[2010-03-29] Scruffydog Updates from AAm Autograph Session

Originally Posted by Scruffydog777

Oh the joys of being an airline employee and flying standby. I wasn't able to make the 1:30pm local time flight out of Paris. It was a long wait after that just to get my bag back so I could go check on other flights. I'm now going to catch a 7:30 flight to jfk. I might not make back in time to get to Boston where I'm supposed to work tonight. Work isn't a problem, I usually give them a good nights work so there pretty forgiving when something like this comes up. The loss of pay will hurt, but it will be well worht it for what went on here. They have an employee lounge at jfk where I can spend the night if I have to.


I'm keeping the bag of cd's close by. Anyone who comes near them, I start barking at them.

I just kind want to rehash about something during the interview. Like I said, I thought we'd be all set up beforehand with our cameras and stuff before Lilly came in. Because of it, I was pre-occupied with the so many other things. Having problems with the camcorder, couldn't find my tripod, I had problems with my camear too. Switching back and forth between the two. Waiting for the right moment to give Alizee the open letter.

Then the camera crew came over to me to start interviewing me. I kind of wish they hadn't because I could hardly think straight. I hate that type of limelight. But then they started asking q uestions, asking questions like why do you like Alizee so much. Which made me start thinking about her and all she's meant to me. I started looking across the table and looking at her in the way I should be looking at her. Looking at her knowing how finding out about her meant to me. Like I said it was a tough moment but if they hadn't come over, I would have just been pre-occupied with taking pictures, presenting gifts and what have you, getting the other members in the video. I wouldn't have really appreciated the moment of why I was there in the first place. It would hav been over before I knew it. So there interviewing me, as much as I didn't like it was a blessing in disguise.

Another bit of your amazing experience, I enjoyed all those you told and one again it was like that. Although it's hard to imagine about such experiences unless you have them, but still reading it thrills me. Sir, you have a great job and congratulations for your successful meeting. You achieved more than what was expected.

It's good that being an aircraft mechanic helps you a lot in travels.

Well why do like Alizée is, I guess, a very difficult thing to answer. I can understand it because I have been asked the same question many times. Is she the best singer or most beautiful woman? Well the question cannot be answered with that. She's more than just a singer or a beauty. Interview made you think about it and that too in front of her. I don't what I have felt at that moment. Maybe her whole life that I know would have come into my mind. Did anything like that happen to you?

[Deepwaters]

The reason she is so special is that she would do something like this half-hour thing just for her fans from the U.S. It's not that she's a beautiful woman (beautiful women are not in short supply). It's not that she has a lovely voice -- it's good, but there are more impressive voices out there. It's who she is. It's making a connection to a splendid heart.

Originally Posted by Deepwaters

The reason she is so special is that she would do something like this half-hour thing just for her fans from the U.S. It's not that she's a beautiful woman (beautiful women are not in short supply). It's not that she has a lovely voice -- it's good, but there are more impressive voices out there. It's who she is. It's making a connection to a splendid heart.

I totally agree with your view. When a person discovers her, it is because of her beauty and voice, but when someone becomes a fan of her, it's because of knowing that who she is. Her personality, that is so strong, that no one can remain unaffected by it.

[VVVACCPLPNLY]

Yes, I try to point this out to everyone! What other singer sets up a private meeting with a handful of fans to sign 50 discs for fans in a country where her music is not even released? Who, I ask you? NO ONE, I SAY, NO ONE! How could anybody not respect that! That is pureness of heart, character, and no other celebrity has that! This is ahh... I get shivers just thinking about it! Let's all thank Alizée, for being (and this is where I disagree with the mystical deepwaters) the most amazingly voiced, talented, and perfectly charactered person on EARTH!

[Tiwaz]

What can I say. I don't know, it's just super awesome and I'm happy for everybody being happy. AAm getting this attention and all. Great job and thanks to everyone involved.

[Aron14]

Hi everyone.
I have got my pictures posted. Check them out if you wish. Here's the link:
http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/gall...89b7fde2337496
What do you think?

[FanDeAliFee]

<center><big><big>Digital Business Intelligence Today</big></big></center>

My friend Ruroshen <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=156413&postcount=64">expressed</a> skepticism that the Alizée staff knew about the <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=156393&postcount=59">traffic volume</a> at our Web site prior to our recent approach to them, and will explain below why I disagree with him. I begin by explaining how routinely data about consumers is now used to sell the most banal, low-margin items.

There has been a revolution in predicting consumer behavior as the cost of computing has plummeted in recent decades. The economic advantage of doing just that has driven it. And it hardly required the arrival of the mass-market Internet to get going. Learn more by reading a 2003 <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/04/25/60II/main551177.shtml">report</a> by US <i>CBS News</i>, which includes a profile of consumer demographics firm InfoUSA, founded way back in 1972. It reports in part:
<blockquote><i>Here’s how it works. The nation’s big banks no longer just do banking... once you’ve done business with any of [their subsidiary] firms, your financial information is distributed to the rest of their affiliates... Citigroup, for instance, owns more than 1,500 different companies, all of which can use your financial information to market their products.</i></blockquote>
The ease of profiling you is exemplified by similar government activities. Long before we were told there was some security crisis that necessitated massive abrogations of privacy, the very ability to cheaply aggregate personal information led to such activity - even by nations which are not historically inclined to imagine they are anointed guardians of virtue whose mission is to subdue the world.

In early 2000, the office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada <a href="http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-c/archive/02_05_b_000516_e.cfm">said</a>:

<blockquote><i>Canadians should be concerned about the existence of a de facto citizen profile containing as many as 2,000 pieces of information about each of more than 30 million Canadians... Successive Privacy Commissioners have assured Canadians that there was no single federal government file, or profile about them. We were wrong...</i></blockquote>
But don't think every use of such information is sinister. Once you know where people are and what they want or like, you get a much better idea of what they MIGHT want or like. This helps you reduce the expensive errors you hazard in siting a new highway, store or other speculative project.

And of course retailers use their own sales records all the time to decide what new merchandise to put on their shelves, how much space it should have and how it should be priced. For example, Wal-Mart reported in 2004 that it maintains 460 terabytes of data. That's about 80 kilobytes for every person on this planet, or about 1.5 megabytes for every person in the United States. A typical lengthy textual e-mail note might be 2 kilobytes in size. You can read how such data is exploited in a New York Times article <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html?_r=1">here</a>.

In doing fund-raising for small-town backwoods philanthropy, I've purchased customized mailing lists of local people from the types of massive databases discussed above, specifying particular germane demographics. One address costs about as much as the stamp on the solicitation letter you post to it. Doing this lets you raise as much money with a tiny fraction of the letters you'd need if you mailed to everyone in your target area.

Now on to the Corsican girl.

<center><big><big>Team Alizée Business Intelligence</big></big></center>

Alizée's fans are skewed young, which means they are avid Internet users. In the old days it was very hard to divine what your fans were thinking, because you could not read minds. Fan clubs existed, but fan newsletters were expensive to produce and distribute and so they were rare things. Even fan letters were much tougher to knock out than e-mail. Now it seems every other person has a MySpace page or a blog and they blab away the most intimate things at will. Because of automation, it is also incredibly cheap to audit all this stuff with machines. Google makes a fortune doing it.

There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the Alizée staff watches the response to the stuff like Web pages, photos, videos, tweets and the like she publishes on the Internet. This includes demographic analysis of all sorts.

I also cannot believe they do not follow the major trends of third-party online publications which are about the Corsican girl, like the view counts of pirated videos on YouTube, and the traffic on all nontrivial fan sites. No doubt this was especially true during the early stages of the comeback.

That's not to say they see every sparrow fall, or even many. But when they recently offered the <i>coffret deluxe</i> product, don't you think they took the time to stick the string:

+"coffret deluxe" +Alizée

into the Google search engine to try to anticipate demand? When I do that now, I get a measly 590 hits. You may recognize the fifth search hit, a Web page at Alizée America titled <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?p=152308"><i>Poll: Are you preordering Une Enfant Du Siècle?</i></a>

So even if you stipulate there was no knowledge of Alizée America before then, the metered response of fans to this high-priced product offer, related to a few thousand dollars of purchases during the Great Recession, surely got some attention.

Of course fans are not the only people who purchase goods, but they are probably the best caged canaries you can measure. And modern pollsters are interested in more than just raw numbers. The "focus group" exists for just that reason, to examine anecdotally the "why" behind preference patterns. Fan site postings provide an inexpensive source of such data to mine for these ends.

Again, I am not a marketing professional, so I cannot tell you what role fan response plays in sustaining an artistic career. But even the pros are on new ground now because of the MANY changes being made to the business because of the widespread use of digital technology. A few years ago people would laugh at how the promise of the Internet was supposed to have threatened traditional publishing. But now, all of a sudden, these same people are not laughing, and some are crying. And this is only the beginning of potential changes.

Okay, that's enough about Internet marketing. Now I'd like to say a few things about the run-up to Scruffy's Paris trip.

<center><big><big>Coordination at Alizée America</big></big></center>

While I have been an enraptured Alizée fan since encountering her work in early 2006, I have only followed the Alizée America Web site for a few months, starting not long before I registered as a member, for the purpose of posting a link to some fan art I created in spring 2009. I have limited my participation to (asynchronous) forum posts and the Ventrillo live-blogging conference only, until very recent days, when at last I enabled private messaging because of the urgency of events.

One thing I noticed soon enough was that Ben was thinking about selling the site. I got the impression it was becoming too much of a burden to run, and in recent weeks his postings seem to allude to preoccupation with things like Real Life! He has always responded to my postings in some thread in a kind way, so in no way do I feel snubbed by him, which I wanted to note before saying more.

Originally Posted by Roman

I missed the part about who exactly and how they
found out about Scruff and made the meeting...

Originally Posted by pepelepew

Thanks Ben for your part in all of this. Did
you know that doc had contacted Virgin before you got this notice?

Originally Posted by Ben

No, I didn't! So you can bet I had quite the
double-take when I got that first email! As I'm sure Scruffy did too
when I told him! The past five days have been quite surreal. I can
only imagine what it must be like for Scruff!

Originally Posted by Ben

...To the best of my knowledge, here's the short version of how it went down:

-Docdtv contacts the Virgin Megastore about an ambassador from Alizée America coming to the autograph session.
-Virgin staff thinks this is a a great idea, contacts Sony.
-Sony/Alizée/her team think it would be good to meet this ambassador and sign 50 CDs. They tell Virgin.
-Virgin writes back to Docdtv with the good news.
-When he doesn't respond for a few days, they also contact me (last Thursday).
-I pass it on to Scruffy, and the three of us scramble to finalize the arrangements.

Yes, that is my brief account as well. You should know that my original note provided Virgin with my telephone number, as dialed from France. I checked the relevant e-mail account for their reply for two days and then relented for a week, knowing they could phone me in an emergency. My answering machine never recorded a call from them. I picked up their e-mail late last Thursday.

Please note, as simple fact, that of the <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/converse.php?u=17&u2=2861">four Visitor Messages</a> I have sent Ben to date, he has responded only to the last one. I did not expect him to reply to my messages, based on this experience. That's why both when I <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=154745&postcount=81">reported</a> e-mailing Virgin on the 15th, and when I finally <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=155926&postcount=164">read</a> their delayed reply, I posted full notice of what was going on directly into the FORUM thread called <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5447"><i>[2010-03-29] Alizée autograph signing at Virgin Champs-Elysées</i></a> in the hope that Scruffy, as well as whomever in authority was auditing the thread (like Ruroshen or Brad or even Ben) would read about what I was doing. I didn't think I was being clandestine about anything!

Again, here was the <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=155938&postcount=203">strategy</a> driving my original inquiry:

1. I gave the Virgin store an INCENTIVE (many more sales) to be interested.
2. I gave Jive Epic/Sony Music an INCENTIVE to cooperate by documenting the NEW importance (10% Web hits) of the potentially HUGE American market.
3. I was COURTEOUS by writing in the best French I could manage.
4. I wrote EARLY enough for them to act. (Although my reply monitoring...)
5. I documented our SINCERITY by pointing at the germane discussion thread.
6. I made a SPECIFIC request, viz. What is the quota on disk signing?
7. I SPUN the PR-angle by saying we're sending an Ambassador, not a 'dog.

<center><big><big>Translator and "Honorary Consul"</big></big></center>

Early Saturday morning I Private Messaged Scruffy, Ben and Ruroshen for the third time about the signing on Monday evening, suggesting that it would be useful if Scruffy could recruit a Parisian member of Alizée America to serve as his translator, given his limited command of French. I further noted that should the Alizée team find some use for us, it would be most helpful if one of our French national members served as a liason there, with this event being a good time to introduce such a person.

It turned out this wasn't bad advice, even if my particular nominee was not tapped:

Originally Posted by Scruffydog777

We went downstairs and I talked to the guy behind the counter and he didn't seem to have a clue as to what I was talking about. This is where Mark being there was really a god send. He explained in French what was going on and soon afterwards we had someone with us connected with what was going on back stage.

<center><big><big>Television & Video</big></big></center>

The other week I had <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=154896&postcount=103">anticipated</a> that French TV might be there, and encouraged Scruffy to try to leverage it, writing this:<blockquote><i>Thanks for the applause for the 'ambassador' idea, guys. Scruff, I don't think it would be THAT weird if you DID put on a tux with tails and a sash... Should French TV shoot there, they might even feature you in any short clip they produce and air. In any case, were I Alizée, I suspect I would not be so jaded yet that I would not react with some kindly amusement at the gesture. And as a visual mnemonic, it would also make it harder for her to forget the Open Letter which will get stashed in a bag with a bunch of other stuff.</i></blockquote>

Originally Posted by Scruffydog777

...Well then the people from M6 started interviewing me ...Maybe you will all get to see it on an M6 video, though I could do with out it.

Originally Posted by Scruffydog777

...There were 2 people there during the regular signing interviewing different people. Well I'm usually a very camera shy type of person, but I jumped right out in front of these 2 with my bag of 50 autographed cd's and went after them, because I thought this would be another great opportunity to spread the word of AA. Well they intereviewed me and afterwards interviewed Mark. Later on, at the end of the autograph session, they interviewed Alizee. They said what they decide to post will be available on the net wednesday on konbini.com...

Did anyone get the Corsican girl on video to say what I had suggested, <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/showpost.php?p=154212&postcount=10">
"Un millier de baisers, Alizée America!"</a>?

<center><big><big>Health Issues</big></big></center>

Originally Posted by Scruffydog777

...I wasn't expecting [Alizée] to be there
already she was right there in front of us. With all the people that were in there, she stood out like a beacon in the night. She shook hands with all of us and then we took up positions around the table...

I have never been a celebrity accosted by crowds of fans. But some years ago I ran a street fair which required that I touch the hand of a couple hundred people strange to me three times. I had never done anything like that before. Immediately after the fair I became sicker than I had been in decades and stayed that way for an extended spell. Lack of certain causative proof notwithstanding, I vowed never again to touch so many strange hands! Every time I watch <i>En Concert</i> and see Alizée high-fiving so many of her fans I want to say: "No, don't..."

I suppose she has a better constitution than I do, perhaps on account of age, and could tolerate the risks of such intimacy. (Or maybe performers who touch so many fans get penicillin shots right after the show!) All the same, it is very nice when someone is willing to risk touching hands with you, and I hope Scruffy and his fortunate companions are grateful for the chance to shake hands with the Corsican girl and her crew! Jalen, don't be envious! Remember, that's the same hand Alizée uses to touch Jérémy, and I won't say how!

<center><big><big>Thanks to Our Founder, Brad</big></big></center>

Originally Posted by brad

THIS IS SO AWESOME GUYS!

way back when i started this website, this was my ultimate goal all
along. seeing her sitting there with an 'alizee america' hat is so
satisfying to me i can't even put it into words

Thank you for your vision, hard work and faith, Brad. As they say, chance favors those who are prepared!

<center><big><big>Thanks to Scruffy</big></big></center>

Needless to say, we wouldn't be talking about ANY of this had Scruffy not made the effort to go to Paris and tell us about his plans in advance! I am a bit surprised none of our European members expressed interest in showing the early initiative he did, especially with regard to aggregating disk orders, without which the private session could NEVER have taken place. But I suppose it was the best thing for the potential PR effect that an American national crossed the ocean to pay homage to Alizée's American-themed album in Paris.

There were even some tense moments ahead of time, because Scruffy didn't know if the US government could give him a new passport in time. I recall it only arrived about 11 March, a mere four days before I got the idea to write the Virgin Megastore. I am delighted with the success Scruffy has made of the trip, despite all the opportunities for mishap. He is truly our Neil Armstrong! The only thing that could make us happier is if the moon maiden and her crew found a way for Alizée America to fulfill the promise made in the Open Letter Chuck led us to create. Time will tell.

[Fall]

Originally Posted by Aron14

Hi everyone.
I have got my pictures posted. Check them out if you wish. Here's the link:
http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/gall...89b7fde2337496
What do you think?

The pics look great Aron, thanks for sharing them. The antlers one made me laugh, and the one with her incredible smile behind you is great. That was a lot of albums you guys bought, they must have thought you were crazy, or maybe trying to rob them lol

[Ben]

Originally Posted by docdtv

One thing I noticed soon enough was that Ben was thinking about selling the site. I got the impression it was becoming too much of a burden to run, and in recent weeks his postings seem to allude to preoccupation with things like Real Life!

Please note, as simple fact, that of the <a href="http://alizeeamerica.com/forums/converse.php?u=17&u2=2861">four Visitor Messages</a> I have sent Ben to date, he has responded only to the last one. I did not expect him to reply to my messages, based on this experience.

I don't intend to run this site for the rest of my (or its) life, but have no plans of selling in the immediate future, Docdtv. And while I haven't had time to respond to all of your messages, we have been considering each of them. There's a whole thread in the staff section discussing a "best-of" thread, for example, and I do need to update our twitter graphics. So please keep sending and suggesting, I hope to add more staff soon to take care of such things! But in the meantime, today was spent updating the homepage.

[Fall]

Originally Posted by Ben

I don't intend to run this site for the rest of my (or it's) life, but have no plans of selling in the immediate future, Docdtv. And while I haven't had time to respond to all of your messages, we have been considering each of them. There's a whole thread in the staff section discussing a "best-of" thread, for example, and I do need to update our twitter graphics. So please keep sending and suggesting, I hope to add more staff soon to take care of such things! But in the meantime, today was spent updating the homepage.

It looks great Ben!
As others also suggested, I think you should also add Lilly's "hello" video when Scruffy and the others upload it. You've been doing an awesome job!