PHAME for fame?

I attended a Facebook Developer Garage event in SF a month ago. Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, articulates a PHAME methodology for optimizing results from social data: 

Problem -> Hypothesis -> Action -> Metrics -> Experiments

This would be an excellent model to apply to:

• Social Media Marketing of bands/artists
• Application Development (Music player apps for example)
• Social Media Marketing in general.

So for example, for promoting an artist or a band, one might utilize the PHAME model to engage in a number of marketing activities. For example, one “P” problem might be ‘how to bring new fans to our myspace site and get more plays’. An “H” Hypothesis might be ‘Using a Myspace friend add automation tool could be an effective and not too costly way to get new fans’. “A” Action might be “Google search on ‘Myspace friend automation’ and select one of these tools to purchase and use (sparingly … so as to not overdo it with ‘friend adds per day’). “M” Metrics – track friends requests resulting in acceptance vs total requests, track number of song plays before and after. Track increase in song purchases (if applicable). “E” Experiment: What are the results like? Any new ideas surface from results so far. Can we add more fan requests per day without getting banned? Should we drop back on friend requests per day? Checking out some of the new fans playlists, is there a similarity in their musical taste to our songs? Are there features or adjustments in the automation tool we have not fully explored that might make a difference? 

The point is that there is no ‘set in stone rule’ that is going to magically work for everyone. In fact,  some musicians might be turned off by the idea of using an automation tool as just ‘being another spammer’. Or maybe your band gigs and tours enough that you are doing fine with building a fan base by more traditional means. You may have your own PHAME experiments to do (YouTube Video? Last.FM ? Use crowd source funding for next recording session using http://www.sellaband.com/ ?)

What should you try next?  There may be many ideas. Start with one. Use the PHAME model. Measure results and tweak the experiment if needed. Have some fun doing it.

UserVoice survey of topic requests for this blog

I just discovered UserVoice and their great feature suggestion/survey tool.  I set up a free account to try it out to have readers suggest and vote on blog topics for Social Media Marketing in Music (this blog). You can find the link both in this post (below) and always find it from the right hand side navigation column directly under the author’s picture.

Suggest or vote on future topics

In order to tempt you into checking out the topic request survey, I’ve pre-populated it with a few topics I’ve been considering (but feel free to add your own suggestions):

Compare the new HD video services out there
YouTube now offers HD formats but YouTube is not the only game in town. What are the players? How do you embed a video in a blog, webpage , Facebook, or MySpace?

Creating a Musican/Band webpage on Ning
4000 new web sites are being created every day on Ning by ‘regular folks’ . It isn’t that hard to make a page … and it’s free.
http://bit.ly/16xW1
… and their Music Player can be embedded in both MySpace and Facebook
http://bit.ly/mnKuH

Music sites (the new ones)
http://mashable.com/2007/11/08/tools-independent-musician/
For this blog, I’d spend some time using Google trends to see which ones are registering traffic.

Digital Music startups
Check this list: http://musically.com/blog/2008/12/17/200-digital-music-startups-from-2008/
Any of these interest you ? If yes, don’t just vote for this topic… but rather create a “new idea” in this forum with this tool and suggest the one that interests you as a “New idea”… more

Mixcloud player
http://bit.ly/zg4He
I met Mixcloud founder at a Facebook Garage event. He offered some free user account codes.

Jamzee – create a playlist of YouTube videos
Jamzee is a service that allows you to create a playlist of YouTube videos that you can share on other websites like your own blog or MySpace.

How musicians/bands can use twitter … and why
By adding a twitter feed from this blog, I’m now getting views from other followers tweets. Might this work for you?

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Reminder, please don’t comment here, but rather use the survey tool to vote or add your topic preferences.

Suggest or vote on future topics

SEO for Musicians

You are a musician. Why should you care about SEO? Good question.  

 If you don’t have a web page or a blog yet, bookmark this page and come back when you do. 

What is SEO?  SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to make your web page or blog appear higher up in the list when someone does an Internet search.

 Assuming you are out in the world playing your music and someone likes what they hear and happens to vaguely remember your name (or your band’s name), they may try and look you up and find you. Will you show up on the 1st page of an Internet search and show up near the top?

First of all, your band name (or in some cases your name) is your brand. It should be easy to remember and easy to spell.  Search engines can probably help.  If a website is getting enough hits and I miss spell the search term, Google will usually help with a “Did you mean <search term spelled correctly goes here> “

I took the DM1 (Digital Music 1)  class at Mission College in 2008 to learn digital recording basics.  For our final project we recorded a music video. I really liked the music of the duo we recorded and wanted to look them up to see where they might be playing locally. Their name is “The Pernikoff Brothers“.  In fact, as I’m writing this I’m listening to  ”New Man” being played back as a HQ YouTube video.  Great song, great musicians, well recorded, a pleasure to listen to. I was there in the class when we recorded this and helped set up microphones for the session.  When I went to look them up a few weeks later, I had difficulty finding them. I was trying “Pernakov Brothers” and “Pernikov Brothers” with no luck. This was a few months ago. Now when I type in my miss spelled version of their name, I immediately come up with a link to their website, so Google can help all on it’s own if your site is getting enough hits and fans choose the link that gets you to their site.

However, if your name is hard to spell or is hard to  remember, you do not necessarily need to re-brand and change your name. All you really need is to have a song, YouTube video, or CD name that is unique and really easy to remember and your new fans can probably find you this way. This does not always work though. Again, Google will likely rout you to sites with the most traffic. For example, when I search on “YouTube New Man” to try and locate the Pernikoff Brothers YouTube video “New Man” , I’m finding numerous videos by people with the last name “Newman”. So in this case, Google’s spelling algorythm is misdirecting me elswhere to videos with numerous plays.

In terms of this blog, searching on “Social Media Marketing Music” did not intially display links to this blog. What really helped get me to a “page 1″ search result from a Google search was having my blog listed at blogcatalog. If you look over at the right hand side of my blog column (below the Tags), you will see several blog cataloging sites I have linked to. The effort expended to figure out how to do this is well worth it. Most of my site hits now come from blogcatalog where one reader who liked my blog gave it a “5 star” rating.  My blogcatalog listing shows up in a ”page 1″ search result from a Google search now.  Do I care that my actual website does not show up in the 1st page in Google search? No. People are finding me through the blogcatalog link and that’s what matters. People are finding me.

I should add that my previous post “Bigfoot’s Lookin’ for Bernie”  gives my blog a top Google rank on the search word combinations “Bigfoot Bernie”, “Bigfoot Madoff” and “Leaf Trombone Bigfoot” (… at least this is true for today). Again, unique words in a song title could give you similar results in fans locating one of your songs.

I won’t go into great detail about how to do SEO. There are numerous resources available. I would recommend looking at some of the “free sample lessons” available from the Lynda.com course  Search Engine Optimization with Richard Jenkins.  There is enough free playback content here to give you the basic idea of what SEO is about. Playing the topic “White Hat SEO”, Richard highlights some very usefull authority sites on the subject.

I’ll close this post with a video embed of “New Man” by the Pernikoff Brothers. Enjoy.

Bigfoot’s Lookin’ for Bernie

A while back I wrote a blog entry titled “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”.  Obviously, having a YouTube video that has viral properties that get lots of links from friends on social media networks like Facebook could help do that.  That’s how I discovered the song  “Here comes another Bubble” by the Richter Scales in the first place. But probably even more important than getting on someone else’s blog would be to have a video that has viral properties.

What would make a music video viral?

1. Humor – everyone likes sharing a video that makes them laugh.

2. Outrageous – although sometimes distasteful (and hopefully faked or simulated) a headline like OZZY BITES HEAD OFF BAT! will grab a lot of attention.

3. High Tech/ Novelty – iPhone App by Smule: Ocarina [Stairway] video (YouTube) has over 500,000 plays and a 4 ½ star rating.

So if you are an unknown band or recording artist looking for new fans, how can you capitalize on ideas like these to get your YouTube video seen and heard?

Humor

Pick something topical and newsworthy and keep it short. If you have a gift for comedic writing and can turn around a song in 1 or 2 days, imagine the number of plays you could get if Jon Stewart played your song on The Daily Show. That should be your goal. How you will get your song noticed and chosen, I don’t know. Surely Jon Stewart has writers and producers. Check Wikipedia. However, even if your song is not picked to be featured on the Daily Show, if it really makes people laugh, surely it has the potential to spread virally as a YouTube video. Post it to YouTube and show it to some Facebook friends. If it’s funny, your friends will share it with other friends. They will share it with their friends… and so on. Keep in mind, producing a video is not easy. If you have a great song and shoddy video production, it will fall flat. Use stills. Use PowerPoint. Think “How would Ken Burns shoot this”? Look at the Video by the Richter Scales I featured in my post “Can you get your song on someone else’s blog?”

Notice the credits at the end ? The last thing you want is to create a truly viral video that you have to pull because of copyright infringement or legal issues.

Outrageous

The now defunct Weekly World News had a very long run as a supermarket tabloid and should be your inspiration if you need to create a headline grabbing song title. Buy Bat Boy Lives!: The WEEKLY WORLD NEWS Guide to Politics, Culture, Celebrities, Alien Abductions, and the Mutant Freaks that Shape Our World (Paperback) on Amazon as your resource. Nothing more needs to be said. Consider this your “bible” for outrageous headlines or, in this case, song titles.

High Tech/ Novelty

If you can associate your song with the latest high tech buzz related to Music, you could quite easily reach new fans with a YouTube video. Certainly Smule will be coming up with other instruments that will even surpass their success with the Ocarina  iPhone app. See if you can sign up be a Smule Beta tester (if you and your band mates own an iPhone or iPod touch). You can sign up for the Beta trial of “Leaf Trombone”. Read the agreement, though. You have to promise not to release your YouTube video until Smule releases the product. Would one of your songs benefit from a horn section? Maybe a “Leaf Trombone” horn section is your answer.

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Here is an idea for a song and YouTube video that combines all of the above…

Song title:”Bigfoot’s lookin’ for Bernie”

Storyboard: Bigfoot comes out of hiding to find Bernie Madoff after losing most of his savings. Bernie Madoff escapes to the woods and “Bernie Madoff sightings” become the stuff of legend and tabloid news for a few months. Bigfoot ends up managing a successful (and legitimately run) Hedge fund. Bernie eventually gets caught and goes to jail. Since Bigfoot makes a fortune as a hedge fund manager and no longer has hard feelings, Bigfoot visits Bernie in jail. The song ends with an iPhone Leaf Trombone duet played by Bigfoot and Bernie.

If you choose to write this song and create the YouTube video, please include me in your song credits. After all, I just came up with the idea. Don’t forget to show a link to your band’s website in your video. After all, that is the whole point of doing all this work … getting fame, new fans, and brand awareness for your band.  If it’s good, who knows, maybe you could get it played on The Daily Show.

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May 2, 2009 Update:

A friend advised me of this useful URL if anyone was seriously considering adding Bigfoot” to thier music video.  http://www.livingsasquatch.com/

Atlantic Records: Connecting Fans with Bands by Eric Snowden (on Adobe TV)

I was researching the Adobe site to learn more about the Flex platform and I stumbled across this presentation by Eric Snowden discussing what Atlantic Records is doing to promote their artists via Social Media networks and web pages. Even if you have no interest in developing a Flex application, this presentation will give you many ideas to think about if you are promoting a band or artist (or if you are a band or artist promoting yourself). I will likely blog about some of these topics further, but I wanted to share the link now, in case it’s a few days before I am able to comment further.

Atlantic Records: Connecting Fans with Bands by Eric Snowden

You may possibly need to install Adobe Media Player 1st to watch this. If you are interested in HDTV streaming to PCs and MACs, you’ll want to download Adobe Media Player anyway.

Can you get your song on someone elses blog ?

It’s easy to promote your own song on your own blog or your own MySpace page. Video’s are probably going to be easier to circulate, especially if they are humorous. The song “Here Comes Another Bubble v 1.1″ by the Richter Scales just earned a place on this blog.

 

Also, thank you to Chris Cinelli for posting this on Facebook where I saw it.

Poll: How much time do you spend self-promoting your music?

New “Music Self Promotion” Group on MySpace

I just added this group on MySpace.

http://groups.myspace.com/musicselfpromotion

Description:

This is an open forum for discussion of what is working for you, what is working for others, what is not working … and a general place to share ideas.  How are you selling your music? How are you reaching new fans? Anything working for you that is “viral” (i.e. your fan base growing without you having to “work it”). Are you looking to ‘get signed’, or are you wanting to ‘go it alone’ and remain independent? How is MySpace, Facebook, and other social media changing the way you market yourself? Do you have a website outside of MySpace? Are you being streamed on internet radio? Which ones are getting you new fans?

Creating this Blog

I’ve had a few ideas for blogs in the past few weeks but had yet to actually start a blog. It is one of the newer skills anyone in Marketing should be learning. Something that will look good on my resume. This topic here, Social Media Marketing of ‘Playlist Power’, looks like a good place to start. Very focused on a topic. Something I can learn the ropes while I create it. Also, at least for the moment, I am very energized to write about this topic having come from the Weekend Apps event with a mission to see what I can do to increase Playlist Power app uptake. I chose WordPress as it seems to be one of a few blogging tools that are readily adopted and my blog post from the Weekend Apps blog used WordPress. After a week of blogging and learning about adding links, tags, media, categories, appearance, and more, I’m now fairly comfortable with WordPress features. I thought about checking a book out of the library to help me get started with WordPress but they were all checked out, with one person already reserving a copy when one was returned. A side benefit is that, with the HTML view, I can copy bits of my blog in html (i.e. parts with ‘links’) and copy them into my MySpace messages and forum posts.  Although the WordPress features provide ample WYSIWYG visual editing features, it is nice to be able to switch over to HTML and copy code for pasting in MySpace.

I probably will buy a book on WordPress before I start a longer, more involved blog. I’m not quite sure about using ‘pages’ yet to organize the blog. I did figure out ‘categories’ somewhat. Still, even though there is likely a lot more to learn, the WordPress features are mostly pretty easy to use for anyone like myself looking to get started blogging.

After a week of blogging, I think I have enough of a story to tell to post a link to my blog on the LinkedIn groups I joined.

LinkedIn Groups

I joined several LinkedIn groups intitally with the purpose of announcing the MySpace Playlist Power app and describing it’s potental as a toll for fan-based viral promotion. I did this before I started this blog. These are the 2 Music Industry LinkedIn groups I joined:

Music & Marketing - 4,790 members 

Music and Entertainment Professionals - 18,165

I’m still waiting to be accepted by the moderator of the Music & Marketing group (as of 1 week later). I was added within 1 day to the Music Entertainment Professionals group.  Seeing how many members this group had, I was thinking that if even 1% of the members checked out the Playlist Power app, I might see a significant number of app adds on our app stats page. The number of adds we were now getting from MySpace “recently popular” pages was slowing due to the volume of new apps being added daily moving our app from page 1 to the 2nd and then 3rd page. I posted to the group. I saw no discernable volume in new users adding our app. How could I even track if this was having an effect? Maybe if I create a blog (this blog), I can create more interest and start tracking some web metrics ?

Deciding this is what I would do, I also decided that my new blog might also be of interest to LinkedIn groups related to  Social Media Marketing. I also joined these LinkedIn groups:

eMarketing Association Network

Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators

Social Media Marketing

I figured that as long as I’m going to blog, I might as well measure where my blog hits were coming from. I have no idea of how effective a post of ones blog to a LinkedIn group is.  I’ll get some idea of interest in my blog topic from two industry group types.