Brand Marketing for Your Band

 1 Response »
Jan 272012
 

Brand marketing and why it is important to your band?

Competition for the attention of music fans has never been fiercer. Many artists are spending more time and energy trying to get noticed then on the most important part “THE MUSIC”. I recently took my periodical look into how many music specific social network sites are out there and found 273. Right there you can leverage some of your fans to set-up and operate profiles for you. They run it and you pop in once a month. Or better yet you stay in touch with these profile leaders via IM on all important news so that they can stay fresh and up to date. Just be sure to remain the gatekeeper of your online presence.

What is a gatekeeper?


In medieval times a gatekeeper was in charge of lowering and raising a gate that protected the castle. They let people in and kept others out, depending on what their affiliation was with the community and king, as well as what the intent of the visit was. Gatekeepers were extremely important to the protection and survival of the community, yet they were either discounted or ignored. In the personal branding arena, you have to play the role of the gatekeeper or someone will steal what is rightfully your’s.

So how do you retain this Gatekeeper position? 1st off you build your own domain and web-site under your control. Then use the funnel approach to direct visitors from all your online peripheral pages to your main site. Do this through widgets, links, etc.

But what do you have once people come to your main site? You want them to both stick around and come back. You do this with interactivity. Have a few songs free to download in MP3 format. Easy to find page specific to selling your music and other merchandise. If fans don’t quickly find what they are looking for they will simply abandon the artist’s website. Highly motivated fans might check iTunes as an alternative but there is much less value for the artist in the indirect relationship.

So how does this relate to Brand Marketing you ask? Being your own gatekeeper means you control your brand not someone else. Expanding your online reach as far as your fans or street team will allow makes you easy to find. And once you have fans at your site giving them what they want keeps them there. Add in your own personal regular events and watch as people come back buying your music along with interacting with you.

Speaking of interactivity as time moves on speed of communication becomes ever more vital.
Keeping track of who is saying what keeps you in control as your own gatekeeper. How do you do this though. A few basics is to set up a twitter search RSS and Google alerts RSS. To really get into it you could look into reputation management providers. The main thing to keep in mind is that we are living in a day of lightening fast messages that can have an impact rather you are aware of them or not.

Additional resources or posts of note
Hypebot
Personal Branding Myths
How to build your online brand

6 Rules of Twitter for Musicians

 2 Responses »
Jan 202012
 

Twitter fits in quite nicely with record label 2.0. With the focus on the conversation community building becomes a natural progression. As fans begin to follow your twitter account they could begin to feel a bigger part of your career. As you learn who else your fans are talking about you can follow them too and maybe find some ideas to work together in enhance your shared community.

Before moving on to talk about different aspects and ideas for using twitter though. I wanted to mention that Twitter is now integrated into your reverbnation account. If you aren’t on reverbnation yet you should be.

1) Starting out on twitter is as easy as signing up, filling out the complete profile info, and following couple of people (@futuremusictalk, @CyberPR, @dubber for starters). Once that is complete you will need to answer the age old question “what are you doing?”. It really doesn’t matter what you put here a simple “hello” will suffice.

2) Tell the wold with a widget or URL link to your profile. This can be placed on your own website or integrated into your social network profile. Even though using my EPK post as a guideline for setting up your social network profile keeps it clean adding in Twitter would be a great option. You don’t have to sign in daily to accept followers, for that matter you don’t even have to follow them back. And this brings us to

3) Communicating with twitter is as easy as checking your @’s Stream and responding to anything you feel is important. Using this method anyone rather they follow you or not can communicate with you even if you don’t follow them. I spend most of my twitter time in my main stream and check my @’s 1st and last thing on twitter. Though when I am asking questions or otherwise interacting actively I will spend my time in my @’s stream.

4) Be personal with your tweets, but keep in mind that your fans don’t want to know everytime you pick your nose. It could be tempting to have everything you do online placed into your twitter feed. But I wouldn’t advice that, insted if there is something like your blog or tour dates that gets updated regularly create a seperate twitter account and use twitterfeed. Then wherever the source information comes from you can place a twitter link for people to subscribe to. However if you do add in more twitter profiles be sure to have them all follow each other. Of course after saying that it is important to have the most relevant information up front.

Example: You add into your tour RSS a live show date for July and it is only January. This would go into your tour date twitter stream automatically. Then as it gets to be 3 weeks before the July show you start tweeting about it in your main stream.

This all depends on how much information is going into twitter from these other streams. For instance if you only blog once a week, or live shows are added only a few times a month. This is fine to feed into your main stream, but if you are booking shows daily for months in advance then that may be too much. It all boils down to personal opinions of both you and those who follow you.

5) What are they saying about you? Now that you are all set up on twitter, or if you have decided not to. Head on over to Search Twitter and put your band name in. In the upper right of the screen will be the option to subscribe via RSS or twitter. I use the RSS myself so that I don’t miss anything, but the choice is yours on how closely you want to pay attention to your brand.

6) What can you use twitter for?

 

a)Take requests in advance from your fans for your next show. Not only can you plan your sets in advance this way but you know what your fans want to hear too.

 

b)Give exclusive and 1st picks of your music, album artwork, or anything else. This not only shows you care but gets many of your fans exciting enough to talk about you for days. Instant word of mouth marketing.

 

Feel free to add any of your own ideas about using twitter to what I have written here. I can foresee an almost endless supply of creative uses to this tool.

Twitter is Garbage

 1 Response »
Jan 182012
 

Twitter is garbage, after all as one of many social networking sites it does nothing for you. All a social network site does is force you to get involved in a community that is not interested in you or your music. Why jump on board any of these so called next big things? Well to really be able to answer that question we need to know just what a social network site is.

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people.

Right of the bat we can see that social network sites are regularly visited by millions of people. That means these sites have millions of potential new fans. Now if you can search through the sites to see who would be interested in your music and be able to contact them that would be great. Naturally since these sites are about shared interests you will be expected to participate.

So back to Twitter then, as a social network site/tool, you need to participate. As Twitter is more about the conversation then to participate you need to join the conversation. Best way to do this is to do a twitter search on subjects that interest you and reply to anyone saying something worth while.

Of course you want to talk about yourself too. When you go out on the town though do you only talk about yourself? I hope not. Of course if you spend any time participating in the various conversations happening 24/7 then you will have plenty of people to talk about too.

In fact if you are doing the twitter search suggestion then you may want to Retweet some of what you see for your own followers to join in as well. So then what is Retweet, and how do you do it? Retweeting is merely letting others know what and by who you find interesting. The way to do it is to place “RT” in front of “@the person you are retweeting” then what they tweeted that you found interesting. The great thing about RT others is that many times you will get interest from new people.

Speaking of getting others interested in you and hopefully your music. As you converse with other people your conversations will be seen by others. If these others find the conversation interesting they may start to follow you too. The more people who are following you the more people that will see when you tweet about your music

Now lets look at a top secret twitter trick (soon not to be so secret). Getting videos done for your music then uploaded to the many online hosting sites. Each one allows you to place a description of the video. Here you need to start off with a URL of where your music is for sale (or any other site you want watchers to check out). Now as you tweet a link to these videos, which many will take a look at, some of those visitors will look into buying your music. For these tweets you may want to add “Please RT” to the end. After all you want more people to check out the videos right?

So yes Twitter is garbage and so is all those other next great things called Social network sites. However for getting new people to check out your music and maybe a few videos they are great. Thus 1 persons garbage may very well be your treasure.

 

This article originally apperaed in 50k Music Mag Issue #3

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