Wow, where do I begin?

I’m in Miami for my first week as Director of Product Development (Music Services) with Market America, a leading network marketing company based in Greensboro, NC with a global footprint in 7 territories, including the UK, Canada, and Australia. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, as I just accepted the offer on Tuesday and Wednesday I was on a plane to Miami!

My role is to drive product development of music applications and services for Conquer Entertainment, a social music platform developed by its CEO, Amanda Ridinger, and the passionate, talented, and creative team supporting the product to date.

The Conquer Entertainment platform for artists is a DIY software-as-a-service mechanism to allow artists to maximize the distribution and marketing of the music to fans through social media, while leveraging Market America’s transformational power of the Shop.com’s network of 190,000 direct distributors worldwide. Shop.com associates will have the ability to create and market music they believe in directly to music fans in their networks. Music fans can purchase music directly from the a Shop.com associate’s website, innovative social media widgets for Facebook and other platforms (I’ll be bringing this to WordPress and Drupal for sure!), or through the Conquer Entertaiment portal, which currently redirects to https://myworld.marketamerica.com/. That will certainly change and I’m already working on it.

The first order of business will be to ensure that music fans and artists can discover their music at a Conquer Entertainment domain name, while we prepare for the rollout of Conquer 3.0. In the meantime, we’ll be rolling out a ShopBox widget (patent pending) for social platforms providing artists with a way to publish their tracks to Facebook and sell tracks directly in social media streams. Yes, you’ll be able to complete the transaction AND download directly from a Facebook news feed or band page. It’s pretty awesome. I wish I would have thought of that myself!

Of course, just getting in the door this week, I have tons of ideas. I’ve been meeting with (and partying with) the Conquer team for the past few days, both at their booth on the main concourse of American Airlines arena and at the Market America after-party at the Viceroy 50, a lounge with an outdoor pool on the 50th Floor of the Viceroy Hotel in downtown Miami. Of course, on the way down from the party, we got stuck in the elevator for a few minutes, but it ended up working out. Although my life is dedicated to digital, sometimes digital – especially when running things as important as elevators – can be problematic.

It’s off to my 3rd day here in Miami. I’ll try and post a few more pics and videos of the Conquer team and the conference itself. Time for breakfast!