Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

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Apple Gets More Serious About Using Twitter, but Why it Doesn’t Matter

October 22, 2009

Apple, the company behind aesthetically pleasing hardware that keeps fanboys drooling, has recently joined Twitter. If you take a look at any one of their four accounts, you’ll notice one thing: they’re not using Twitter to converse but to broadcast. Effectively, they’re porting their press release information to the wide open, and perhaps going a little more granular by featuring content specific to elements of iTunes.

itunesmusicsmallFirst, I’m going to say kudos to Apple for trying involve themselves in the world of social media. I’m going to stop there, though. Unfortunately, they still don’t quite “get it.” Let’s envision this scenario: a user has a support issue about an Apple product. If it was a Comcast product, you’d get a near immediate response from Frank Eliason, the company’s Director of Digital Care. Apple has no such protocol in place, and at this point, there is no engagement. If you used Twitter to direct a complaint to iTunes, if and only if they bother to monitor and respond to their replies, they would send you to their faceless and non-responsive customer support channel.

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Should Universal be Entitled to Zune profits?

November 9, 2006

On November 14th, the Microsoft Zune, a wireless portable media player, will be available for sale. The hype in anticipation of the Zune has been pretty darn big, and apparently other companies (read: Universal, the world’s largest music company) are looking to cash in.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it would be giving over $1 per each Zune sold to Universal. That’s $1 per a piece of hardware that Universal had no involvement in producing. However, the agreement reached means that Universal will now be licensing its music in the Microsoft Zune store, which leaves the status of iTunes to be determined.

Microsoft’s agreement to pay Universal per Zune unit sets off a heat wave and puts a lot of pressure on Apple to do the same (Apple currently pays off a portion of royalties per iTunes sales and does not compensate anyone for the sales of its iPods). Universal has one year left of its licensing agreement with the iTunes store, and who knows what kinds of negotiations will be made once the Zune precedence is set. Apple is Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the portable music market, so Microsoft played the pretty devious card when agreeing to this deal.

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