I’ve recently started to get more involved with a few music networking/tech groups around the NYC area – namely, NY Music Tech and Noteworking meetups.  This past Monday saw a NY Music Tech event take place at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, and I helped work the door for the event.

The duties were basic.  Look at the online RSVP list and cross people off, collecting their money as they entered.  The venue is large and held the group comfortably, but as the only bar that was open was in another room, a lot of people wanted to “leave” (to go to the bar) and come back in.

Enter, the stamp.

Now, I’m personally not a big fan of stamps.  I understand their value, but I don’t like them.  For some reason they still remind me of the large X’s I used to have to get on my hands when going to see bands before I was 21, and they’re darn hard to wash off (the stamps and the X’s).

It does seem that I’m in the minority on that front, though.  The group was manageable in size (about 40-50 people this month) and I’m darn good at remembering faces.  So, when people stepped to the front room to grab a drink before the presentations began, I said “no problem, see you soon!” and let them go.  What started as one or two people asking to be stamped on their way “out” quickly turned into almost every person that left to grab a drink checking that they could come back in and double-checking that no, I really didn’t have a stamp.

I was puzzled, but The Knitting Factory graciously provided a stamp for me to use (mainly to stop the questions from being asked about said stamp) and I started sarcastically stamping away, asking every person that asked for a stamp if they wanted one or just thought they needed one before they went to grab a drink.

The overwhelming majority insisted that they wanted to be stamped, and I quickly found a lot of enjoyment out of making large, dark “100″ marks on the top of everyone’s hands, whether they were planning on grabbing a drink from the bar or not.

It appears that people just really like to collect stamps!

On top of me still trying to wrap my mind around why (can anyone help enlighten me?) anyone would want a stamp, my mind quickly wandered to the marketing application of the stamps.  We know that people like them, and many people commented that they knew people who proudly wore theirs as badges of honor “I did this, I was there!” after a weekend at shows.

Why, if that is the case, do bands not make more customized stamps? Typically the venues provide the stamps and they’re usually pretty meaningless to the bands – they’re either a random shape or symbol, or the venue logo.

Why not instead provide your OWN stamp at the door, and allow people to show off YOUR logo after the show? Doesn’t that make more sense?

You could take it a step further and provide something that people could do after the event with their stamp (perhaps a photo submission contest of some sort, making sure that the stamp is visible in the photo) to keep the engagement going after the event.

The ideas are plentiful! The lesson? Don’t overlook a seemingly “normal” part of a concert-going experience. Instead, see if you can capitalize on that “normal” experience and turn “just something that happens” into working for you as something novel.

What say you on the stamp v. no stamp debate? Are you pro-stamp or anti-stamp? Why?

This is a story about a little festival that could.

They could produce a stellar lineup. They could sell out within a week. They could promise to be one of the best festivals of the year, if not the past few combined.

This little festival that could did put together a stellar lineup, did sell out within a week, and does promise to be one of the best festivals of the year – if not the past few combined.

This not-so-little festival can also be rude, as seen above.

If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s been a lot of chatter about Coachella over the past few weeks. First, there was the excitement over the lineup (summary: “HOLY COW IT’S AMAZING!”), then there was the chatter about tickets going on sale (summary: “YAY! I HAVE MY TICKET AND I’M SO EXCITED!). Then tickets sold out, Coachella posted their “kthxbye” Tweet was posted and we saw the following:

I get being sassy. I understand that a music festival (or an artist, or a producer, or a disc jockey) may have a bit more leeway than your standard corporate account on Twitter. I even get that humor (in this case, trying to use lolcat humor) can be witty and funny.  However, in this instance, the tweet was just plain rude.

Tickets were going for $1,000+ at the point that the tweet was posted, and the festival and the 75,000 tickets offered sold out within 6 days.  6 days!  Many people were waiting on paychecks to come in, or waiting to get vacation time approved at work.  I know quite a few people myself that had booked accommodation and airfare, but were waiting on buying tickets until they got paid again (just like they did in years before).

Knowing that people are spending a lot of money to go to this festival, and knowing that tickets sold out much more quickly than in years previous, the least that @Coachella could do was show a bit of sympathy, or even thank the people who purchased tickets, when they ran out.

A few examples of tweets that would have worked better than their rude tweet:

“Overwhelming response to ticket sales! We’re sold out already!”

“Thanks to all that bought tickets for this years festival – we just sold out in record time!”

No, it wouldn’t have solved all of the complaints. But, what tweets like the one above would have done was remove the sassy and rude aspect of their current tweet, as well as show appreciation for people that bought the tickets.

Sometimes using humor goes a bit too far, and the fact that people are still talking about that tweet 2 days later shows that this time, it did indeed cross that line.

Coachella – in the future, put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re talking to and ask yourself how they would feel before you tweet. Humor doesn’t always translate well online, especially on Twitter.

At first blush, yoga and music don’t have a ton in common – aside from the fact that music is usually playing during a yoga class, of course.

I was willingly having my ass kicked by a great yoga instructor at my gym last night when the strikingly simple analogy hit me – yoga is just like practicing a musical instrument. Bear with me here…

The basics of practicing seem simple – you play a piece over and over and over until you get it right.  But look deeper, and you notice the nuances.  Are your fingers correctly placed on the violin so that your notes come out on pitch, as opposed to sharp or flat? Are you moving them at the right time for the runs? When you’re drumming, how is the tension in your arms and wrist affecting how you strike the drum? Where are you holding the tension? Where should you be relaxing?

The most simple of techniques, rudiments, fundamentals or poses can take on a completely different light when you analyze them and pay attention to the action of doing them, not just the getting through them to the next phrase or pose.

Enter – the mountain pose.  It’s literally what you see above – standing with your feet together and arms at your side, palms facing forward.  How deceptively simple! “Standing up, I do that all day!”

Right – but how often do you pay attention to how you’re standing? How often do you pay attention to if your toes are spread or together – to how your feet are grounded on the floor? How often do you think of where your hips are in relation to your shoulders, or how your neck is aligned with everything else?

You don’t. Just like you might not pay attention to how you’re striking the drum or if your fingers are placed in exactly the right place on your violin at exactly the right moment.  These little details escape us as we rush through our lives and through our practice… we often get through them just to get to the next point.

The lesson I took away from yoga last night was this – before you move onto the advanced stuff (running a Twitter contest for tickets, or developing a strategy for increasing the engagement on your Facebook Fan Page), make sure you have the basics down (like Tweeting things that people are interested in, or getting fans on your Fan Page).  Start from the beginning and apply thought and a good dose of awareness to everything you do before moving forward.

Doesn’t the saying go “Perfect practice makes perfect”? Start small, get the basics right, then move forward.

Oh – and the soundtrack to this post? The Facebook soundtrack – fitting, eh?

It’s funny.  In certain circles, weird looks cross faces when I mention speaking to people for years without ever meeting them.  In other circles, it’s completely normal. It’s been this way for about 10 years now, at least as I remember it.

Ever since my teenage years, I’ve seen the Internet as a tool to connect with people.  At first it was old friends – people that had moved or that I’d lost contact with for one way other other.  Later, I got into WGI (the link is an MP3 to the last show I played, the Overture to Candide played from finish to start, then from start to finish – in case you’re wondering).  I also joined LiveJournal around the same time and started to see things changing.  All of a sudden, the Internet became a place for me to chat with people about upcoming shows, connect with members of other drumlines before we ran into them at a competition, capture my thoughts and feelings as I had them, and ultimately meet new people.

All in all, this seemed pretty natural.  I’d be meeting these people in person a short time later – and many of them I’d already met in passing – we just didn’t have the luxury of time to talk.  In that social circle, connecting online was normal.  Mention this to people I went to school with though and I got a completely different reaction – it clearly wasn’t normal to them and in fact, was really, really strange.

Jump forward a decade and these days, I’m hard-pressed to count friends and acquaintances that I haven’t met online on two hands – part of this is work-related (I work in marketing/social media as a job), and part of this is lifestyle related, seeing as I’m into music with a really strong online presence and community (drum and bass, dubstep, WGI/DCI, etc).

I spent Thanksgiving in the UK and got to thinking about it on the plane ride back.

The friend who let me crash at their place? I met them in person, but through someone I met online.  We’ve kept in contact for 5ish years exclusively online, and kept up online by and large even when I lived in the UK.

The offices I visited when I arrived, to catch up with people I’ve previously worked with? I met them at an event in NYC, but only because I saw a Tweet that they’d be in town and arranged to meet up.  I knew them online first and have kept in contact online ever since (over a year and a half now).

The old friend I caught drinks/dinner with and my old flatmate who came into town to see me? I met one online and one through well, living together, but we’ve all kept in contact online for the past year and a half and 5+ (respectively).

These are just a few examples, but in each one, the relationship wouldn’t have happened or be maintained without the use of the Internet.  Nowadays I find it normal to keep in contact with people all over the world and feel like I actually know what’s going on in their lives – even if we haven’t seen each other in person for years.

What’s this mean for you? It means that you shouldn’t overlook the power of the Internet as a medium – not only to promote your own stuff, but to discover new people and new opportunities, as well as maintain the ones you have.

Pretty simple. huh?

I’m curious about why people use Facebook.

More specifically, I’m curious about how people use Facebook.  The network itself has an interesting past – from starting out as a purely social networking site limited to certain universities (which is when I joined), to becoming a behemoth marketing tool complete with targeted ads, Fan Pages and Groups (so, ads, small versions of microsites and something akin to a listserv, but on steroids).

I ran across this article today which caused a pretty instant “WTF ARE THEY SMOKING?!” reaction upon reading this line (emphasis mine):

It takes an incredible commitment to cultivate a personal brand.  To go from three Facebook friends to 3,000 is no small feat; same goes for Twitter — to grow a personal fan base requires a savvy combination of content creation, curation, promotion and cool.

For me, going from “three Facebook friends to 3,000″ would literally mean that I met 2,997 new people.  I use Facebook much the same as I have for the past 6ish years – as a way to aggregate everyone I’ve ever met in my life.  I don’t add people who just happen to know my friends, and only rarely add people that I haven’t met in real life (though, due to my Internet-heavy life, there are a few exceptions).

The rest of the article is remarkably on point though – if you’re interested in the corporate brand/personal brand discussion at all then I’d suggest that you go here and read it.

But, getting back to my original question… how do you use Facebook?

I’ve been doing some thinking and see a pretty clear breakout for artists/musicians/people that care to have a visible brand of any sort:

• Personal Page For friends, family, acquaintances, people they know. It contains details about who they are, not just the brand they present to the world. There are probably varying levels of access (via friends list/privacy settings)
• Fan Page For fans and friends/family/acquaintances that want to keep in touch with what you’re doing professionally. There aren’t varying levels of access, but the content is designed to be used as a marketing tool.
• Group I don’t think that many musicians have jumped on Groups yet, but I see a lot of useful applications of them.  This is more of an unstructured conversation than your Fan Page, but may have a lot of the same people involved.  This is also used as a marketing tool, but it may be a value-added one, as you can make groups private.

So – how do you use Facebook? Do you have a personal page and a Fan Page? Do you market yourself through your personal page (and things like event invites, etc)?

Oh, and speaking of event invites – here’s how to block the people that keep spamming you with them.

Tell me in the comments, please! I halfway think that I’m missing the boat with Facebook and if so, I’d love to know why/how.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about why so many artists seem to be suddenly splitting from their record labels. There was a wave of self-released records a few years ago, including NIN and Radiohead, but recently the “I can do this myself!” camp has expanded with the addition of OK Go and Amanda Palmer, among others.

The basic premise of a label is this: you sign an act you think will end up making you money, invest some time and resources into them in exchange for some ownership (profits, rights) of the product, and start on your journey to making the big bucks. You need the talent to make your connections worthwhile, and the talent needs you, your money, and your connections to help them make it big.

I know, it’s a touch more complicated than that in reality. But, when you get right down to the meat of it, it’s about the label making a wise choice on the artist selection side, dedicating the resources (time, money, guidance) into making that investment a success, and enjoying the rewards when it happens.

Tell me again exactly how that process differs from being a venture capitalist?

It doesn’t!

EXCEPT when you consider the fact that the labels somehow forgot about patience (among other things), and started screwing up from the very beginning.

Sign an act that can’t sing their way out of a paper bag? Great, auto tune the records to hell and use every available bit of technology at your disposal to get them to sound nothing short of magnificent.

Not writing songs that reach as many people as you’d like? Hire a songwriter and make sure their music fits the masses.

There ARE labels out there that take the time to really evaluate the acts they sign, and sign them BECAUSE of their talent and their potential. These, lately, have been the indie labels, which are doing quite well if you look at their growth over the past few years.

It seems to be the majors that have this problem – this immediate need to recoup their investment and milk the artist for all they’re worth. Yes, the music business IS about making a profit. It’s a business and for any business to be sustainable, you have to have some cash coming into the door. However, they’re not looking at things from a long term view as well as a short term view, it seems.

All of that technology to make an artist sound amazing when they’re truly not comes at a cost, and that cost = overhead. Keep increasing the # you’re putting into someone and profits for you diminish, lessening both what you make AND what the artist makes. Tough cycle.

Venture capitalists will put money into a business they think could be viable in exchange for partial ownership of the returns. They’ll sit on the board, they’ll guide, they’ll oversee, and they’ll use their connections to help improve the business. They’ll be present and their input will be heard, but what they wont do is demand their investment back from the first few customers their new business signs. They’ll wait it out, see their investment slowly grow (if they chose wisely), and be in it for the medium to long haul.

Just like labels, VC’s come in different flavors. Some request more of one thing, or less of another. For the artist, it’s about picking wisely (just like the startup!). For the label, it’s about putting terms out there that provide ways for both your profits AND your artist (and THEIR profits) to grow over time.

If artists evolve over time, and fan bases grow and change right along with those artists, hey don’t labels take the same approach? Why don’t they act more like guides, instead of dictators? Why don’t they make smarter choices about who to sign from the very beginning?

It seems that labels put profits above all else in both the short AND the long term, preventing (often times, it seems) the chance of long term growth. Plus, some of the signing decisions? They’re just downright silly! Why are you going to sign someone who can’t sing to a label?!

Riddle me that.

Otherwise known as HOLY STATISTICS!

These summary stats were pulled from the Socialnomics site, so go there for the full statistical breakdown in written form. These are just the highlights!

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. 80% of Twitter usage is outside of Twitter…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
6. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
7. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
8. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
9. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
10. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
11. Only 14% trust advertisements
12. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
13. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
14. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

The benefit and the downfall of not having a traditional 9-5 is the fact that you can work at any time, and generally in any place.

This is great at 3pm when you have to scoot off to run a few errands, but can become troublesome when you really know you should be spending your Sunday afternoon being productive, instead of laying around in the park.

Even despite the evidence to the contrary, this myth about being “one in a million” seems to persist through many areas of life.  A great High School football player may see his name in lights in a huge college, then NFL, stadium. A teenager teaching himself guitar may fancy himself as the next Jimi Hendrix.

Dare to dream people, but don’t forget to hustle along the way.

Hustling means practicing not only to be good, but to be phenomenal.  As a hint, Malcom Gladwell seems to have done research suggesting that this greatness starts hitting its stride around 10,000 practice hours. And that’s perfect practice, not just half-baked “I think I’ll play a few notes and call it practice”, practice.  There’s a difference, and every musician knows that this difference exists.

Wake up early and set a schedule.  Learn when you’re most efficient, when you’re the most creative, and when you’re just “there” and pretty much useless. Build around that, and stick to it. Work your butt off like your career and livelihood depends on it, as you know what? It does.

The lack of defined working hours is either a good thing or a bad thing. It really is up to each individual to figure out what works for them, then react accordingly.  Do you have your best brainstorms at 2am, consistently? Great. Harness that and make sure you plan to be up and brainstorming at 2am.

Do you work a full-time job? Plan around that, and be prepared to sacrifice.  It wouldn’t be called the life of a struggling musician if the musician wasn’t, well, struggling.

Hustling often means staying up extra hours, giving up free time and using vacation days to work on your craft.

A hustler’s life ain’t easy…

I often notice a difference in people I come across. It’s become a bit easier to define lately as those who get “the hustle”, and those that don’t.

Those that do often have multiple projects going on at once. Those that do always have their hands in something and their minds working on a problem they’re not quite sure how they’re going to solve, but they know they’ll get there. Those that do are often the ones drinking a few cups of coffee to get them through until midnight, and those people you see that always seem to have something to do, people to see, or places to go.  The hustle really is the manifestation of their belief in many ways – the belief that if they work hard enough, if they hustle enough, that their dreams WILL come true.

Those that don’t have it… it just seems half-baked. They have this great idea but aren’t really ever able to execute. They practice for hours but never really improve. They’re always on the cusp of doing something that could be great, but never really manage to start doing it.

Can you taste it?

It all goes back to how bad you want it, I think.  Do you wake up thinking about it? Do you dream about it when you go to sleep at night? Does it invade otherwise unrelated conversations with friends? Does it excite you?

Are you a hustler, or are you just along for the ride?

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 provided by mike.jw under a Creative Commons license

An article recent came out at the Boston Globe, talking about the Millennial generation and the vinyl to digital transition of music.

“The younger generation has no romantic attachments to records as physical objects. To them, music exists as a kind of omnipresent atmospheric resource.

And it’s not that I begrudge them their online treasure troves or bite-size iPods. But I still miss the way it used to be, in the old days, when fans had to invest serious time and money to track down the album or song they wanted.

What I’m getting at here is a deeper irony: technology has made the pursuit of our pleasures much easier. But in so doing, I often wonder if it has made them less sacred. My children will grow up in a world that makes every song they might desire instantly available to them. And yet I sort of pity them that they will never know the kind of yearning I did.”

Even though I grew up mainly in the cassette and compact disc eras, I love vinyl. I love the feel of a record in my hands. I miss looking at the artwork on the vinyl itself or the packaging.

Music is an art form, both in sound, and in sight. Liner notes in CD’s have lately been reduced to a single slip of paper, instead of the large-format prints of the 90’s. Cassettes are all but forgotten, but vinyl has seen a surge in popularity as of late, selling close to a million albums in 2008, up over 15% from sales in 2007.

Time Inc. ran an article about this very subject in 2008, aptly titled “Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back”.

“Album extras Large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos (some even have full-size posters tucked in the sleeve) and liner notes are a big draw for young fans. “Alternative rock used to have 16-page booklets and album sleeves, but with iTunes there isn’t anything collectible to show I own a piece of this artist,” says Dreese of Newbury Comics.”

What was lost, and is now being found, is the second art of music sales.

The packaging.

I, for one, am happy to see that particular art form return.

Photo provided under Creative Commons License by Anthony Mooney

PLUR – Peace Love Unity Respect

I started going out to parties at the tail end of the US “rave scene” in the late 1990′s. The parties were held in warehouses, in dive bars, in fields and in ritzy establishments with the snooty doormen and overpriced drinks to prove it. People from all walks of life came to enjoy the music and meet people. Bankers, artists, musicians, marketers, real estate agents – you name a profession and one of those ravers would raise their hand to claim it.

I was still a student at the time and remember feeling so welcomed and loved by the people I met off the local message boards and out at parties. I was never into the drugs – I always came to enjoy the music and hang out with people who eventually became my friends.  I can’t remember a time where someone was purposefully unfriendly, or hesitated to smile and welcome me into the fold.

As I was chatting with Jeremy Meyers a few nights ago, we started talking about how raves, and PLUR, were “the original social network”.  I take a slight spin on that and say that PLUR and social media principles are one in the same.  It may be a different decade, but things haven’t changed.

From Wikipedia:

PLUR or PLURR is an acronym that stands for “Peace Love Unity Respect”, a credo or mantra of the rave culture. Many in the rave scene have heard this term at some time or another, although its common usage is relatively recent. Early 1990s and mid-1980s ravers often followed similar principles, but did not use this coinage to describe their belief. It may be interpreted as the way that a raver believes he or she should live his or her life, and how people are expected to behave at a rave. This philosophy of the rave culture theoretically takes precedence over any chemical aspects of the rave scene.

Peace

To ravers, this means being respectful of others.  Keep the peace and respect people’s opinions, dancing space, clothing, and ideals.  We all may be different, but we have the music in common, and because of that, the rest deserves respect.

To social media marketers, this means respecting people’s opinions. You don’t have to agree with everything they say, but there’s a difference between disagreeing and being disrespectful.  Social media is gaining traction and the community has a responsibility to itself to keep the peace internally. Certain voices stand out, but we’re “all in this together” and everyone deserves respect… at least in the beginning.

Love

Again, from Wikipedia:

Acts and feelings of goodwill towards all others are a moral imperative with their own rewards. In the raving community, it is an encouragement to form bonds of friendship between dancers.

Replace “dancers” with “comrades”, “colleagues”, or “other social media people” and the same principle applies to social media. No editing needed.

Unity

I touched on this earlier, but in both social media and the rave scene there is a sense of “we’re all in this together”. Social media people view sharing knowledge as a best practice, and the people working in social media are constantly talking to others trying to improve upon the way things are done, come up with a solution for a problem, or answer that pesky question of “How do we measure social media”?

We’re all in this together, whether that means bonding over music from all walks of life, or bonding through communication and the sharing of knowledge about your chosen path in life.

Respect

For many ravers, this means not doing drugs, being safe at raves if you use glowsticks or other equipment to dance and making sure that everoyne is having a good time – not just you.

To people in social media, this means respecting the opinions and practices of others, even if you disagree. Disagreement is often an invitation for a dialogue about different methods or practices, but these dialogues are still respectful of both parties. It’s about connection, even despite (and sometimes because of) the differences.

Moving from “the rave scene” to “the social media scene” has been a natural progression. I was posting on message boards before they were part of social networking platform offerings. I was meeting people I met online out at parties and events long before they were called “tweetups” or “meetups”. I connected with people online, I shared what I knew, I shared my opinions, I shared my personality and I received far more than I ever could have expected in return.

When I made the move into social media professionally I was already there personally. I was active on social networks, I was a blogger (my personal blog, which I now keep private) for 8 years, and I was connecting with people in person that I met online.

The locations and situations may have changed, but the sentiment has stayed the same.  Respect others, acknowledge their opinions, share what you know, learn what you can do better, and have fun. Share, learn, respect, acknowledge and enjoy.

Respect, Enjoy, Acknowledge, Learn, Share – REALS.

Social Media – Keepin’ It REALS

It kind of has a ring to it…