Nokia’s “Come with Music” Comes Without Content

Posted By Joe Pulizzi on November 12, 2008

If some big companies ever figured out the concept of delivering valuable, relevant content, they’d be dangerous.

I read this post from Marketing-Interactive yesterday about Nokia’s “Remix” event in Singapore, where Nokia continues to promote it’s new music service called “Comes with Music”. “Comes with Music” provides a mobile music package where consumers can access unlimited songs from the Nokia music database without paying anything when buying certain phone packages.

Nokia originally announced the program in 2007 and it seems to be getting some traction, but it could be doing so much better.

Here’s why.  I’m a consumer and I’m trying to find out more information about Nokia’s program. So, I type in “Nokia comes with music” into Google. The first result is the original press release from 2007 from the Nokia website. The rest of the results are reviews from blogs and tech sites.

But there was no other content from Nokia. No pay-per-click link to a microsite. No Nokia blog insight or message from a Nokia executive. No special features about music being featured.  Nothing.

Okay, so let’s go to the source, Nokia’s USA site. Clicking on the home page I couldn’t find any content on the program, so I typed in “music” into the search bar. The list of results all had music in the title, but nothing that said “Comes with Music”. So, after clicking on the first two, I was taken to products that had nothing to do with music.

I’m sure I can’t be the only one looking for this type of content.

Here’s a couple suggestions for Nokia.

1. Start developing some relevant content around the “Comes with Music” program. Tell the story about Nokia and their music initiative through artists, labels and case stories. Make that content search-engine optimized so people can find it, and in the meantime, buy some Pay-per-click on certain keywords like “nokia comes with music” so people can find it.
2. Nokia is holding events all over the world. How about activating that event program with a magazine called something like, uh, “Comes with Music”? Here attendees could experience what Nokia has to offer without throwing the product in their face. This will help bring the connection to life and may actually help them keep relationships with the people that attend the event or find the content compelling.

These are two very simple things that Nokia could do to take their new product to the next level. Seems obvious, but it’s obviously not to Nokia.