*Puts on criticism cap*
I'm no expert either but to me it seemed the online element was pretty much missing and what was there was badly managed.
Besides Meat and his assistant tweeting and Facebooking themselves there was nothing. Nothing to see on YouTube, nothing decent with regards to a new / nice website.
The clips appeared on an old record company website. The record company doesn't update its own Facebook page either. Then some tracks appeared on Soundcloud and these were never embedded on Meat's own website. A 20 minute job at most with WordPress.
Random mistakes where the music was released on iTunes and then pulled.
In addition the pledge stuff was badly managed and seemed a bit of a weird hindsight money making thing rather than pledging for something that doesn't exist yet (which the platform surely is for), with bizarre excuses about delays of the products and I regret forking out a lot of money on something I still haven't got. If anything the pledge thing should have been dedicated towards a proper GATW video if the record company / other sponsors couldn't be arsed putting up any money.
The online element pretty much seemed to be resorted to selling / making money only rather than using a lot of opportunities (including free tools) to actually tell people about the product.
I bet the negative TV performances publicity helped sales somewhat but this surely wasn't their "expert" approach relying on that.
Shame and I honestly think several of us fans could have done a better job in certain areas (the disastrous video and website etc).
Website is a total joke. I appreciate these things aren't as important as they used to be but that is no excuse. For many searches relating to the album Adje's site comes up first!
The problem then is this and I DO think that THIS type of stuff matters:
If there was a lot of content on the Meat Loaf site about the album that review would have been pushed further down in these type of results for sure.
Notice how the extract on the 4th place is only text that Google can crawl and is actually related to the relating merchandise and not the album itself or its release !
Google is clever enough to put things together knowing this is indeed the new album, that is the official site and that is a related extract. But even 1 paragraph of text about the actual album release on the official site would probably have pulled that result to the 3rd place I reckon.
Damn shame this was not better organised to potentially increase the sales by even a few thousand where possible.
*Takes off criticism cap and waits for dislikes from those who think everyone did an excellent job and everything was done perfectly*