There are a lot of bands registering for Twitter these days, and while the subject of this post is not specific to Twitter, it certainly was inspired by what I’ve seen a lot of while spending time using the service.  I know I’ve touched on this topic briefly in one of my previous posts, but I feel this particular behaviour needed a post of it’s own.  The behaviour I’m talking about, is “broadcasting.”  This is when a band (or a person) uses the internet as an outlet to send outward one-way communications.  Something like “NEW SONG NOW POSTED ON OUR MYSPACE” is a broadcast.  Sure, it’s informative, but it’s not engaging at all, and it doesn’t make the most of the opportunity that having friends/followers listening to what your saying presents.  And when this is the ONLY type of communication being sent, and in the worst case scenarios, the same message is being broadcast repeatedly, with no other types of messages in between, the offending communicator ends up doing themselves more of a disservice than they would by deleting their account and keeping quiet.

The feeling that type of communication engenders in the listeners is one that tells them the band doesn’t care about them at all.  At least, not beyond needing some attention paid to them, and they don’t care from who.

In this modern age, attention is fleeting, and it is PRECIOUS!!!  Someone who follows you has gone out of their way to click on (or search out) your profile, and then click again to request to follow you (or subscribe to your email list, or friend you on Myspace, or what-have-you)… and while a few clicks don’t seem like a lot of effort, they really are.  Because that person didn’t have to bother at all!  That means you’re speaking to someone who wants to hear what you have to say.  Unless of course, you followed/friended them first, and they’re reciprocating to be polite.  Those people need to be treated with respect too, but while they have said it’s okay for you to send them your messages, they may not be your biggest fan (yet!), so keep that in mind when communicating and don’t presume anything.

The bottom line is, just because you’re online, it doesn’t mean the unspoken rules of conversational behaviour go out the window.  Respond to people who say something to you, answer people when they ask you questions, don’t just broadcast your promotional messages all the time.  Treat your listeners with respect, and take good care of the attention they are giving you, because it’s very easy for them to give their attention to someone else.

Listening to what your listeners are saying – responding, asking questions of them, and engaging them in conversation are things you can do to make the experience they get from listening to you, much more rewarding for your listeners.

And then they’ll listen to you even more.

trying to help bands avoid communication fails...

Back in February I published an article, “Building Fan-Band Relationships In 420 Characters Per Day” that put forward some tips on how bands could take better advantage of the Twitter platform, and utilize it to more effectively communicate with their fans.

Since then, I have seen a large growth in the number of bands who are using Twitter, and have seen many examples of good practices and some examples of not-so-good practices, some of which I’d like to call attention to here.

Some great example posts of good use of twitter by a band:

- “We’re #1 [national] artist for most views on Youtube today!! You guys rock keep checking the [song title] video! -N

This is a great post because it’s informative, yet promotional, but doesn’t sound egotistical, in fact it has a thankful tone, contains a directive inciting fans to perform a desired action, and the post is “signed” by the band member, so a reader knows which band member logged in to Twitter that day.

- playing at 1714 XXXX street in LA at 2pm. directions at http://XXXX.com – only room for 50 people so come get in line asafp!!!

Another great use of twitter, in that it announces a promotional message that your fans would care about, (a secret show), gives specific details, conveys urgency, and excitement.

- @username What exactly is a garbage plate?

This is a great example, because it’s a conversational response to something one of the band’s fans actually said to the band.  Interacting with the fans is crucial, because the Twitter platform is not meant for one-way communication.  It’s meant for conversations.

- http://twitpic.com/XXXX- yes, you can play with the mac, just don’t touch the keys or drool on it.

This one is great because it uses a twitpic, and everyone loves to see pictures posted from their favorite bands.  Especially when the photos and caption provide insight into what you’re doing, showcases your personality, or something that you’re passionate about, and has an interesting caption.  The immediacy of Twitter makes the photos seem even more special because there’s the feeling they are happening right “now.”

- sick with flu, in bed, brain full of emptiness. watching DVD of doctor who and drinking hot toddys. life, love & time are great mysteries.

Another post that shows personality, talks about some non-music related interests, keeps fans updated in a very intimate way, and still manages to contain a profound thought.

- What are some new bands/artists that don’t suck? I need some new music that doesn’t sound like some regurgitated crap I’ve heard before.

Okay, so this one isn’t articulated the best, since its a little negative, but the idea of polling your followers to get them to talk about other bands they listen to is a great idea.  Not only does it engage your audience, get them talking about music, but it actually also gives you useful info about your fanbase that could help you better market your music.

In general, posts that inform, inquire, engage, and interact are the best.  For a really great example of an artist who is being extremely effective on Twitter, check out @amandapalmer.  She’s the lead-singer of the band The Dresden Dolls and also a very talented solo artist.  Whether you like her music or not, you could learn a lot stylistically from her twitter account.  She does twitter-based Q&As with her fans, holds impromptu secret shows announced via twitter, does quick promos like “first five people to @reply me get on the guestlist for the show tonight”, surprise fan meet-ups, polls her audience, talks to them, has conversations with them, posts lots of twitpics, and demonstrates many other lessons in effective online fan-communication via Twitter.

So just before I wrap this up, I think it’s only fair to comment on a few bad practices, however I’m not going to call anyone out or anything like that, but here are a few “please don’ts” to keep in mind…

- please don’t publicly thank people for their support when really what’s happened is that you followed them first, and now they decided to follow you back out of courtesy.  Note, this is especially bad when you do this with famous musicians.  @depechemode is not showing their support of your band, by returning a follow.

- please don’t REPEAT OVERLY PROMOTIONAL TWEETS THAT ARE WRITTEN ALL IN CAPS.  PLEASE DON’T REPEAT OVERLY PROMOTIONAL TWEETS THAT ARE WRITTEN ALL IN CAPS.  PLEASE DON’T REPEAT…see what i mean?

- if someone follows you, don’t automatically assume they’re now your fan.  Don’t auto-DM them thanking them for their interest in your music, or make any other assumptions like that.  Consider that the online equivalent of someone saying “hi, what do you do?” and you’re response being “Oh my god, it’s so great you talked to me, because now we’re best friends, and we’re gonna hang out every day and you’re mom’s gonna bake me cookies.”  It’s a little weird.

- please don’t ignore questions or comments from your followers.  Even if it’s only 140-characters worth of attention they gave you, that’s still effort they didn’t have to bother making, so if they’ve gone out of their way to do it, you had better pay them the respect of replying.

I’m sure there are more of both good practices and bad practices… but I’ll tell you what… I’ll stop here, but I invite everyone to continue this post through the comments section.  What are some more good and bad practices that you’ve seen?

Use Ping.fm to send your message across all your networks at once.

Ping.fm calls itself “a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”  It’s currently in beta mode, which means it ‘s free to sign up, and try it out.

Post a message to the Ping.fm service, and Ping then takes that message and distributes it out to all your social networking sites for you… so you only have to send it once.

You tell Ping.fm which social-networks you belong to (they support probably every one you already use), add them all  to your list within Ping, and then when you use Ping.fm to send a message, you just let Ping take care of the rest.  Type it once, and Ping can get sent out as your latest Twitter post, Facebook Status, Facebook Note, Facebook Photo upload, Linkedin Status, Myspace Status, Myspace Bulletin, etc.  Check out their mainpage for all the networks they support… a list of over thirty different ones.  It’s got built in support for URL-shortening too, and tells you how many characters your message will be, so it can stay Twitter-friendly.

You can send your messages to Ping.fm from many ways too… via SMS, instant messages, email, 3rd party apps, and more.  They make this very easy for you.

Signing up for a ping.fm account is about as basic as it can get… email address, user name, password, you’re done.  Then, when you’ve logged in, you can start adding all your networks, which does require you logging in to your various profile pages through their site (and presumably giving them your passwords… tin-foil hat-wearers need not apply I guess, but anyone trying to create a business like this, if they’re going to be successful at all, the privacy of this info has got to be fully respected… they wouldn’t dare compromise that.)

I only wish you could use it to send messages out to members of a Facebook Group, a list of email addresses, or more info beyond a “status update” but the reality is this service is still in beta and I’m sure they’re working on this.

For musicians, this is great simply because when you want to send a quick promotional news item or reminder out to your fanbase, if you’ve been active online you probably have many different places where you connect with fans, which makes updating each one of them separately a very tedious process.  So to only have to type your message once, and have it sent out across all your networks just makes things so much more efficient and easy, which, I hope, will make you communicate more often, thus strengthening the bonds you have with your fans, and keep you top of their minds.

First become part of a community, and then focus on leading it

There’s a lot of talk these days about community-building, and many look to that as a modern strategy for spreading a band’s music.  While I do believe that it is a great strategy, many bands tend to overthink or underthink this strategy – some are too selfish, and for some reason it seems all natural behaviour of interaction and human nature can go out the window when it comes to promoting a band.

To build a community online, one not-recommended method is to take a passive approach… like start a myspace page, post some tunes, and wait for people to find you and friend you.  Then only communicate with those people that have reached out to you.  That’s okay, in that, at least you’re only talking to people who have expressed previous interest in you.  However, it’s certainly not enough, unless you manage to catch lightning in a bottle, and make a song that takes off virally, spreading through the online space like crazy.

Another poor approach to community-building could most-politely be called “the aggressive approach.”  You know this approach when you see it, and the results are the bands who have a billion friends on Myspace, and very little plays.  These are the bands that send email after email (or facebook event after facebook event) about their songs and their shows to anyone they can find, regardless of whether they have permission, and regardless of whether it makes sense or not.  Some “clever” bands even think that if they friend all the attractive women on Myspace, that their true target fans would be fooled into thinking the band attracts those folks to their live-shows, and that somehow the true fans would be more inclined to be a fan of the band because of this.  Does this make any sense to anyone?  Seems to me it would be much easier and more effective to focus on your target fans to begin with.

The truth is, the best way to build a community online is to start by getting involved in existing ones.   I guarantee you there is already at least one, and most likely several places online that exist for people who might like your particular sound to already be congregating and discussing other bands who are somewhat similar to you.  Take a minute, think about your band, and your music.  Think about yourself too.  You probably make a similar sound of music to the type of music you personally like to listen to (or at least one of the types of music you listen to.)  That’s because you’re a fan! So get in touch with your inner-fan, and think like that!  And don’t ever forget, Online is the same as “The Real World” because it IS the real world.  It’s still people talking to people.  We just use new tools to communicate.  But the rules don’t really change.

Let’s for one minute pretend you don’t make your own music, but you are an avid fan of punk rock… you would go online and find messageboards, facebook groups, myspace friends, twitter friends, blippers, fan-pages, artist websites, blogs, online magazines and local-scene websites that all focused on the music you like, and you would get involved in the current conversations.  You’d ask questions, make comments, have discussions, talk about music you like, check out the music that other people were talking about, etc.  What would end up happening, naturally, is that you would develop friendships, meet new people, find a group of folks who you agreed with often, bonded with, and felt connected to.  That is called building a community online.

You wouldn’t go on, only post things that you wanted to say, never comment on anything that is already being discussed, never answer any questions people ask you, and only talk about one band.  That’s ridiculous, no humans interact that way, and no one’s ever made a friend or bonded with anyone from having a one-sided conversation like that.  So don’t promote your band like that!

Think like a fan, be a part of the existing community, have conversations, make friends, and talk about all sorts of bands…yours included, of course.

And if you’re in a band, and are having difficulty getting started, email me. I’ll try my best to help!

Next post… I’ll talk about how this can apply in the offline world.  Or in the meantime, maybe you can tell me?

See you on Wednesday.

- The idea for this post came out of a conversation I recently had with @withabullet.

It's easy to use, but its easy to misuse too.

So you’ve signed up for Twitter.  Congratulations!  It seems to be all the rage right now in the music industry.  Bands and industry people are registering for the site like crazy.  So how do you make this Twitter thing work for you?  How can you use it to help promote your band?

The key is to make sure that’s not your only goal.  What you should be trying to do is become part of a community of people who most likely will enjoy your music, and want to hear what you have to say.  And build your numbers up slowly and organically.  Don’t just sign up, start following a bunch of random people, and make your only tweets promotional in nature, like saying “check out my band on our myspace” over and over again.  In fact, a really good idea is to upload a profile picture, customize your profile page, fill out the BIO line, display the link to your website/myspace, and post at least five to ten tweets (see below for more on that) all before you start following people you don’t know.

On Twitter, it IS okay to follow people you don’t know in real life, so that’s a plus.  People are far less protective of their Twitter followers/followings than they are of their Facebook friends.  So go ahead and search Twitter for key words of conversations that might indicate that a person may like your music, and follow them.  For example, if you are in a band that sounds like MGMT, try searching for things like “Hipster Runoff” and definitely “MGMT”.  Find people who are already talking about the genre, follow them, and start talking about them too.  Be honest… “hey, I love MGMT as well.  I play in a band and they are a major influence on our sound.” is a good start.  It’s honest, to the point, and conversationally promotional.  Then, if the person @replies, and asks you for the link to your Myspace, go ahead and give it to them.  @replying is a public conversation, so then anyone reading that conversation will see your site as well.  And the people who are actually reading the conversation, are the people you want to reach!  Jump in, and start talking to people.  Just don’t come on too strong… you wouldn’t walk into a house-party full of strangers and just start shouting “HEY, I’M IN A BAND… CHECK US OUT!”, so don’t do it online either.

The other key to twittering effectively, is to tweet often, but not too often, and to balance your tweets between promotional tweets, personal tweets, and conversation tweets (either asking a question, or @replying to one of your followers posts).  Working Twitter into your daily routine takes a bit of getting used to, but you need to make sure you do it.  Here’s an easy way to get into it.

Start by tweeting three times in a day.

Make one tweet your “promotional tweet”… things like “in the studio, laying down vocal melodies,” “just posted a new song on our myspace, hope you like it!” and “new tour dates announced!  check them out here.” are all basic examples of promotional tweets.  Give a bit of information that people who follow you would care about.

Another of your tweets should be the “personal tweet.” These are designed so your followers feel connected to you, the way your friends in real-life are.  Say things like “Deciding between Pizza and Chinese Food for dinner.” or “going snowboarding tomorrow, stoked!”  Basically whatever is really going on in your life outside of the band.  Even though they seem mundane, when you’re a fan of a band reading these tweets, they can seem really exciting because they are the window into the band members personalities… and that deeper fan-band connection is what they are looking for.

Finally, the third tweet should be your “conversational tweet.” These are designed to further embed you in the community, and stimulate interesting discussion.  These don’t have to be about music, or your band, because they are to show that you’re interested in what your followers have to say, and that you’re paying attention to them too.  Things like “@follower, nice new tattoo you got there!” or “Question – what do you think of the new U2 single?”  And if someone asks you a question, make sure you @reply back to them too.  These tweets all show that you care about what the people who follow you have to say.  And again, just think about this from a fan’s perspective… imagine if your favorite band was actually listening to what you had to say, responding to you personally, and asking you questions… you would immediately recognize that as a sign they cared about you too… and think how that would make you feel!

This is the power of Twitter for musicians.  Promotion, fan-connection, community-building, relationship-developing.  Use it to truly endear your audience to you. In three simple tweets per day.  (a measly 420 characters of daily effort.)

PS – Fan relationships are precious…don’t abuse them.  Don’t do any of what I’ve mentioned above if you don’t actually care.  A one-sided relationship is really easy to sniff out, and it’s more detrimental to you than if you didn’t do anything at all.

The 21st Century version of being the DJ at a house-party.

In the dark ages before the internet, people used to share music physically.  They’d do things like make mixtapes for eachother, or trade albums back and forth, telling all their friends about what bands they’ve discovered.  At house-partys, invariably one person would end up “DJ” for the night… hanging out by the CD player and picking songs to play for the room.

Then, as it always does, technology comes in and makes things more efficient, faster, and better, though that last one can be debatable at times.

So along came Napster, mp3 players, P2P, etc.  We all know that story.  And now there’s an influx of different web startups that allow people to share their music and their musical tastes with the online world in all sorts of different ways.

Enter Blip.fm.  It’s the new incarnation of being the DJ at the houseparty.  You get to be the one to tell all your friends what songs to check out, and provide a soundtrack to an everchanging mood, timeline, day, whatever.

Similar to Twitter, Blip allows people to create their own profile, then send small messages (like tweets) out to their “listeners” which are the other people on the network who have decided they want to follow you.  The addition that Blip adds to the Twitter/micro-blogging concept is that they have a streaming audio player built in, so you can attach a URL to your message that will trigger a song to start playing.  And as long as the song has an mp3 posted somewhere online, and that location has been input into the Blip.fm database, you can stream it to all your listeners. Its very easy to add a song to the Blip database, all you need to do is post the mp3 online somewhere, and input the URL on the Blip site.

So for bands, it’s another great way to be active in the online space.  Musicians, you should start blipping songs by your influences, and by bands whos fans might like your music.  Start listening to other blip DJs who are blipping songs by similar artists too.  What will happen is, you’ll build up a listener-base of avid music-fans who happen to like bands similar to yours.  Then, when you occasionally blip one of your own songs, and you’re open and honest about it, you’ll have a receptive community of listeners paying attention to you, and maybe they’ll like what they hear.