This has made me think about my social media strategy. The truth is, I don’t really have one. When this blog started in 2009, the strategy was to produce via this medium and draw interest and attention back to this page. Since then, I’ve joined twitter, created a tumble log, joined linked in and various other services.

I’m now forced to think about how I spend my time on these networks and which ones I chose to contribute to the most. The problem is that they all seem worthwhile and enjoyable. So I will have to prioritise. This is how I think I will do it.

My blog – this blog

This blog will be the space most serious to me. As I pay money to keep this domain every year and have the url printed on my business card, I may as well keep this in good order. I haven’t written here consistently. There are two reasons for this. One is that I’ve been distracted with less meaningful social media services. The other reason is that I’d rather have well thought out posts on this blog, which means that I don’t often have interesting material to share here or it takes some time to write and edit everything in a decent manner. This blog will however become my most important internet presence.

Twitter

Twitter has been getting a lot of criticism lately. Poor quality topics, too many spammers, too many rants etc etc. If you reduce your stream and make good use of lists, this shouldn’t really be a problem. One thing I like about twitter is the instant access to it through mobile phones. Whenever there’s a big story, you’re sure to find opinions and links to articles for any important issue. While I enjoy twitter, I will probably tweet less. If I have something important to say, I’ll now have a good think about it and do the issue justice by writing an article for it. It will end up on twitter anyway through an automatic blog post link.

Tumblr

A great idea at the time. “I’ll just use tumblr for all the youtube videos and quotes that don’t necessarily belong on my serious style blog”. Since the emergence of google buzz and now google plus, I think tumblr has less appeal to me. It takes time away from blog writing and lately, I’m short on informal things to publish. Between twitter and google plus, I think I have this type of publishing covered.

Linkedin

Every now and then I log into Linkedin, make a few changes and then log out. I haven’t given up on linkedin, I think it’s a great presence to have but I’m not exactly there everyday and interacting with it. My time on linkedin is very low at this point and I think I will continue with the same level of engagement.

Google Buzz

I think buzz is approaching the end of it’s life cycle. I did like that both my blog and tumble log got published on my google buzz profile and therefore shared among a more tech savvy crowd. However, I think the cheap and lazy re-publishing model is being less favoured with google plus. This of course encourages users to create unique and meaningful content from within google plus rather than just bombard your material into peoples’ streams. I will stop contributing to google buzz except for the odd photo that I just have to share (instead of sharing photos through twitter) and the automatic blog posts that I have set up.

Google plus

This service will only become meaningful for me if all of my friends (yes, all, I don’t have many) start using it in a genuine manner. If this doesn’t occur then it will follow the fate of my twitter stream, full of interesting people I don’t know who sometimes upload really random things.

Conclusion

In summary my social media strategy is this. I will work hard on this blog. I will continue to use twitter for small comments in between blogging and to take in the vibe of my network. I will wait and see how google plus unfolds. If google plus is successful then I will probably spend less time on twitter and this blog to engage with it. I hope to check back in a few months to see exactly how things pan out.

I like the service for 3 reasons:

1) Easy access with little effort

2) Simple to learn and no frills design

3) Adequate compatibility for different publishing mediums (at least in my experience)

The fact that Buzz lives inside your gmail inbox is fantastic. After I’ve checked my emails, Buzz is just one click away. It’s just a matter of opening up the Buzz pane and you can quickly scroll over recent activity. A much simpler task than viewing your RSS reader. And just that one step more convenient than viewing your twitter account.

Another bonus is the simplistic design that Buzz has. No skins, themes, confusing colours. No multiple columns, boxes, side menus either. Now I’m not a facebook user but I have seen the interface, it’s actually part of the reason why I haven’t signed up. Just by looking at the facebook home page it speaks out to you: “EXCESS TIME CONSUMER” or “PROCRASTINATE HERE, YOU WON’T LEAVE IN HOURS”.

Buzz was quite easy to learn, much to do with the fact that it doesn’t do all that much. BUT THAT’S GOOD! Don’t turn it into a Drupal admin page.

The integration with social media publishing tools. I like the fact that youtube links automatically get embedded. I can share a photo from my picasa album, links to websites retrieves images from the site to display. I can send my blog posts and tumblr entries through. Buzz makes it easy to express myself and my interests. I like the fact that you can have “shorter than blog posts, longer than twitter entries”. In this case, it looks a bit like a stripped down version of tumblr, although I think Buzz is more fluid and connected with larger audiences. It’s an interaction rather than a viewing service.

Buzz’s Limitations

• Not so much limitations but things I would like to see.
• The possibility to log in without gmail. I can go to youtube.com and log in without being in gmail. Same goes for picasa, reader and calendar.
• Having the opportunity log in separately would be nice to have.
• Hide replies to a particular Buzz
• Hide people’s twitter streams, without having to block that person entirely. It would be nice to filter this so as to get that person’s more meaningful entries.
• A separate window for viewing a list of your followers. At the moment I have like 60 followers who I don’t know. I am checking there profile one by one but this takes time. Make it easy to view a list in one page and then be able to drop down a list of their recent activity in a fast sort of way.

I can’t think of any more limitations. I know some people are complaining that they don’t use gmail and feel left out. I’m sure they didn’t mind having to fill out forms when they signed onto facebook, myspace, linkedin, youtube etc. Get another email or google account and start exploring. Heaps of google users have more than one google account. Twitter made you sign up to use their service, you need to sign up to Buzz too.

I’m sure google will start to add more things to Buzz. I think they’ve thought this one out. It may seemed rushed to some but I think it came at a good time.

What else do users like about Buzz?

A few months back I started using the open source micro blogging service, Identi.ca. It was the open-source alternative for Twitter. I have since signed up for Twitter as it is heavily supported by other services I use such as Linkedin and Tumblr. There is also a large community using Twitter and without an account I was missing out on contacting people I may know.

Differences between Identi.ca and Twitter

Twitter’s a bit different to Identica, it takes some getting used to. What I like about Identi.ca is that you can go to the homepage of the site and see what anyone in the whole community has been denting about in real time. You can tag your profile so it’s easy for people with similar interests to stumble across it to learn a bit more about you. You can also join groups on Identica and write messages to a group, allowing all followers of the group to receive your message even though they may not be following you directly. This makes message integration a whole lot more effective. Another plus is the small size of Identi.ca’s community compared to Twitter. It makes it easy to find and connect with people without cluttering too much of your home page. The community on Identica is great for me as most groups and messages are IT related and dents are usually insightful. I rarely see anything like “I just came back from the gym” on there.

But still, I opened up a Twitter account.

Twitter’s been around for longer, has more coverage and credibility. Most candidates running in national elections around the world use twitter during their campaigns to engage with the public. Organisations use it as a feedback tool, influential public figures also let you into their lives by the way of Twitter.

On Twitter, I couldn’t get the same username that I have for identica so I had to get creative as well as settle for something else. One plus is that Identica provides support for Twitter meaning that if I post something on Identica, it appears on my twitter page almost instantly. Now that Linkedin provide integration with Twitter, every time I send a message on Identica (which automatically gets published in Twitter as well) Twitter then sends the exact message to my Linkedin status on my profile there. All I have to do is remember to stick “#in” somewhere in the message.

Functionality

With Twitter/Identica, the functionality is only as good as the size and activity of your network. If you aren’t using Twitter to communicate events between close friends then, it’s usefulness becomes limited. On the same note, if you network isn’t using Twitter at the same pace you are then it becomes a bit irrelevant. I think that as long as the community continues to grow, Twitter will have an ever important presence on the internet.

Microblogging is a great service that fits between facebook or a blog. It doesn’t have to get too personal as you can set your profile to private. You also don’t need to invest a lot of time or effort as a blog would require. Another bonus is that it’s free.

Call me a nerd but I think that ipods, blackberry(s), wi, ps3, psp, xbox, HD LCD/LED, all become boring when all I really need to kill some time is an internet connection and access to Twitter and emails.

http://identi.ca/rbravo
http://twitter.com/rbravonet

For a music band that isn’t connected to a record label, OIP is vital.

The notion that alternative music need not use social networking tools because of pop fads or trends is now outdated. Whether you produce folk music, death hip-hop or political punk rock or even opera, a credible internet presence can do nothing else than enhance your reputation.

Currently the internet is an inexpensive medium that reaches a mass audience of distinct ages and demographics. Being accessible to distant fans can take your success higher than what was possible ten years ago, and this is possible without much budget spent on advertising. Now let’s look at the tools available.

Social Media

The above concept has changed the way we view networking and even critics cannot play down the influence and significance of this trend called web 2.0.

There are more than enough useful applications to use on the internet. While it is advisable to have several appearances or entrance points online, it isn’t necessary to use every one available as maintenance becomes time consuming. It’s best to stick with the most common ones as the audiences there are larger. Now let’s investigate the crucial applications you need to have to create that mass following.

Youtube

This medium may be intimidating for musicians who have yet to shoot a video clip or record a performance. If you’re eager to find success in this industry you might as well start with what you have.  Film a recital or jam session, play one of your songs in acoustic and film it. If you are prepared, create a video clip and upload it. There are some cases where regular youtube users become famous for the videos they produce. You could be the next story. Who wouldn’t want a million people watching and hearing what you have to say.

MySpace

This is another obvious option for musicians. Maybe you think that mySpace isn’t part of your audience but if you tell young people that you create music and then cannot point them towards your mySpace account then you may lose credibility. The benefit of MySpace is that you can upload four sample songs to showcase. If you are worried about someone stealing or plagiarising your work then you can cut your sample song to a shorter length.

My Space allows you to interact with other bands in your genre or geographical area. Your following can grow farther than you can imagine. If we listen to Icelandic post-rock music here in Australia then why not?

Facebook

Let’s be honest, I don’t like it and you don’t like it but you will need to use it. For most people who are too lazy to maintain meaningful relationships, facebook offers a one-stop-shop for them to interact with friends. One advantage facebook offers is a fan list to keep track of people interested in your music or other offerings. Once you grow a big enough following of 5000 people (facebook’s limit of friends), then if a gig comes up and only 1/4 of your list turns up then it’s a successful event.

Twitter

Not as crucial as the others but a great way to publish an SMS sized message to the rest of the world. How you use it is up to you but it’s a good tool for announcements and once again you have a list of people following and reading what your band is up to and where you are touring.

Flickr

Not really needed or recommended but a good place to post photos of the group. Maybe one of your members is a photographer. This site is like youtube for photographers and enthusiasts.

Free Email

Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail are the most popular of the free email providers. All of them are important as they are necessary for access to instant messaging sessions and services. Gmail and Yahoo accounts qualify for OpenId registration so that might appeal to you however, hotmail is the number one service for instant messaging. This activity requires a lot if time so it might not factor in as a must have but at least one of these email addresses will be useful to have.

Never forget to create practical email signature. When you create an email list of fans, it’s important to include direct links to all of your internet entry points from your youtube channel to your website (more on this below).

Music-related Network sites

In the last five years, sites that are specific to the underground music industry have emerged to help artists get recognition. I will post a few of them as this is a more specific audience target.

Reverbnation

This website is an ideal start when thinking of marketing your band. Here is an excerpt from their website:

We provide innovative marketing solutions that musicians need to compete, cooperate, and differentiate in an increasingly noisy online environment. Unlike typical “closed” communities, artists use ReverbNation as their home base for approaching marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole — be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Tools like TunePaks, FanReach, and Widgets give the artist the power to spread their music and information virtually anywhere. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages.

Purevolume

It offers similar services to reverbnation above. Below is their about us passage.

… is a website for the discovery and promotion of new music and emerging artists. Each artist has a profile that typically contains basic info, updates, photos, shows and music for streaming. Artists have the option of making each of their songs available for free download. Listeners and fans can also create profiles to interact with artists and each other, as well as track and share music they like.

Sonicbids

This is an interesting site. It revolves around music gig/events/concerts. The band needs to sign up and create a profile for event promoters to view. Then the band submits to gigs and connects to promoters who are looking for talent in your genre or area. It can also track your popularity through the latest internet applications such as myspace, last.fm etc.

Here is a extract from their mission statement section:

Our mission is to help create and empower an Artistic Middle Class through the use of innovative technology.

We see our website as a first step towards this mission. We want Sonicbids to be a place where any band from any genre anywhere in the world, can come to find and connect with any type of music promoter, licensor or broadcaster — easily, effectively, and quickly.

The Internet has forever changed the landscape of the music business – for the better. It has helped create a new class of artists we at Sonicbids call the Artistic Middle Class.

Free or inexpensive technologies like Apple’s Garageband (recording), and websites like CDBaby (distribution), iTunes (music retail), MySpace (promotion), and Sonicbids (professional connections) have helped give access and reach to artists that was once available only to a very small group of insiders.

Along with the explosion of blogs and podcasts and music discovery sites like Pandora and Last.fm, it’s now possible for just about any entrepreneurial artist (talent of course being a prerequisite) to meaningfully connect with an audience and build a music career without the traditional backing of a major recording label.

We see the future of our industry as being one where music is everywhere, but where the mass market of the broadcast era is replaced with a mass of profitable little ones.

We see the future as one where artists of all types, by leveraging the power of the Internet, can build careers from the ground up, on their own terms.

ilike

A great networking site for musicians, promoters and bands. Here is what they are about:

iLike is the Web’s leading social music discovery service and the dominant music application on the Facebook®, Orkut, hi5 and Bebo platforms. With more than 50 million registered users, iLike helps people share music recommendations, playlists, and personalized concert alerts. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player suggests new music, creates automatic playlists, and connects people through music. iLike offers musicians and labels a Universal Artist Dashboard™ from which to reach fans and manage their presence across multiple channels: Facebook, Orkut, hi5, Bebo, iLike.com, Ask.com, iLike Sidebar plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player, and iLike’s iPhone application. By leveraging iLike’s “artist-fan graph,” a vast database of connections between consumers and their favorite artists, iLike helps artists reach their fans and cultivate the viral spread of their music. iLike, inc also runs indie music site GarageBand.com.

An Official Band Website

Now the most important aspect of an online internet profile, your own website and information hub. A self-hosted website is what you should aim to have if you want returns on your time and financial investment. All the tools mentioned above work well with a website and those entry points should all be directing people to your website.

The basic setup should be:

• One website with static information
• A link on the main menu to take you to the blog section of the site, where posts are added in reverse chronological order
• An about page including your band history and the genre you play
• A comment page for people to leave a message
• A contact page, this can be an email address and phone number posting or a contact form to protect your privacy and avoid getting spammed so much
• A community message forum may be useful to implement once enough interest is generated by fans

Having a blog on your website keeps it relevant and up to date. All blog posts published on your website can automatically appear as announcements on your facebook and twitter accounts.  This is the benefit of having several entry points and having the applications intertwined.

Lastly, an example

While researching for this blog entry I came across a musician who had her internet presence well established. I was please to discover that she had started her career with no record label and little resources. It has taken her 6 years to become well notices but everything has paid off. Her name is Lisa Donnelly and here is her website: http://www.lisadonnelly.com/

Her myspace page is where she probably gets most of her traffic. It’s great because while you browse the page her music automatically starts playing in the background and after 120 seconds, you already know whether you like her music or not. http://www.myspace.com/lisadonnellymusic

She has incorporated most of the services I have mentioned above and with various entry points on the internet, her reach is always increasing. Lisa’s is a remarkable story of determination and hope. I think it’s worth a read: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/jun/04/l-woman-lawrence-native-lisa-donnelly-perfects-her/

Summary

In summary, not a lot is needed to create an online internet profile. It is necessary to create one in order to grow an audience and to keep current fans updated. You don’t need to subscribe to every social networking service out there, as a few solid ones may be more effective. Of course this isn’t the only aspect you need to work on but it sure helps. A credible and public identity can do nothing but help your journey so give it a go now and see what happens over the next 3 months. There’s a rave out there on the internet with music fans, get in on the action and supply the masses with the music they need. Good luck!

I remember going through some of the hype when I was at school when hotmail started to gain popularity. It wasn’t long before instant messaging – icq, msn, yahoo chat rooms – started taking up all the free time of highschool students, not to mention mobile phones and text messaging.

I was in the loop from the beginning but somewhere along the tack I fell out of the loop and now as an adult I have to discover the new fads on my own.

I think that the emergence of facebook has been a real turning point in the way we create meaningful networks on the internet. Myspace also created a lot of hype at its beginning but I think it was viewed as too informal to be used seriously by the older population. It wasn’t long ago also, when youtube came on the scene and you could easily spend a good 2 hours viewing average quality and weird footage from fellow internet users around the world.

When I first heard of facebook I thought it would be a one year hype over what I thought was a gossip machine that looked like an open version of an email interface. After analysing facebook again recently, I realise how well they have integrated all the successful tools of modern internet communication.

To me, facebook to some extent is more or less a mixture of:

• Hotmail – an email client
• Google talk – an embedded instant messaging client
• Flickr – an online photo gallery
• Twitter – similar to the extent of the status updates (micro-blogging)
• Blogger – layout is similar to a blog, and all accounts are uniform
• Youtube – you can upload and view videos without having to visit youtube anymore

So once you have facebook and realise that you have more online friends than numbers on your mobile phone, what else might you need to enhance your internet experience?

The nice and easy thing about facebook is that it gives people with limited technical knowledge the chance to maintain the closest thing to a personal blog or website without asking them to download anything or even learn much. The technical requirements for usage is for most people, just a step away from being a capable email user.

Having said all that, I don’t have a facebook, twitter, myspace or flickr account. I will resist the temptation for now however, I am curious to see which application will last the longest.

What really gave this new communication medium credibility was the use of such services for the US Presidential election campaign. Everyday, candidates would upload a new video to their youtube channel or change the headlines of their blogs. It made the business community view these teenage fads with more interest than before.

While I don’t have the need to spend an extra hour a day learning about the lives of my acquaintances, I am content with having some space on the internet to share thoughts without feeling too deprived of my privacy. I like the fact that I can decide whether or not to notify my real-life people network of my site or not. I am not bombarded with information of friends that might not be interesting to me.

I also feel a sense of achievement in creating a blog. I have chosen the url, I have set it all up, I can customise it the way I like and in the future I can scrap it all and start again. It’s not too hard to get into blogging, but it does feel better when you have set up a site and customised your blog rather than just open an account with a free service.

Note to self: If I write more often then my articles could be shorter and easier to digest. Thanks for reading, those who managed.