Flowd, the social network designed for music lovers, today officially launched in the U.S. and announced a deal with Digital Mind State’s CEO Mike Johns to help drive its success. Flowd’s free service enables musicians to engage directly with their fans by building a customized community on its mobile platform.
Flowd’s Frequent Fans mobile commerce platform incorporates a flexible method for creating fan loyalty programs, along with aggregating mobile check-in, photo and video uploads, and contests or other promotional activities. The European club scene was an early adopter of Flowd, so it makes sense for the Digia Ventures portfolio company to work with Johns as it expands to the U.S. Formerly known as UrbanWorld Wireless, Digital Mind State specializes in bridging urban youth culture and the mobile industry.
Wilhelm Taht, marketing director for Flowd, said that building up large numbers of fans and “likes” is usually the first goal of new media marketing, but the interesting part comes in when you ask yourself “where do I take it from here?” Flowd provides tools to answer that question and results have shown 350 percent higher engagement rates for music fans than on Facebook, he reported.
“Using Facebook and Twitter is great! But social media doesn’t end there,” Taht said. “Flowd complements your actions within other social media and integrates nicely both into Facebook and Twitter, as well as allows you to do things you’re not able to do elsewhere.”
Speaking at the Digital Music Forum West event in Hollywood, Calif., Taht said more than 600 artists have signed up to use Flowd, including indie rock band We Are the Ocean, DJ Armin van Buuren, Alex M.O.R.P.H., British electropop group Fenech-Soler, and trip-hop outfit UNKLE.
For We Are The Ocean’s first-ever acoustic show, Flowd powered a promotion that rewarded the first five fans to check-in to the event using Flowd’s location-based tools before the show were invited to take part in the sound check and hang out with the band. Close to 10 percent of those attending the show used Flowd.
Armin van Buuren used Flowd during his A State of Trance live music events to create and host an online and mobile “hang-out” where fans shared pictures and stories. All participating fans later received a 10 percent discount offer on the related 5-CD compilation; 5 percent of them redeemed the offer, which Flowd said resulted in €0.83 (about $1.13) average revenue per user.
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