How to get Tumblr working again for embedded IE browsers

Some of you may have noticed over the past couple weeks that Tumblr is not working inside of webDOM. You may have also noticed that Tumblr has stopped working in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. Whenever you click on a link to go to your dashboard or another page, all of the sudden webDOM crashes.

The first thing you need to verify is that you're using Windows 7. There is a different fix for WinXP but it includes using a proxy server that can mask the User-Agent string of the browser and will be covered in a different tutorial. The Windows 7 fix includes using Internet explorer 9. If you do not have IE9, download and install it now before continuing. To check your version of internet explorer, open it up, then click on the "Help" button in the toolbar and click "About".

After you have the proper version of IE for Windows 7, you can follow the next steps to get Tumblr working on your computer:

1. Make sure that webDOM is shut down and that no instances of the program are running
2. Click the Windows Start button
3. Type in "regedit" in the start search bar, then hit enter
4. Click on "Edit" then on "Find"... or just hit "Ctrl + F"
5. Enter into the search box "FEATURE_BROWSER" and hit enter, then wait for the search to find the proper key
6. On the right side, right-click and then under "New" choose, new DWORD. (DWORD is 32-bit)
7. Name the new DWORD "webDOM.exe" capitals matter.
8. Right click on your new DWORD and click "Modify"
9. In the value enter "1F40" (one F four zero) ... that's a hexidecimal value... then hit enter
10. Open webDOM as usual

It's important that you follow these steps exactly as they are written. This means that on step 7 when you are entering webDOM.exe as your new DWORD, you must have "DOM" in capital letters or the fix will not work. This is the same for any application which uses the same method to automate on Tumblr. Just replace "webDOM.exe" with the name of your application.

Tumblr has been working on their new interface and it has caused issues with older versions of internet explorer. However, the fact that you can simply change your user agent to above MSIE 7 or a whole other accepted browser points to a possible "security" based reason to do this. Most automation systems that are running on tumblr use the embedded (ActiveX) version of internet explorer and it seems Tumblr has targeted this directly. Even if internet explorer 9 is installed, the user agent for webDOM will show up as version 7.

Despite their attempts to block out undesirable users by using a generalized filter, Tumblr needs a bit more effort to reach their goal of a "no-automation" social network. Unfortunately they are growing, and we all know that the more things are resisted, the more they persist. They have entered into the never-ending arms race of anti-automation. Surely there will be new limits placed on following, commenting, and the like soon.

Back on the Game

This Morning...

It's been awhile since my last blog post. For awhile, I let SoundCloud just go by itself without doing any more SuperFollowing. This allowed me to see the natural "after-flow" of last month's campaign. So far I've gotten a total of 2,391 plays

Today I'm dropping comments on superfollow with a link back to my site directly to see if people will click on the link and maybe I can get more than one hit out of the link, whereas with messages I only get one hit per message. So far Superfollow has worked wonderfully because of the mutuality of it I'm assuming. The down side of it is that I've been makinng comments that just gave a compliment and basically waited for people to come back and click on my website link. That's too much extra work.

Later this evening...

What I did today has already proven to work more efficiently than sending messages. I've gotten 17 visits from soundcloud and 72 plays today so far. The idea of leaving the link in my comments has worked and caused people to come to my site off of different tracks, etc. Tomorrow I'll be able to see the final outcome. I only ran 1,000 and my return ratio doubled the prior one.

I'm also working on another new track so we'll see if it turns out being liked by my target market. I'm up to 990 plays this week, about 300 of those being today. I also have got about 586 subscribers in total and I've run through about 14.5k user Id's from the dub-step category of soundcloud users. I've dabbled with just sharing tracks on some of those, but the SuperFollow custom action on webDOM seems to be the way to go. That mixed with a good spun comment message allows for a very nice result so far and it's looking more promising. I'm going to run another 1,000 while I sleep.

In the next entry I'm going to cover how I will automate the webDOM soundcloud plugin fully by selecting a schedule for unfollowing and following. I've also created a new action in the newest soundcloud update to unfollow people who are not following back. It's called Mutualize.

Big day for Soundcloud

Yesterday I followed the new strategy on Soundcloud. The results were quite good; My conversion rate from follows/invites to actual profile views went up. My song plays and comments went up as well. This is what I did.

I created two new custom actions in webDOM. One that writes a comment on someone's profile, and the other shares my newest track with any user from my list. I combined these two scripts into a main custom action I called "SuperFollow". I have updated the soundcloud plugin, so for those of you using it, you can enjoy these new features as well. The SuperFollow action only follows a person who has tracks placed on their profile page. If it notices there are tracks, it will also comment on one of the tracks using the message body I have set up in my message settings. If SuperFollow notices that there are no tracks (i.e: a music fan rather than a musician) it then chooses to share a track with that person, just selecting my latest track as the one to share. Since my message is spun using DynamicPhrases, webDOM won't drop the same comment twice, or it will, but very rarely.

I ended up running this on about 2,000 user ID's because I forgot to stop it at 1,000... but no problems, because though it could not follow, it still shared tracks and wrote comments. Here's what I got from yesterday's run so far:

354 profile views
333 plays
62 comments
11 favoritings
4 visits to my site

Now... I took a look at my google analytics for this and I noticed that those 4 visits from yesterday came from my profile page on soundcloud... In total, soundcloud has sent me 36 visits since April 3rd... and on one day it sent me 12. The other 32 visits from them came from the read message page. This allows me to make a couple observations:

1. Soundcloud allows links in messages
2. People respond more to a direct message, though some respond badly if they think it's spam
3. Most people who you do not ask to go to your site will not click your website link on the right side of your profile
4. Commenting and following and sharing tracks really helps the ratio between the number of profile views and the number of plays I'm getting

Also, take into account that this is only one day after my campaign, so there's going to be more people coming in all day as well as over the next few days. The biggest problem is my conversion rate. It seems that I really do have to ask people to come visit my site. So I'm going to wait a day or two, let yesterday's run finish it's job, and then my new policy is going to be dropping links on comments. The links are clickable in comments. It might be a bit shady as far as people seeing it as spam or something, so I'm weary to do it... but hey, one's got to do what one's got to do.

In other news, I was looking at google analytics and my results from last.fm. I'm going to run a last.fm campaign again today and see what I can do as far as that goes. I didn't run much automation on it, and it is up there right after soundcloud in top referrers.

That being said... Facebook remains my top referrer simply due to the viral aspect. The day before yesterday I posted up a new song on my site and shared it on facebook. I got about 180 plays / 112 full plays / 2 downloads. This is pretty good and at least there's people listening and downloading my music. On the 18th though, only about 2 people came from facebook (most of my facebook visitors came from april 3rd to april 12th.) In direct traffic, I had 12 direct visitors on the 18th so it's showing that people are coming back and listening to my music.

It seems I need to make the download aspect a little bit more noticeable or visible. Perhaps I'll make the download button into a gif that slowly pulsates from that dark red color to a yellowish or green color. I'll play with it to see if I can get my download ratio up. Tomorrow we'll see the full aftermath of this. Now it's on to Last.fm for the night.

Marketing: Results from Last.FM and viral marketing

Yesterday I talked about my Last.fm strategy. I did not mention the customizations I did on the Auto-Shout script. I added a couple lines to get the username of the user into a variable and then used that variable in my message. I then made use of DynamicPhrases (text spinning in webDOM) in order to really get the most of out my comment posts. Also so that no two comment posts would be the same. This is the full message as a dynamic phrase...

Hey ^global.name|global.tname^!|.| -^ ^I see you like|been listenin to^ ^Kode 9^?| i see.^ ^People who like him usually get along with my music well.|I think you would like my music too.|you might like my stuff as well!|I know you'd like my tracks too.^ ^If you'd be so kind please|^ ^drop over to|go to|hit up|check out^ my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. ^I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.||I'll bet you love it :)|thanks :)|Leave a comment and tell me if I was right or not.^

If you want downloads of my ^tracks|music|songs^, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so ^head over there|check it out|head on over|you can go^ and get all the downloads you ^want|need|desire^ (new tracks every couple days)|^. Thanks for ^taking the time time to read this|reading this|supporting independent music|supporting me^ ^:)|:D|=)|;)|:o)|=o)^

When webDOM parses this out, it can come up with some pretty different messages, but still carry the same meaning. Here are some examples of how it works out...

Example Output 1:

Hey Amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? People who like him usually get along with my music well. If you'd be so kind please go to my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so check it out and get all the downloads you want (new tracks every couple days). Thanks for reading this :)

Example Output 2:

Hey amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? you might like my stuff as well! check out my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so you can go and get all the downloads you want. Thanks for supporting me :)

So I just went about Auto-Shouting this using a 90 second wait counter (at least 90 seconds between each comment sent). I was able to pull 7 people from last.fm directly since yesterday. I checked my last.fm account and I got 1 play yesterday. A comment, and some people tagged my account and added my music to their last.fm library. This is modest so far, so I'll see if it's just the fact that not everyone's on last.fm every day. I'll give last.fm a rest for a couple days and see if any of the effort from yesterday has some continuing payoffs.

As far as the viral part of the site goes... I'm delighted to see that facebook is sending me a nice constant stream of people. I looked at my stats on the site this morning and I've already had 30 full plays and 5 downloads (which means 5 shares of my tracks, most likely somewhere on facebook) Only about 8 people per day on average, but return visitors and new people alike. Here's my google analytics output on that...



Overall as well, here's a view of my GA dashboard. Visitors are going up, so that's awesome. Direct traffic being the biggest contributor, followed by facebook.


Onward and upward! Today I'm going to try out Mixcloud plugin and see where it takes me

Marketing Day 4: Checking SoundCloud Starting Last.FM

I got anxious last night and decided to start SoundCloud on messaging after about 750 friend adds (follows on soundcloud). I let the messenger run all night. Only problem is that webDOM says it's performed 350 actions while I only see two pages of messages in my outbox. I'm assuming that this is because SoundCloud ghosts messages (which is popular nowadays.) I used DynamicPhrases in my messages so I'm guessing that some of my messages are not getting through possibly because they are being sent too fast. I sat and watched webDOM sending for a bit and sure enough, SoundCloud comes back with a message after every send saying: "Message was sent".

While the messaging part is a little disconcerting, I found that at least I got some plays on my SoundCloud profile, a comment, and a couple of profile visits. Since I did my search in google, and overall doing a search for dubstep, it seems that a large portion of the people I chose are possibly just not on soundcloud much or have abandoned their profiles. This can be helped by trying to find more recent users. All in all... it seems my target was correct, and my auto-play song on the site matched that target, but so far I've not seen the type of results I'm looking for. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see the aftermath of the soundcloud venture. So far with adding all day yesterday I've gotten no referral hits from SoundCloud. This means, either my music is bunk, my target market is off, or that people on SoundCloud just don't like following external links on profiles. I'm hoping it's the later.

In other news, I continue to get hits from SoundClick commenting even though I stopped auto-commenting on soundclick two days ago. Seems that people on SoundClick are used to copying and pasting links, cause my direct hits who are new visitors keeps going up. I've also now hit the search engines with two people searching for "wise eyes music" yesterday. I'm assuming these are also soundcloud members as one of them searched for my actual domain.

All this is good stuff and positive hits for my site. But I need something that's going to bring more people, and I need to make it clear how to download the song. I was thinking that maybe a system could check if the song was 20% finished and then during that time, show the download dialog and possibly change the title of the page. When page titles change in most modern browsers, you can see the tab flashing or you can at least see the change. I'm going to go for the same way facebook chat does their flashing titles when someone gives you a chat. I'm hoping to increase the natural viral effect of the site and the tracks. Also, I'm releasing another track every other day (I have about 150 unreleased original tracks,) so that I can keep users coming back to the site who know that there's always going to be new content on there.

What's my new site for today? Last.FM. I've got a profile up on there already with some music uploaded. It's been around for a couple years, and I've already got about 165 natural listeners on that site. They are a good example of a site which gets unknown content heard. I have heard many good things about them so my plan is to set up a dynamic (spun) message that goes in comments to see if I can drive traffic from there. My plan is to find an artist that's got similar music, and then using that artists fans as my target market. I'm going to leave soundcloud and soundclick running as well so I can get the full benefit of webDOM.

So I'm going to similar artists pages, then gathering from the main profile page. After that I click on "See more listeners" on the right and usually last.fm gives about 5 pages of listeners or 100 most recent listeners. This is great because these are people recently involved in the site, fans of a similar artist, and will be perfect candidates for my music. I'm starting small with about 400 listeners of similar artists. Then I'm setting up my profile with the new link to my site and sending out a very targeted message. I'm using Last.fm plugin's Auto-Shout custom action in order to get the job done.

We'll see how last.fm pans out tomorrow. Happy marketing!