Music. Marketing. Social Media.

There’s a lot of talk about what social media is, especially lately.

“It’s a new way to communicate”

“It’s a new distribution platform for ideas and voices”

“It’s the hot new thing to do!”

“It’s the thing that is ruining everything else, including publishing!”

Some of the statements above may be true, but what isn’t ever covered is what social media is not.

Social media is not a new platform from which to shout your message to anyone listening.

Social media is not the new email.

Social media is not the be-all, end-all.

Social media is not the sole force behind the declining recording and publishing businesses.

Social media is not a tool you can pick up and discard at will.

Social media is not easy.

Social media is not free.

I’ve written before about how to not use social tools. Twitter, Facebook and the mentality behind MySpace, for example.

These posts revolve around a single principle – you can’t successfully use social media to market yourself if you think like an ad executive in the 70’s.

Social media requires a shift in thinking.  Stop thinking of your fans as big dollar signs, waiting to buy your concert tickets, latest schwag or newest CD. Start thinking of them as people, with preferences and lives – of which you are a part by their choice.

Spamming your “friends” or fans with glittery comments on the latest and greatest social networking site won’t work, just like sending them auto DM’s or spammy @ messages on Twitter won’t work.  You don’t like getting spam email, so why would you ever think of sending spam “conversation starters” across the social web?

Social media isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not free. It requires time, effort and a lot of thought. But first, it requires an understanding that your fans are your fans because they want to be, and not simply open wallets.

They want to be treated like a human being, and you must understand that before you can be successful.

Do you disagree? Perhaps you want to share an example of someone you like using social media well? Leave it in the comments!

Do you remember being a kid, and thinking about how cool it would be to carry your favorite music around with you and create the soundtrack to your life, just like a movie, while it was happening?

Congratulations, that became possible about five years ago.

Access is something that has fundamentally changed the music business as we know it, and the music business has spent the past decade or so dealing with this ever-increasing “problem.” Everyone involved is trying to make this shift work for them, and everyone still wants a piece of the pie.

Marketing has recently undergone the same shift, and the industry is starting to see the results.  This new “thing” called social media has finally reached a point where businesses have started to pay attention, and among the plethora of “social media experts” emerging, we’ve seen a lot of companies both large and small, start to use these tools and integrate them into how they do business.

I’m not saying anything new here, but it’s worth repeating.

What has changed is how businesspeople – marketers specifically – view the consumer.

Gone are the days of nameless and faceless consumers with voices even more limited than their buying power.  Now, everyone is an individual in a very public way.

We have more access to music – so we choose not to buy it and download instead.

We’ve started creating the soundtracks to our lives in real-time, and seek to fill the holes we see as we go through this process.

We have better access to discovering new bands, and through the magic of the Internet we can go from “wait, who?” to superfan in a short amount of time.

From a business standpoint, businesses can now see who buys their products better than ever before.  Am I a mom? If so, what’s my favorite food? Do I blog? How about Tweet? Do I have a MySpace profile or am I on Facebook? How public do I allow my Internet life to be, and how vocal am I about my preferences?

Consumers are no longer anonymous and faceless beings, and while the music industry always had a much closer tie to their consumers than some other industries, this change is still felt there.

The point a lot of people miss when talking about the increasing visibility and power of the consumer point is this: Consumers want to include you (sometimes) in the soundtrack of their life.  Your job as a band, as a label, as a manager, as an agent, or as a solo artist, is to make that choice easy for them.

They want to learn about your products if they’re so inclined, but they don’t want to be “sold”. They see through “selling”.

So be present. Be in multiple places. Be easily accessible, and give consumers the choice to include you in the soundtrack of their life if they want.

Photo credit: Alejandro Groenewold

You know that crazy guy on the street corner, shouting at you to buy his wares? They may be designer handbags (fake), pashminas, fruit, or biblical reckonings. Whatever he’s selling, he passionately wants you to buy. Obviously he conveys this by yelling at you. Obviously.

How often does that work?

… how about “It never works, unless I have a genuine need to buy his stuff – and then I buy despite the yelling.” That seems about right for me, and I know many others in this great city will also agree.

Marketing has gone from a “tell anyone who will listen our message, over and over again, and hope that they’ll eventually buy from us”, to a much more relationship-based approach.  Without being all buzzwordy – people want to talk to people and companies they’re interested in. They’re not as interested in listening to said people and companies shout in their general direction, and some are just plain turned off by the shouting.

The point is this: Social media tools aren’t just about taking the same practices from “old” marketing ways and adopting them to “new”. You can’t expect to shout at people on Twitter or Facebook like you used to do (even on MySpace, the horrors!) and have them pay attention to you. They just won’t.

If you don’t “get” it you’re probably wondering “Wait, why won’t they pay attention?”. If you do “get” it, you’re probably thinking “Yup, I agree!”.

For the ones that don’t “get” it – it boils down to the way you think about your fans/consumers. They’re not nameless and faceless people who happen to buy your stuff. They have personalities, they have passions, they have interests, they have likes and dislikes. You fit in there somewhere, which is why they buy your stuff. You have to quit thinking about your fans/consumers as anonymous pockets of money and start thinking about them for what they are – people. Fans. Consumers. Actual living breathing females and males with actual lives.

That’s where you start from!

Suddenly, shouting at people with lives and interests doesn’t make so much sense.  You wouldn’t do this in a normal social setting, so why would you online?

For years the recording industry, and even the music industry as a whole, viewed their customers as anonymous open wallets. Clearly this hasn’t worked for the recording industry in recent years, and the public is finally seeing a shift towards viewing people as actual people.

Consumers across all markets now have a true voice, and fans/consumers expect you to at the very least, listen to them.

So – on behalf of all fans and consumers out there, I beg you.  Bands? Solo artists? Please stop shouting at me. Please stop “connecting” with me on social sites and then turning the conversation around so it’s 100% about you.  I’ll stop listening, and I’ll show you that by unsubscribing, or unfollowing, or unfriending.

Chris Brogan touches on this in a recent post – check it out here (excerpt below).

The Mindset: Don’t Be That Guy

First, learn to promote, but don’t be that guy. It’s really important that you are participatory in the social space. If you’re here just to talk about you, your work just won’t get as much spread. People won’t take the actions that they might if they feel you’re “one of us.” By starting with this point, I’m saying this: your mileage WILL vary if you approach social media tools as just another channel exactly like what you were doing with marketing.

Have you had this happen to you before? Do you have more to add? Say so in the comments!

I attended the Boxee Beta launch party at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Monday, and I was blown away by their product. Wired’s Epicenter blog reviewed the launch here.

For those that don’t know what Boxee is, watch their video talking about their Alpha product below:

Boxee Beta

A lot of thought was put into the new Boxee Beta menu, and to many users, the updated menu style respresented almost a complete overhaul from the Alpha version.  That’s all well and good, but what really got me excited was the way Beta removes barriers.

What if I want to watch TV in bed? Great. I can do that.

Movies? Them too.

Hook it up to a TV and control via a remote? I only need my phone (really, they have an app for that).

Look at photos on Flickr while listening to music on Pandora? You betcha.

Why You Should Care

Boxee has an interesting “App” section.

Photo credit: Boxee.tv Blog

If you take a look, you can see major social platforms, websites and media companies all coming out with their own applications.

That’s great! But wait… can’t you do the same?

You’re on MySpace, you’re on YouTube, you’re on Twitter and you’re on Facebook. Why not create an application that aggregates that content in your own Boxee app? Your fans can download your app and have even more access to you though Boxee, which is mobile (seeing as it’s a piece of software that sits on their computer) and allows people to consume the content they want – when they want.

Or, what about going a step further and making sure that your upcoming events are there, the app points to your website, and why not even set up an email address for fans to submit their own content and allow your app to aggregate it? I’m no programmer, but those ideas sound appealing to me as a music fan, and I’m willing to bet there are quite a few people who have already started developing things like this from the tech side.

Mary McKnight posted this tweet (regarding labels) in response to Jeremy Meyers earlier this week, which resonates with me for a number of different reasons:

That’s the subject of another post (or five), but as it relates to Boxee, the point is this: Boxee provides an easy, “what I want, when I want, where I want” way to connect you and your lives/music/brand/story to fans.

If you haven’t checked out Boxee I highly suggest you do, and keep a close eye on them over the next 4-6 months. The potential here for musicians is huge and I’m looking forward to see who jumps on the bandwagon, and how they pimp it out to fit their brand.

Do you use Boxee? Love it? Hate it? Have another idea to share? The comments are yours!

aka: the conclusion.

To be honest, I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile.  If you haven’t read the series, you can find them linked below:

Part 1 – Introduction

Part 2 – Product

Interlude – Back to Reality

Part 3 -Price

Part 4 -Place

Part 5 – Promotion

We’ve arrived at Part 6 – The Conclusion.

Throughout the series, I posed a number of questions to (hopefully) start some thought around how you can, or want to, market yourself.

The best advice I can offer as a marketer is to actually go out there and execute – go and DO this stuff you want to do! BUT, and this is a huge but, do it with a purpose, and measure it.

The “hot topic” for most of 2009 at any social media conference was “How do I measure this?”. I can’t say that there is a “one size fits all” standard to measuring your success, but there are some things you can do to start to get a grasp on the effect “this stuff” has.

I’ve provided my own list below, and included a few more links of people far more knowledgeable than myself to give you a head start.

Basic Ways To Measure Social Media Impact for Musicians

• Website visits
• Number of Twitter followers
• Number of Facebook fans
• @ replies on Twitter
• DM’s on Twitter
• Downloads of music/CD’s
• Blog comments
• Tickets sold to a show
• Email newsletter sign-ups
• Email newsletter forwards
• YouTube views
• Asset trends (download trends, YouTube video trends, website trends)
• Likes
• Comments on Facebook Fan page
• ReTweets (RT’s)
• Blogger coverage
• Interviews
• Contest submissions/entries

This is is not exhaustive by any means, and David Berkowitz recently compiled a much lengthier list for MediaPost – you can find it here. Another list is here.

In addition, if you’re wondering what’s up with Social Media ROI, check out Olivier Blanchard’s stellar presentation below.

Did I miss anything off the list? Still have questions to ask? Bone to pick? Leave it in the comments!