Ministry of Sound and Hed Kandi
James Bacchus, Ministry of Sound
James Bacchus is Head of Operations at the Ministry of Sound, the UK’s largest independent record label. The company is 15 years old. Its portfolio of services includes licensed clubs around the world, tours and events, product licensing and multimedia online marketing activities in web, radio and TV.
Summary of presentation
The main focus of James’ presentation was Hed Kandi, a distinctive house music and lifestyle brand acquired in January 2006. Hed Kandi, and its sub-brands, gave the Ministry of Sound a unique opportunity to transform what they do on the web.
As the Hed Kandi website is funded by advertising, the company wanted to both increase exposure and drive traffic to the site by better engaging its customers. A key component of this was to increase its 3.6 page impressions per visitor to a higher level.
Means of Customer Engagement
James described two features through which customer engagement is shaping the actual content of both the Hed Kandi and Ministry of Sound’s websites:
- TV ratings – users rate TV content, allowing the Ministry of Sound to present content in multiple ways, depending on what the users themselves think of it.
- Comments – users give feedback on news articles and give their views and opinions on what the Ministry of Sound is doing. James used the example of a Lollipop video, which was re-edited based on customer feedback.
However, James did add a note of caution when he warned that it is insufficient to merely listen to your customers - you must also act on the feedback that they give you!
James then talked about blogs (online diaries), a new feature that they have just put live on the Hed Kandi web site. The blogs enable the Ministry of Sound to build relationships between the DJs and users, allowing users to interact both with the blog writers and with each other. James explained how blogs were preferable to forums, as the latter can contain a lot of disparate topics, require frequent monitoring and offer no direct interaction with the brand. Blogs, on the other hand, help give the brands an identity and character, making it more personal, and so help to counter the otherwise ‘faceless’ nature of dance music. The Ministry of Sound is also able to cross-fertilise content, taking music reviews from the community and putting snippets on the commercial page for that particular track.
The World's First Live MOSS Implementation
James went on to explain the technical foundation for the Hed Kandi site, which was built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It was the world's first live implementation of this software and it was achieved together with cScape. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers out-of-the-box tools for things like blogs, wikis and RSS. However, James explained that they decided to go for a custom blog implementation which gave them greater ability to control the branding and achieve better integration with other web content. Moreover, as the custom implementation still sits on the same underlying platform, it makes use of the SharePoint security model, back-up and restore features as well as user authentication. Site visitors also use a uniform method to add content across the site.
However, allowing users to add content to your site is not without risk. It can provide a window of opportunity for people to subvert web sites by posting HTML or images that expose weaknesses in browsers. That not only creates a threat to your customers, but it can also damage your reputation.
James also warned about direct threats to your business, such as SQL injection attacks, leading to a loss of data or service. In order to mitigate such risks code should be written defensively, you should speak to product vendors to ensure that they have written their code with such risks in mind and ensure that the products used are constantly updated. Anti-virus products should also be used on your server.
Concluding on a more positive note, James described how it’s possible to reward and provide incentives to the participants who contribute the most to the website. With 1% of users providing 99% of the user-generated content, it is important to identify this 1% and offer them incentives so that they become even greater brand advocates. At Hed Kandi, the most prolific and positive members are upgraded to contributors - the same status as DJs - as a badge of honour. Public recognition of individuals’ achievements is important, of course, not just to the new Web 2.0 world, but to all types of social networks.
Contact cScape's Customer Engagement Unit for more details:
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