After years of watching music fans flood online social networks to interact with their favorite recording artists, the music industry is starting to get serious about adding community features to its own websites.
Hoping to become a big player in that effort is networking giant Cisco, which during the Consumer Electronics Show, January 8-11 in Las Vegas, introduced its Eos platform—a set of hosted online tools designed to enable media and entertainment companies to build social networking functions into websites.
For record labels, that means adding fan community services to artist sites. Warner Music Group (WMG) is the first label partner signed on to use the Eos platform, and it already plans to add such functionality to the sites for Atlantic artists Laura Izibor and Sean Paul. Other artist sites will migrate to the platform over the course of the year.
“As the Web shifts from the enterprise to the consumer in terms of where the traffic is coming from, the social media revolution—which is all about fans interacting with artists—is going to provide an enormous opportunity," said WMG executive vice president of digital strategy and business development Michael Nash. “This is a recognition that having a social media strategy is not just about partnering with social networks, but it's also about what we do with our direct-to-consumer efforts."
Eos features include data analytics, content management and site administration capabilities, but it's the social networking that gets Cisco's foot in the door. That a company the size of Cisco is dedicating an entire division of resources to the effort speaks volumes on how significant an opportunity it expects the field to present in the years ahead.
Hoping to become a big player in that effort is networking giant Cisco, which during the Consumer Electronics Show, January 8-11 in Las Vegas, introduced its Eos platform—a set of hosted online tools designed to enable media and entertainment companies to build social networking functions into websites.
For record labels, that means adding fan community services to artist sites. Warner Music Group (WMG) is the first label partner signed on to use the Eos platform, and it already plans to add such functionality to the sites for Atlantic artists Laura Izibor and Sean Paul. Other artist sites will migrate to the platform over the course of the year.
“As the Web shifts from the enterprise to the consumer in terms of where the traffic is coming from, the social media revolution—which is all about fans interacting with artists—is going to provide an enormous opportunity," said WMG executive vice president of digital strategy and business development Michael Nash. “This is a recognition that having a social media strategy is not just about partnering with social networks, but it's also about what we do with our direct-to-consumer efforts."
Eos features include data analytics, content management and site administration capabilities, but it's the social networking that gets Cisco's foot in the door. That a company the size of Cisco is dedicating an entire division of resources to the effort speaks volumes on how significant an opportunity it expects the field to present in the years ahead.
