What is T4?

[beauzeau]

I think sonoma's on the right track with the promotions they're doing. Having T4 around for folks to use to create their entry (if that's allowed) is a good way to generate entries from new rumblers.

But so far, the riffrumbles have been kinda limited to people who are ALREADY using RW. So how to get MORE people aware?

It's obvious for guitar players I think. Guitar mags are the way to go. Or at least they were for me when I started playing. They didn't have the internet back then. I'm not sure what changes the guitar mag industry have gone through with the internet. I would be inclined to think that most people look online for tabs these day.

Of course, sonoma may not WANT to grow into a huge thing overnight. But if they DID, here's what I'd suggest.

Call up Rich Abramson over at Simmons/Abramson Marketing and get Gene Simmons in on a promotion effort. Gene lays down a bass line against some instant drummers. Then you have a riffrumble where the contestants write a song around the bass line. Gene picks a winner, who gets an autographed battle axe thing and some insane bass models or something.

But Gene won't come cheap! Especially these days with the show and all. Sonoma would want to make certain that this investment would pay off. Ultimately, you'd want it to pay off in sales of standard, but for the immediacy, you'd want it to pay off in terms of the number of installs of T4 and contest entries.

Sonoma doesn't get enough traffic to simply promote a contest like this on their homepage. Alot more would have to go into it. This would need to be promoted over the course of two or three months to get as many participants as possible.

Guitar magazines, of course, would be the obvious first place to promote the rumble. Second place to promote would be inside Guitar Center stores. You create these big cardboard standups of Gene holding the Punisher bass saying "Come and Jam with ME!" The display has all the info on the contest and also contains low-cost (like under 3 bucks) cd-roms that have a limited edition "Gene Jam" version of T4 that's been custom skinned with a Gene theme for the promotion. I own standard, and I'd still go buy one!

Then, when the promotion is over, you get back all the cardboard standups, and you give them away as bonus prizes in future riffrumble contests! Or sell them on ebay. You might be able to recoup a good bit of the money you had to pay Gene by selling the standups at auction, seeing as there will be a limited quantity of them. Movie theaters are doing this more and more these days.

If you could get Gene to mention something about the contest on his show, even better. But I'm sure he charges a premium for that!

Anyway, just an idea. I'm sure it would work just as well with someone that's not quite as 'hot' as Gene is right now. That'd be much cheaper I'm sure. But it's this kind of hard promotion that would really really get the brand out there. I have a feeling that online jamming will become a brand thing. Someone will (hopefully) refer to any online jamming tool as "rifflinking" in the future. And the first one to really crack the egg open is the one that wins. Doesn't matter who's better. Just like with Mac and Microsoft.

IMO riffworks has already cracked that egg. It's just a matter of letting everyone know about it.

[beauzeau]

Of course, sonoma could always sell out to Time Warner, and then we could just pick up a cdrom of T4 from any post office or walmart or any other place they give away their AOL discs (frisbees, coasters, skeets, whatever you call em).....