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| image from ‘The Breakfast Club’, courtesy moviescreenshots.blogspot.com |
Week 4 of the Music Success in Nine Weeks course covers social networking. It’s the longest and meatiest chapter so far, not surprisingly as this topic has in a short time become an absolutely essential component of marketing – not just music, of course, but just about anything – and it is growing in importance daily. Ariel covers several of the major networks in some detail, offering strategies and tactics and some specific resources for getting more out of each.
The course also links to some introductory videos at Commoncraft.com, which do a great job of introducing the basic concepts and the major platforms in clear, straightforward presentations. It would be both difficult and pointless to try to do it better than they have, which is presumably why Ariel has linked to them, and so I will follow her lead. If you don’t know what I’m on about, go there.
Instead, I’ll give my spin on what social networking means to a musician who wants to get some value out of it without getting lost in what is, frankly, a bit of a jungle. I’ll preface this by revealing that I am actually quite new to the whole phenomenon, having dismissed and avoided it until quite recently. Oh well – better late than never, and I’m learning fast…
Talk amongst yourselves…
So. Social Networking… I have to say I get a kick out of this term. For some reason I have an image in my head of Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club (Bender) responding to Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) saying he was in the Physics club. “So it’s sorta social…demented and sad, but social. Right?…”
What, exactly, is non-social networking? What did people do before? “Oh, hi, you’re into the same stuff I’m into, we should, you know, not get together and… not talk… or something. Let’s not grab a coffee sometime. No, don’t tell me what you’re doing, this is networking, didn’t you get the memo? We’re not supposed to actually interact – that would be (eww) social… this is work. There’s no time for pleasantries.”
‘Nuff said. The word is what it is, and it’s what we’ve all more or less agreed to call the extraordinary phenomenon of the new Web, where static documents are a thing of the past and interaction is everything. And if you didn’t get the memo, and you are trying to get exposure for your music (or art or business or brand or whatever) online, then you need to know two things right away: a) yes, you have to get involved – there’s no way around it, no going back, and it’s not going away anytime soon; and b) don’t worry, it’s not too late – and by the way, it’s pretty easy. Well, kind of.
What could be simpler?
Yes, it is easy on one level – these systems are generally designed to be extremely quick and intuitive to get into, partly because the vast majority of people that will use them have the attention-span of a fruit-fly. I didn’t say they were dumb; doubtless many are, but that’s nothing new – what’s new is that even the really smart ones (and there are LOTS of them) are ADD-riddled and if they haven’t figured out what something does in a few seconds, they’re already gone. You missed them. Oh well.
However, like almost anything worth doing it’s worth doing effectively and well. Moreover, from the standpoint of someone wanting to use these tools to build some visibility and capture some of the world’s attention for the music we have poured our hearts and souls into, it’s essential to do it smart – anything else is a waste of time, and when it comes to wasting time social networking is like TV on speed, crack and acid all at the same time. So you need to know what you want to get out of it and how to position yourself, your brand and your music to get it.
And that, of course, is not quite as easy. In fact it can appear, at first glance, dizzyingly complex. Let’s take something like Twitter. One the surface it’s laughably simple, and in fact that’s the main objection that people who don’t ‘get it’ (of which I was one a few short months ago) often raise: what can be said in 140 character that is of any importance whatsoever? And isn’t everyone just blathering on about what they had for breakfast?
The answers are, respectively: A great deal, or nothing at all, depending on who’s saying it; and an emphatic No (sure, there’s a lot of that in there too, but there are also amazing and profound things taking place every second). One of the buzzwords floating around these days for what happens on Twitter that is so important and fascinating is: The Conversation. It captures the essence of it, but you probably still need to spend some time there to really ‘get it’.
Nature abhors a vacuum…
Twitter’s very simplicity is one key reason it is so revolutionary; the others are immediacy and transparency. It takes a bit of using it before you ‘get’ the importance and power of this magic formula – it’s hard to explain, and apparently came as a bit of a surprise even to the platform’s creators. They honestly didn’t know what they were building. But they built it, and people came…
Around the same time I had my ‘aha’ moment with Twitter, I also became aware of the dizzying array of ancillary applications that have quickly grown up around it… alternate interfaces, statistics, visualizations, analysis, protocols to link it with other networks and platforms and generally extend it both horizontally and vertically. It’s more like an ecosystem than a website. (Ooh, I like that.)
Other networks are similar – Facebook, for example is a bit more self-contained but is substantially more complex in and of itself. To make matters worse, they seem to have an uncontrollable urge to keep fiddling with it, and it can be hard to find what you’re looking for (Live view? News view? Status updates? Pages? Groups? Privacy settings? Applications?).
The business world was pretty quick to see and grasp the opportunity, and a fair amount of the traffic on all of these systems is now direct marketing of one flavour or another – some of it distinctly sleazy, some less so. If you do nothing but promote your stuff, it’s not much different than standing on a street-corner shouting “Buy my CD! Buy my CD!”. Utterly futile.
Mixing business with pleasure…
What’s a poor musician to do with all of this? Ariel’s book tries to give some direction, but in fact it’s really possible to boil everything down to a single word: engagement.
What’s more effective than flogging music to people who don’t know you and are busy with their own lives? Going to a great party and working the room. Social networking is the world’s biggest and (in some ways) best party and it’s always on, 24/7. You need to show up, engage, take part in the conversation, be yourself, be interested in other people, comment and respond and be genuine and… for lack of a better word… social.
Social networking offers an immense, open-ended and global space to be yourself, and to be available to your fans. The tools are there (in spades) to do this in strategic and highly effective ways, and it’s likely a good idea to explore and use some of them – but don’t overthink it. An authentic voice is a valuable tool too, and you can lose it if you’ve got your eyes on the prize all the time.
What’s not productive is to try to understand them all – or stay on top of every new development (you could probably do this full-time, investigating hundreds of new tools a day, and literally never get ‘on top’ of them all – that’s how fast this stuff is moving). Probably the best strategy is to time-box it and dedicate (say) an hour every day to it – whether that’s all at once or spread out is up to you. Pick one thing and do it for long enough to get the ‘feel’ of it. Make some new friends. Get to know them a bit before going into self-promotion mode. It pays off. Trust me.
Finally… try some of the ‘other’ networks – Twitter and Facebook are the two heavyweights and should not be ignored, but in some ways they are also supersaturated and there is value to swimming in a smaller pond – still lots of fish but not quite as much bait… Orkut, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn… all have their own ‘flavour’ and you might find they gel with your style more – and there are thousands of others including smaller, specialized ones based on Ning, where you can even build your own if you don’t find one with everything you’re looking for. But it might be a lonely party…
Here’s a great post that goes deeper into this and everything else I’ve talked about here… I would call it essential reading.
Well that’s what I’ve got so far, what do you think?
