What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

Many companies have decided it means selling products directly on Facebook. For example, just today, Gilt Groupe launched the ability to buy products directly on its Facebook page that aren’t available on their regular site.

The concept has spawned a whole new term: F-Commerce.

Max Ciccotosto, the founder and CEO of Venpop, which is a division of Seattle-based WishPot, says forget about it. ”A cart on Facebook is boring. … We are skeptical about F-Commerce. We are about social merchandising.”

WishPot launched back in 2006 as a social registry, where friends and family members can see a list of the items you want for a wedding or a birthday across a number of retailers. But as the company evolved and struggled through the recession, Ciccotosto said, “We needed revenues. They were growing but they were not sustainable, so we shifted from social shopping to a social commerce platform.”

Since then, Venpop has built a number of tools that allow retailers to roll out social features to their Facebook page and to their Web site. At the end of 2009, its first customers went live, and now the 12-employee company is cash-flow positive.

He said the trick to “social merchandising” is in automating the experience, so that retailers can send notificiations to Twitter and their Facebook page to highlight price changes, new product arrivals or other popular catalog items.

Often times, instead of using software, companies hire social media employees to sift through hundreds — if not millions — of items to find something to highlight, but he said Venpop’s software can quickly and easily spot marked-down items — a new line of clothing, for instance, or a special product that happens to be selling well.

From there, the deal can be posted to Twitter or Facebook. He said when retailers list specific products on their Facebook feed, they get three times more clicks and also more comments.

More recently, Venpop rolled out a new flash sales tool that allows retailers to offer “a deal of the day,” or a Groupon-like special to their most loyal fans on Facebook.

A retailer pays a commission to Venpop based on the number of products it has and the number of fans it has on Facebook. It doesn’t give Venpop half of the revenues, like a Groupon or LivingSocial company might demand, if they offer a deal of the day. Plus, offering such deals to a company’s Facebook fans focuses on rewarding its most loyal customers rather than soliciting new customers who may never return.

He said while Venpop has the ability to also integrate shopping cart technology on a company’s Facebook page, only three out of its 3,000 customers actually wanted a cart. ”I know companies that have paid $20,000 to implement a shopping cart on Facebook that generated $0 in six months,” he said. “That’s disconcerting to me that they will see no return on investment and then say Facebook doesn’t work.”

So far, Venpop has signed up a handful of its customers to offer the daily deals, including Amanda Pearl, a jewelry and handbag accessories provider; Karma Kiss, a gift provider; and Green Feet, an eco-­friendly retailer.

Other companies are scrambling to define social commerce with plans that are all over the map.

Adgregate Markets, Milyoni and Payvment all believe in setting up commerce on Facebook, which may ultimately become the mall of the future. Others, such as eBay, believe that integrating Facebook into their site could help make product recommendations to consumers. And Copious hopes to create a platform that leans on social networks, so there’s more transparency between people who are selling items to one another.

The day the mall went live, Payvment said its customers’ sales quadrupled, compared to sales when they were limited to a shopping tab on their individual fan pages.

Now, Payvment’s competitor, Adgregate Markets, which also helps brands build storefronts on Facebook, is releasing data that helps define the size of the opportunity for e-commerce on Facebook.

In a study commissioned by Adgregate and conducted with the help of Webtrends, Adgregate looked at the impact of Facebook fan pages on traditional e-commerce sites.

To be sure, the idea of social commerce is so new, it’s difficult to give too much weight to early studies like these, but because everything on the topic is unknown, it’s worth taking the data into consideration.

Generally, what Adgregate found was that Facebook was generating a ton of visits to brands’ Facebook pages, providing an opportunity to convert the traffic into sales, especially as brands see visits to their traditional web sites shrink.

The study highlighted one example. Delta Airlines recently enabled customers to book tickets directly on its Facebook page. While traffic to Delta’s site lost more than a million unique visitors over a three month period, its Facebook page gained more than a 1,000 new fans.

The study analyzed the unique visits to the websites of the Fortune 100 as well as their Facebook fan pages.

From Adgregate’s customer base, the study makes a number of conclusions:

• Following the launch of a Facebook store, wall posts generate on average 1,673 percent spikes in store traffic.

• Facebook stores on average generate a 17 percent social engagement rate (merchandise “likes” and “shares” per visitor).

• Facebook stores generated on average 5.9 pages views per visit.

• Facebook commerce conversion rates range from 2 to 4 percent, which is on par with e-Commerce websites.

• Average order value of $104 with 24 percent growth month-over-month (although this largely is dependent upon retail vertical).

No, it’s not the mall. It’s Facebook.

So, could the social network also be the place you go to shop?

Christian Taylor, the CEO of Payvment, believes it is only a matter of time.

Payvment launched a Facebook Mall two weeks ago, where consumers can shop among 50,000 retailers and add items to a single shopping cart. Payvment is signing up around 300 new storefronts daily and has roughly 1.2 million items in the mall today.

Taylor doesn’t tread lightly when on the subject.

“Facebook is the perfect storm to become the largest shopping portal on the planet,” he said. “I think it’s a no-brainer that e-commerce on Facebook will be huge. Amazon is so big because of its traffic, and Facebook blows it away.”

Taylor’s interest in social shopping developed by accident.

Pre-Payvment, Taylor was the president of Xcreative Interactive, a company that was building Facebook pages for large entertainment and media brands. He said it was very successful and had huge clients such as Disney and Lionsgate.

But there was one big problem.

The pages would always garner millions of fans, “but we could never get them to buy a DVD or a movie ticket. It was very hard to convert off the network,” he said.

That’s when they saw an even bigger opportunity to build e-commerce services for small and medium sized business. The employees voted to shut down the company and move from New York to Palo Alto.

That was almost two years ago.

After the move, it developed a framework that allowed companies to build e-commerce capabilities into their Facebook pages as a separate tab.

While it attracted thousands of merchants, he said there was a problem with that, too.

“Even if you have 5,000 fans, at the end of the day, you are only selling to 5,000 fans,” he said. “It took us four months to discover that there’s something wrong here. You needed a way to be discovered.”

Enter the mall and the single check-out experience across multiple brands.

Already, the difference has been noticeable, Taylor said.

Before the mall went live on Feb. 24, about 3,000 of its 60,000 merchants were regularly selling items, or roughly five percent. “When I tell you it was night and day, I can say that [sales] quadrupled the day we flipped the switch on the mall.”

Should Amazon or other e-commerce leaders be scared of Facebook’s ability to garner a very large audience?

Taylor: “If they are not, they should be.”

“The really scary part for the old regime should be that people return to Facebook daily and spend more time on Facebook than any other Web site on the net….We are turning Facebook into the largest shopping mall on the planet.”

The threat is clearly not imminent. Today, Amazon, eBay and other retailers that have gone online, like Best Buy and Target, have large audiences themselves.

They are also experimenting with ways to make shopping more social, as we’ve reported before, but generally e-commerce has failed to become very social yet.

However, Payvment believes with the social graph acting as the center of the shopping experience, it can take it to another level. Visitors to the mall “like” individual items to surface them to the top. It’s also much easier to shop for a birthday or Christmas.

So far, Payvment’s Shopping Mall on Facebook has attracted 9,015 monthly active users and 568 “likes.” While Payvment claims to work closely with Facebook, it has no direct ties or arrangements with the social network.

The company also doesn’t make any money yet.

Its platform is entirely free, and anyone that adopts the platform right now will be grandfathered in for life. In return, they are asked to provide feedback.

To date, the company has raised $8 million in capital from Sierra Ventures and BlueRun Ventures. It has 20 employees.

The real Charlie Sheen joined Twitter on March 1. Prior to that, an imposter or “squatter,” as Twitter refers to those tweeting under a false name, had secured the handle @charliesheen. The faux Sheen was quickly removed and the former “Two and a Half Men” star slipped into the handle with a “verified” blue check on his account. He now has more than two million followers.

Twitter has 175 million users and counting and only select, mostly high-profile people are granted “verified” status. How are verified users vetted? Twitter refused to explain the process, saying via e-mail, “we continue to very selectively verify accounts most at risk for impersonation on a one-off and highly irregular basis.”

But what does that actually mean?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The new SkyGrid Groups pages look like another social network, but they’re not; instead, they link out to fans’ existing profiles and updates on services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

SkyGrid founder and CEO Kevin Pomplun said an artist like Lady Gaga (who is a launch partner) could create groups for the local areas where she will be touring (so they can meet and organize rides) or for people who are talking about a particular song of hers (based on a keyword search). Another pilot user is the crowdsourcing project Ushahidi, which is using its page to highlight top fans in its community.

For one thing, once I gave out my new number to a handful of friends, I had this one goofy friend for whom I recorded a custom greeting. Every time he would call, I’d let it go to voicemail and he’d start every message laughing at some silly in-joke I’d leave for him in the greeting. Okay, I grant you not many people would go to the trouble to do that, but if you knew this guy, you just might. Update: A few readers pointed out in the comments that this feature is re-enabled in Google Voice, and they’re correct though it’s not exactly easy to find.

Ever since GrandCentral became Google Voice, it’s been a lot less fun to use. That custom-greeting feature is gone, as are some of the funnier Web calling buttons that GrandCentral had offered. Maybe that’s one of the reasons behind today’s acquisition by Google of SayNow.

Details are scant about what Google has in mind, but a source close to the deal tells us that the intent on Google’s part is to make Google Voice “even better in a world of Skype and Facetime,” which implies that the next step for Google Voice is some form of video calling.

SayNow made a name for itself by giving celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers (remember them?) and the cast of “Glee” a phone number for fans to call and hear the occasional message. And at the start of the football season, ESPN used it to send the message embedded below from former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka to some 1.6 million fans on Facebook. Another feature gave celebs a way to hold live conference calls that fans could dial in and listen to. The biggest SayNow client was the rapper Soulja Boy, who racked up 50 million calls totaling some 100 million minutes of call time. If nothing else, Google can learn from the team at SayNow how to promote the service and get people interested in using it.

SayNow also has a serious side, an enterprise application called Big Call, aimed at making conference calls for businesses easy. The company says it was built by an intern in a week.

The deal for SayNow comes on the same day that Google made its long-awaited number-porting feature official, suggesting that Google Voice is going to be the focus of a lot more time and attention in the coming months.

Ditka’s season-opening greeting for Facebook users is below.

Or at least somewhere very close to the teen idol: Some Twitter users report that they are located “in Justin Biebers heart” or “Bieberacademy” or “Bieberville, California.” That comes from a new study from the august Palo Alto Research Center, which had an intern comb through the “Location” fields on 10,000 Twitter user profiles.

The PARC report says that 66 percent of users filled in the field with “valid” information. Another 18 percent left it blank altogether, and 16 percent used it to make a joke and/or an expression of their Bieberlove.

But even that 66 percent number is a bit misleading, since “valid” is a very vague term. Check out this great deadpan:

This includes those who merely entered their continent and, more commonly, those who entered geographic information in highly vernacular forms. For example, one user wrote that s/he is from “kcmo–call da po po”. Our coders were able to determine this user meant “Kansas City, Missouri”, and thus this entry was rated as valid geographic information (indicating a location at a city scale).

Big picture: The PARC report explains convincingly that you shouldn’t take the self-reported geographic information in Twitter profiles at face value. And, I’d argue, that extends to the rest of the information as well. On the other hand, if you’re an advertiser trying to find a lot of Justin Bieber fans, this stuff may be very, very useful.

(Thanks to YouTube’s Hunter Walk for the tip. Via Twitter, of course.)

“Instead of wanting a fancy fan page, you want a fancy newsfeed,” said Jeff Widman, the CEO of BrandGlue, a company that helps companies manage their social media. The newsfeed is the basic home screen where Facebook shares status updates from friends and fan pages.

But the problem is that not all of a brand’s updates automatically get passed along to fans. Facebook filters which ones show up, based on a formula that it doesn’t disclose. It’s designed to keep spam and other boring posts out of users’ feeds.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Ads that can incorporate people’s friends as “fans” on Facebook make a much bigger impression on viewers than plain ads on the site, according to a report from Nielsen and Facebook released Tuesday. The study found that ads that involved people’s friends increased users’ ability to recall the advertiser by 16 percent, compared with regular ads, which boosted recall by 10 percent. And intent to purchase a product increased by eight percent after viewers saw ads that involved their friends, versus just two percent after they saw plain advertisements.

“While you can buy a homepage ad, you can’t buy the influence that’s inherent when a consumer sees a list of their own friends featured on a social ad,” wrote Nielsen’s Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs and Sean Bruich of Facebook’s measurement research in the report.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The acquisition is a savvy one for Yahoo (YHOO), which already has a strong sports content business and stands to benefit from the additional social networking and mobile integration that Citizen Sports offers.

Below, the official announcement:

Yahoo! to Acquire Citizen Sports

Strengthens Social Strategy by Combining the Power of the No. 1 Online Sports Destination with the Web’s Most Popular Social Sports Company

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar 17, 2010 –As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (http://www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!‘s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket. Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming. Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace (NYSE: NWS), hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004. Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

We can’t verify this directly with the company, since its site is down and has been for several days. “Dear Artists and Believers,” it says. “We have extended our maintenance window. We expect to be back tomorrow at the end of the day.”

But Hypebot points to a document filed in a Dutch court yesterday that appears to indicate that the company has filed for bankruptcy. UPDATE: Sellaband’s site now says it is indeed in bankruptcy, but that “the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon.”

The giant caveat: None of the reports on this story seem to be written by anyone who speaks or reads Dutch or understands the Dutch legal system. So it’s possible that all of this means something else entirely. If you want to take a crack at it yourself, here you go.

Meanwhile, some background on Sellaband: Founded in 2006, it was designed to let musicians, ranging from groups you’ve never heard of to ones you used to hear a long time ago, finance recordings by soliciting their fans.

Sellaband would distribute the albums–the company negotiated a deal with Amazon (AMZN) to help move the discs–and would sell advertising against the artists’ fan pages. At some point, in theory, revenue would be distributed to both the acts and their fans/investors.

Sellaband claimed to have raised more than $2.5 million for several dozen albums this way. But a recent campaign to fund a new record by hip hop pioneer Public Enemy had stalled and was moving backward as of last week.

Here’s a promo for that effort and an opportunity for me to type “Don’t Believe the Hype”! (Sorry. I’ve been saving that one up since 1988):

Public Enemy/ SellaBand Promo from Command Pictures on Vimeo.

People who have signed up to be Facebook “fans” of the women’s apparel retailer will receive a status update in their news feeds offering them a special 30 percent discount offer on its infinity scarf. Then, if they want, Facebook fans can buy the product right from that feed page, sometimes known as the wall–all the way through entering their credit card details and shipping address.

The sales messages will only appear in the feeds of people who have already signed up to be fans of the brand, or who have friends that decide to share the offer with them.

It’s one of the most direct attempts yet to make Facebook a platform for sales, not just advertising and marketing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

One that is causing a particular stir is a change in “Her Majesty,” the final song on the final album that the Beatles recorded. In the album “Abbey Road,” the song starts and ends with distinction: a surprisingly loud opening and an abrupt end. To many Beatles fans, the unresolved ending conveys special meaning, a sense that the iconic band’s music has no end to it.

Well, not anymore.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

This one isn’t a total shock, as EMI and Grooveshark had supposedly been close to a deal prior to the lawsuit. And it wouldn’t be the first time that a label sued a Web company: See Warner Music Group (WMG) and Imeem, as well as Universal Music Group and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, among others.

No details on the deal from EMI or Florida-based Grooveshark, which offers free streaming music, a la MySpace Music, Imeem, Spotify and others. Unlike those services, though, Grooveshark doesn’t appear to have licensing deals with three of the big four labels and plays their music anyway. But with the exception of the EMI suit, it has remained unmolested. Interesting.

For the record, here’s the release (Inside baseball note to Grooveshark guys: Please don’t attach press releases as PDF files. Really cumbersome. Thanks.):

Music streaming service Grooveshark signs deal with EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing
Gainesville, FL–Today, digital music service Grooveshark.com announced it has entered into agreements with major label EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing that will give Grooveshark users access to content from EMI’s roster of current and legendary catalog artists and EMI Music Publishing’s songwriters.

Grooveshark offers music fans the ability to stream songs for no fee from a vast catalog of music. Fans can enjoy Grooveshark’s music without having to download client software or register. The basic service is free to fans and supported by visual advertising. Fans who opt for a $3 per month premium service can enjoy unlimited ad-free streaming music. The site was recently named the best way to listen to music on the web by Rolling Stone, and just surpassed one million registered users.

“EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have collaborated with us to create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music,” says Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino. “We will continue to deliver the best music service on the Internet to our users, and we will expand our capacity to strengthen fan-to-artist connections through our technology.”

“We think services like Grooveshark offer great music discovery options for fans,” said Mark Piibe, EMI Music’s Global Head of Digital Business Development. ”In turn, Grooveshark offers a new revenue stream for our artists and will help us learn more about how we can better connect different types of fans with artists.”

Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]