Last week while at BarCampMiami I bumped into an old friend from Advertising.com that I saw speak the previous year. He was handing out flyers and promoting a new advertising platform for musicians, artists and entertainers through their social network inventory. The site is called Showflake.

Essentially it’s a CPM (cost per thousand impression) model of advertising on Social Networks. It is very plug and play, cost effective and limited. For $25 you can use one of their pre-made templates, insert you own text and have your ad distributed to 100,000 impressions on their network of social sites.

Let’s go through a brief set-up on Showflake to show its ease of use.

From the homepage, click on create. You are given 5 pages of banner templates to choose from. We’ll select the 1st one for ease of use. When the pop up comes onto the screen, click customize.

Showflake Screenshot

Next you will create the ad. You get 3 lines of text, limited to 30 characters each. For my example I used

• New G-Ro Single
• Click Now
• Download the Free MP3

The last step on this screen is to choose a landing page. Enter your choice of a Myspace, Hi5, Bebo, Perfspot or Friendster page and your fans will be redirected to you profile page.

Let the page refresh and you will see your ad. Once you are satisfied, click next.

The last step is choosing when to display your ad. For each day you select, it will cost $25, and each day your ad will be shown about 100,000 times. Choose your dates carefully.

When you are all set, you will be prompted to create a new account. You enter your contact and payment info and you are all set to show your ads on the dates you selected.

Showflake has a back end that will show clicks and impressions to keep your tracking in tact.

The disadvantages / Areas for improvement

Showflake makes it easy to get a great amount of exposure for a cheap price. They fail in a few key points for musicians.

• No targeting. I don’t want to show my rock band ads to country fans. I also want locations. If you are not touring and only playing locally, I only want to show my ads to locals.
• Better landing pages. I don’t always want to send my fans to my Myspace page. I want to send them to a squeeze page or landing page where I can capture their email address in exchange for a free MP3. Or really, any other page.
• No bulk discounts. It is going to get expensive to do a big campaign and if the CTR’s (click through rates) are consistent with st social advertising, you might get a lot of impressions, but don’t expect a lot of clicks. Being the case, bands might need up to 1,000,000+ impressions to see some tangible results, espicially since no bands see any sales directly from their Myspace page. Buying 1,000,000 impressions will run you $250.

I love the idea of easy bulk social advertising. But I also believe in the long tail. You need to market your music to the people that are in a higher percentage of liking your music.

I would recommend trying it, if you have $25 laying around. It may ive you an idea of what to write in ad campaigns and help in creating them in the future. Plus it never hurts to get the word out.

If you have tried Showflake, let us know your results and your recommendations. Till next time rock stars…

-Greg Rollett