember the burger joint that you’ve got the promotion for, you can just show your cell phone as the coupon. And that’s just one application of the technology.”<\/p>\n

The other place where Shazam is applying itself is in “contextualized” entertainment.<\/p>\n

\"The
\n“We’re doing some piloting for HBO right now,” Musli told us. “There’s a lifestyle series called ‘How to Make it Big in America’ and people can actually Shazam the television program to get behind-the-scenes footage and additional content. That’s had a great reaction from the media industry and I think the reason for that is because we’ve already got over 50 million consumers that have the capability in their hand, so there’s a readily addressable market.”<\/p>\n

And that market is especially valuable right now. Everybody seems to be attempting to link “offline” content to the Web through apps on our mobile phones. Like optical (QR) tagging<\/a>, RFID “object hyperlinking,”<\/a> and augmented reality browsing, audio tagging via Shazam is another way to enrich content, and with 50 million users built in, it’s a viable one.<\/p>\n

“We’re still right at the start in terms of advertisers and partners,” Musli said. “But a lot of people are surprised in a good way that Shazam is going outside of music and going into interactive marketing. Not everyone saw this coming, in terms of product set, but we as a company have been talking about direct response -and how you can apply the technology- for some time now.”<\/p>\n

But as it adds new segments to its business model, is Shazam going to change from a music app to something wholly different?<\/p>\n

“We’re not going to be changing direction,” Musli asserted. “It’s just two different things around one capability from the handset, so it’s just giving people that have taken the time and effort to put Shazam on their devices more value. It’s not like we’re going to be pushing promotions to our audience, this is about stuff they’re interested in.”<\/p>\n

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010<\/a>

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Shazam is a brilliant application. If you want to identify a piece of music that is playing, all you have to do is hold up your smartphone, and the Shazam app will tell you what it is based on its “audio fingerprint.” It’s simple to use, handy to have, and available […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}