Social Media Strategy Outline Musicians

By Hyperbot.com

Hiring A Professional Social Media Consultant

Social media is more than just one more new method of marketing or advertising online. Social media is a living, breathing, growing organism, and it is based in communities. The fact is, if you're not active in this growing industry, you will be left behind. People are talking about you, whether you're present in those discussions or not.

You can't keep sending out one-way communications in this new business environment. People no longer trust advertising; people trust people. Consumers trust their peers' opinions. So you have to make personal connections.


Social media is about listening to the communities you serve. It is about establishing a rapport with your target audience. Seeking out influencers in your market. And more importantly, not looking at it as a market, but as a community made up of individuals. This isn't one-way PR communications, it's a dialogue--a conversation.

Unfortunately you can't simply build a great blog and expect people to show up. The website itself is only about 20% of the work-there's still a long laundry list of things you'll still need to do to be successful. Many people don't realize the hard work required when they first take their business online--but proper developers and consultants do much more than just give you a front-end web design--they'll provide their expertise when you have questions, coaching through your learning process, promotion of your campaigns, help with your market research and search engine optimization, help measuring the effectiveness of your efforts, and hopefully access to the right connections within their networks.

A good social media consultant pulls some weight online and understands how your community will respond negatively or positively to different tactics . He'll be honest with you when he knows you need to invest some extra work to create a great product. You deserve that, because a great product hardly needs promoting.

With the right consultant, you can set goals, you can learn how to develop your voice and communicate through social media in a personable way, you can identify and establish relationships with the right people in your niche , and you can learn how to use the web as a listening tool and a research tool to understand your market and give your followers what they want.

More importantly, having a consultant who is experienced as a blogger and social media user on your side will help you avoid the pitfalls . The "blogosphere" community is self-policing and sometimes unforgiving. If you don't engage the community properly you may risk a huge loss of rapport. A social media consultant can help you present yourself and your company effectively and transparently. A good social media consultant is someone who has a great reputation in the online community; others speak of him well and trust his opinion; the things he shares are valued in the community, and he thus can provide tremendous value to the clients he represents.

A social media professional will use all the online tools available to spread the word about the organizations or campaigns he represents-much like traditional PR. But, compared with many traditional media, social media marketing is a strong and cost-effective tactic to compliment your other marketing efforts.

Cody McGibbin, contributing writer at SocialMediaMarking.com, is a nomadic entrepreneur & lifestyle designer who helps social changemakers & other remarkable people spread their message on the web.

Artist Tour Schedule - FREE Feed Generator

Are you an artist looking to post your tour schedule on your website and on multiple social networks? Do you have to update your tour schedule all in a variety of places across the web? Well now there's a great tool to help make this process much easier!!

Check out the site MakeDataMakeSense.com! They have some great tools and there is one you definitely should be using call the "MySpace Events Feed Creator". Just update your tour schedule on MySpace and feed it across the web in any place you wish!


The MySpace Events Feed Creator generates RSS or Atom feeds for MySpace events. Just enter the URL for a MySpace profile, and the feed will be created. You can use it to offer your events to people as feeds, or to republish your events on your non-MySpace sites.


Once you have created your feed - then you should use another great free tool called WebRSS. With WebRSS you can take any feed and covert it to display fresh content on your website, blog and social networks.

Here is a live example of one that I created for DJ/Producer ESKMO:
http://www.music2management.com/eskmo_tour_schedule.html

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Brand Overviews

• HowSociable? - A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
• Addict-o-matic - A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
• socialmention - A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a 'social rank' score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.

Blog Search Tools

• TECHNORATI Search - Technorati's new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
• TECHNORATI Advanced - Technorati's advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
• Google Blog Search - Google's index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
• IceRocket - Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
• BlogPulse - Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Buzz Tracking

• Serph - Track buzz in real time
• Google Trends - shows amount of searches and google news stories
• Trendpedia - Create charts showing the volume of discussion around multiple topics. Generates cool graphs.
• BlogPulse Trends - Compare the mentions of specific keywords and phrases in blog posts (LEFT vs. RIGHT)
• Omgili Charts - Omgili Buzz Graphs let you measure and compare the Buzz of any term. Mostly from review sites/forums.
• eKstreme - blog data is obtained from Technorati and the social bookmarks come from del.icio.us.

Message Board Search Tools

• BoardTracker - tracks words in forums
• BoardReader - Search multiple message boards and forums.
• Omgili - Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content platforms, such as, forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards and others. Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions.
• Google Groups - Searches usenet groups.
• Yahoo! Groups - Searches all Yahoo! Groups.

Twitter Search Tools

• Twitter Search - Search keywords on Twitter which "self-refreshes". See what's happening -- 'right now'.
• Twitstat - Twitter Tweitgeist - Tag cloud for last 500 Tweets
• TweetScan - search for words on Twitter
• Twit(url)y - see what people are talking about on Twitter
• Hashtags - Realtime Tracking of Twitter Hashtags
• TweetBeep - Track mentions of your brand on Twitter in real time.
• Twitrratr - Rates mentions of your search term on Twitter as positive/neutral/negative
• TweetMeme - View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now.
• TwitScoop - Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual and creates a tag cloud.
• Twilert - Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service.

Web Site Traffic

• Compete - Competitor site traffic reports. Estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic Web sites.
• Quantcast - Use this on large high-traffic Websites. It allows you to compare multiple web sites in one handy chart. Estimates only of monthly visitor data.
• Alexa - Comparative site traffic reports. Includes estimated reach, rank and page views.
• BlogFlux Page Rank - Tells you Google Page Rank for a web page. Use this to compare different websites.

Search Data

• Google Trends - Search trends and see search volume by country and region.
• Google Insights - Compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.
• Wordtracker Keywords - Displays average daily search volume of a given keyword or phrase.
• Yahoo! Keyword Tool - Displays search volumes for specific keywords and phrases for previous month's search data.
• FACEBOOK LEXICON - Displays volume of wall postings for specific term(s). Similar to Google Trends. Not great with obscure terms.
• Google Keyword Tool - Generate keyword ideas for related keywords and search volumes.

Multimedia Search

• YouTube - Search for videos and channels by keyword.
• MetaCafe - High-traffic video search engine.
• Google Advanced Video Search - Search for videos, what else?
• Flickr - Search Flickr for photos, groups or people/users.
• Truveo - Aggregate video search engine. Search videos from YouTube, MySpace, and AOL.
• Viral Video Chart - Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.
• Guardian's Viral Video Chart - Weekly roundup of what's excellent on the web

Social Bookmarking

• Digg - Social Bookmarking, mainly for news, images and videos
• StumbleUpon - Social bookmarking - general cool stuff
• Delicious - Social bookmarking

Feed Aggregator

• Yahoo Pipes - Feed aggregator and manipulator. Set up pipes for news alerts and overviews. Generally Awesome.

URL cruncher

• Bit.ly - URL cruncher with dashboard metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around url etc

Specific Social Network Tracking

• Adonomics - Facebook analytics and developer application tracking and graphing.

Search Engine rankings

• PageRank Checker - Shows Google page ranking

Advertising and Event Tracking

• MediaHound - Competitive tracking and analysis; focus on technology B2B space

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

 

3 Hot Tips About Social Media Strategies

Companies large and small are rushing to understand and get involved in social media. But most of the agencies and consultants who are being paid to establish social media campaigns for corporations are afraid to tell their clients three things they don't want to hear.

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1. Everyone Must Work Together

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In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don't work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.
For example, I recently handled social media advertising for a major retail chain's holiday microsite. The promotion was conceived by the digital department and involved augmented reality. But the IT department refused to allow a link from the homepage to the microsite because the microsite's design was done by an external agency.

Further, the marketing department refused to allow a dedicated e-mail to go out to the company's mailing list, and when placed in the company's normal promotional e-mail, the link to the microsite was lost in a sea of weekly specials.

These hurdles made it very hard to drive traffic to the microsite.
But more than that, this lack of internal collaboration and contact makes any kind of social media involvement virtually impossible.

A company that hasn't learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

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2. Top Management Must Be On Board

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If the direction doesn't come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it's OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company's marketing and culture.

Example: The marketing team of an international manufacturer of electronics wanted to know how the company could begin to use social media and we discussed the many possibilities.
Listening and responding to what customers are saying about the brand in social media can supply good intelligence and give the company a chance to interact with customers.

"Our management doesn't want to listen to customers," the PR director said. "They want to talk to them."
However, that doesn't work anymore. The status quo is dead. Any company that isn't willing to listen to customers and be nimble and quick enough to respond, and, when necessary, change, will soon be unable to compete with smart, tech-savvy companies that can turn on a dime.

Willingness to change is the new bottom line for every business today. But top management has to buy in before change can begin.

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3. Don't Expect Overnight Success

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Sure there are videos that go viral, contests that attract a lot of buzz, and Facebook () pages that get a lot of fans. But what comes after those efforts?

After the tools change (and they surely will) how will social media fit into the company's overall strategy and help it reach long-term goals?

With the scissors brand losing market share to foreign knock-offs, the company enlisted several actual crafters to blog, attend events, and represent the brand to customers as part of a new community strategy.
"If you empower your customers to become your evangelists, you'd better be prepared to continue it," says Brains on Fire's Geno Church. "It's permanent when you engage in this type of marketing."

Once you have created the community, listen to it. Fiskars made several changes to its products based on what it discovered through its Fiskateers community. Doing so helped build customer trust and loyalty.

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Where Should Your Company Start?

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Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.

Pick a small number of social media goals for the coming year. Some possibilities:

- Turn the company newsletter into an internal blog and give all employees the ability to contribute
- Establish a social media policy for employee participation in social media on company time and beyond
- Let employees vote on the best ideas suggested by other employees
- Resolve to respond to customer service issues within three hours, via social media

Don't try to do all of these things at once. Pick the ones that are most likely to be possible for your company to start and sustain.

B.L. Ochman is a Managing Director of Proof Digital Media; publisher of What's Next Blog, and co-founder of pet site Pawfun.com.  

Social Media: Not “One Size Fits All

Most companies are jumping on the social media marketing wagon and understand its role in brand reputation management and customer feedback. And why wouldn't they since it is quickly becoming one of the most intimate and non-invasive means of marketing? The "follow us," "be our fan," and recognizable Facebook and Twitter icons on company marketing materials  are growing and marketing professionals have come to understand it is necessary to have a presence in the space... and let people know you are there.

Once companies garner the internal support needed to initiate a social media commitment (and it is a commitment), they begin thinking about strategy, ROI, marketing integration, etc. and realize the depth of this medium can be overwhelming. Companies are learning from others' mistakes and smartly putting an emphasis on careful and effective execution and without proper planning, this is rarely accomplished.

To execute social media the right way, the next question a company should ask is "how do we get started?" and "what should we be doing?" Those questions are paramount when crafting a social media strategy since there is not a "one size fits all" approach.
When planning an approach, there are a few key components to consider:

• What is the overall goal for a social media campaign?
  Without identifying why a company wants to get into social, a strategy is impossible.
• What is important to the brand and to the target customer?
  What is the best use of social base on the company goals and current services?
• What do customers want to know or share (i.e. comments, images, videos, etc.)?
  Do customers simply need a way of informal communication to share opinions or do they need/want more of a service focus?
• What type of online presence already exists (if there is a presence, how can it be optimized)? Does the company current have an ad-hoc approach that can be organized to increase effectiveness or does the presence exist only on the customer side?

Carefully thinking about these considerations and crafting honest answers will help determine:

• Which social media outlets and accounts will be created and why (i.e. what will be the Twitter account focus?).
• How the social efforts will be maintained (updated and monitored). Are there internal resources or does the effort need a combination of internal resources and outsourcing?
• The positioning of the accounts, which includes the focus (i.e. which accounts will be used to encourage feedback or manage brand reputation).

After these considerations are evaluated and the questions answered, a comprehensive social media marketing strategy can be created and execution can be planned accordingly.
This will get a company off to a great social media start and encourage success!

Jen Cohen is a social media and marketing maven knocked down many times in 26 yrs. Something Creative http://somethingcreativemarketing.com

New Income Streams For Musicians

The artist music business model has been in flux for years. The record deal dream that most artists sought is no longer the viable alternative that it once was.  The leveling of the music distribution playing field by the Internet is virtually complete.  Terrestrial radio is on a path towards destruction that even the major labels can’t compete with.  People now access and download music from multiple sources, usually for free. D.I.Y. solutions are everywhere, but for many artists hard to integrate into their daily lives.

Where does this leave the average independent artist? At the beginning. Every artist wants to know how they can make music, make money and survive to write and play another day. Here, in no particular order, is a list of possible income streams. Please add anything I missed in the comments section below.

• Publishing
• Mechanical royalties
• Performance Royalties from ASCAP and BMI
• Digital Performance Royalties from Sound Exchange
• Synch rights TV, Commercials, Movies, Video Games
• Digital sales – Individual or by combination

• Music (studio & live) Album – Physical & Digital, Single – Digital, Ringtone, Ringback, Podcasts
• Instant Post Gig Live Recording via download, mobile streaming or flash drives
• Video – Live, concept, personal,  – Physical & Digital
• Video and Internet Games featuring or about the artist
• Photographs
• Graphics and art work, screen savers, wall paper
• Lyrics
• Sheet music
• Compilations
• Merchandise – Clothes, USB packs, Posters, other things
• Live Performances
• Live Show – Gig
• Live Show – After Party
• Meet and Greet
• Personal Appearance
• Studio Session Work
• Sponsorships, and endorsements
• Advertising
• Artist newsletter emails
• Artist marketing and promotion materials
• Blog/Website
• Videos
• Music Player
• Fan Clubs
• YouTube Subscription channel for more popular artists
• Artist programmed internet radio station or specialty playlist.  Any artist with a base creates a station or playlist for distribution programming the music he/she/they is/are into including their own. Fans could pay for shout outs and sponsors could pay for blocks of time or ads to support it.  It could also be a subscription podcast that people could pay a couple of bucks or more a month for.
• Financial Contributions of Support - Tip Jar or direct donations, Sellaband or Kickstarter
• Patronage Model - Artist Fan Exclusives - e.g. paying to sing on a song in studio or have artist write a song for you
• Mobile Apps
• Artist Specific Revenue Stream -  unique streams customized to the specific artist, e.g Amanda Palmer
• Music Teaching - Lessons and Workshops
• Music Employment - orchestras, etc, choir directors, ministers of music, etc.
• Music Production - Studio and Live
• Any job available to survive and keep making music
• Getting Help From Other Artists and Helping Them -  Whatever goes around come around. – e.g. gig swapping, songwriting, marketing and promotion

What income streams for musicians can you add?

This guest post by David Sherbow looks at potential artist revenue streams. David is the CEO of LiveMusicMachine.com and blogs MusicBizGuy Speaks.

Original Article on HyperBot

SEO For Your Blog Article Posts

Each time you post new content on your website or blog, you should always adhere to a step-by-step process to ensure you've done everything required by these search engine optimization standards to help you gain a higher ranking on the search engines.

The process should go as follows:

1. Topic Research
2. Keyword Research
3. Title Tags
4. Meta Description
5. Meta Keywords
6. Write the Content or Article
7. Ensure Keywords are Present in Your Written Content
8. Include Anchor Tags
9. Syndicate Content

Lets take a look at these steps to better understand what each one involves to help you start achieving higher search engine rankings.

Topic Research

Most website owners already know what their website will be about when they first set it up.  If you know what your target market is, simply provide content on your site that meets the needs of your market, but do the necessary research required to support your content.  Doing so provides value to your sites visitors and will ensure your site is accurately providing the information and content they seek.  Providing accurate information on your site that is relevant to what your site is about is loved by search engines.  The more frequently you do this to ensure your site and the content you are providing is relevant to what your site is about will boost your search engine rankings significantly over time.

Keyword Research

I can't stress enough how important keyword research is to your ability to achieve higher rankings on the search engines.  Use free tools such as NicheBot Classic and Google Adwords Keyword Tool to conduct research on the various keywords that are relevant to the content you are writing.  Look for a combination of keywords that receive high search usage among the search engines that are relevant to your content.  Once you've identified a set of keywords, make sure to write those keywords into your content.  For example, this blog post is about search engine rankings… Look through the post and see if you can identify how many times the keywords “search engine” appear in this post.  You'll notice they appear quite frequently  This is done so search engine spiders know in detail, what the page is about and will give it a higher search engine ranking due to the relevance of the post to its title and topic.

Title Tags

Title tags are extremely important to your search engine ranking.  It is well known in the search engine optimization industry that ensuring your title tags contain keywords words relevant to the content on a particular web page that it is describing will grant you a much greater opportunity to achieve higher search engine rankings.  Always ensure you write enticing, yet descriptive titles to all your web pages and blog posts.

As an example, the first two words of the title for this post are key words that receive a great number of searches every month on the search engines and are very relevant to this post.  You'll also notice the title of this post is displayed in the title bar of your browser which is managed by the title tag of this page.  Bottom line, well written, keyword optimized yet descriptive titles for your pages and posts will go a seriously long way to helping you achieve a greater ranking on the search engines.

If you are a blogger and use WordPress, install the All-in-One SEO plugin for WordPress which provides some of more basic title tag and meta tag customization features.

Original Article By Sean Smith, Powerofmore.net

Getting Serious With Social Media

This is the year to buckle down and tackle a social media strategy. It's time to get serious!!

Here's 10 ways to get serious about social media in 2010:

1) Quit counting fans, followers, and blog subscribers like bottle caps. Think, instead, about what you're hoping to achieve with and through the community that actually cares about what you're doing.

2) Learn how to measure your efforts by utilizing reporting and stats. Quit making excuses for why you can't do it - and make this a part of your Social Media strategy.

3) Learn what case studies can do and can't do for you. Stop saying there aren't enough of them and go Google the term "social media case studies" or spend a few minutes on my Delicious links. Then, get busy writing your own.

4) Understand the difference between making a business case for social media and chasing the next and greatest fad. If you don't understand how to explain where social media impacts areas outside the business besides your own, make a concerted effort to learn.

5) Stop lauding social media as the thing that's going to fix it all. Fix your business first.

6) Approach social media methodically, and with the same care that you would any other business investment you make.

7) Quit waiting for the water to be perfect before you get in. It's not going to be, ever. Try something that makes strategic sense for your business.

8 ) Think long term, and commit to it. That doesn't mean some of your experiments can't be finite, but the overall approach has to be for good.

9) Focus on what you're good at. Know the core of your business, and make that the center of your work, especially through the amplifier of social media.

10) Recognize that potential missteps shouldn't paralyze you into inaction. Acknowledge that there are ways to recover from, say, a misguided communication effort. Having a plan to pick yourself up is the key, rather than trying to avoid failure at all costs (including stagnation).

What else would you add? What's your buckle-down strategy this year, and how are you turning your approach from theory into application? Share your ideas, favorite posts, and strategies in the comments.

Abridged: Amber Naslund, Altitudebranding.com