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.

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.

962,631 Facebook fans vs 199,240 Myspace friends

Radiohead has 962,631 Facebook fans versus 199,240 MySpace friends (today’s count). Think about this for a minute. Without a music player app that can store a playlist, Facebook has nearly 5 times the number of fans on the www.facebook.com/radiohead page than the number of Radiohead friends on www.myspace.com/radiohead. I do not claim to know why, but here are some thoughts.

1. Demographics. It just may be that the demographic for Radiohead’s fan base uses Facebook more than they use Myspace.

2. Visibility of the facebook wall. I joined the Radiohead fan page and this fact went up on my wall. I’m not sure that if I became a “friend” of Radiohead in MySpace any of my friends would know.  If I see one of my friends joining something on Facebook and it looks interesting to me, I will usually click on it to find out more. So Facebook has “social networking” virality

There are things I like about Facebook and and there are things I like about MySpace. If I find a new artist I like, I will invariably check out their MySpace page before I do anything else. I often look at “Friends” of a particualr MySpace artist and check out their music too. It’s nice to be able to sample entire songs (and now videos). I much prefer this to listening to 30 seconds in iTunes or other music commerce sites. YouTube videos might be a next choice. Th artist’s website might be a next choice as well.

Facebook is where I will typically see Videos that someone else likes enough to post a comment about. I have added links to videos on my Facebook wall I think my friends might enjoy.

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.

HD Video web services

If  you make a music video and link to it on your own MySpace page, will it reach many new viewers that are not already familiar with your Music ?
I recently read a CNET post on Which HD video Web service is the best? . Looking at some of the offerings, I wondered if bands/artists might be able to gain new viewers by creating videos and uploading to these sites rather than simply posting or linking to their videos from their MySpace page. For example, there is a Music and Entertainment category in blip.tv, but I found very few music videos there to watch. This allowed a few artists previously unknown to me to have me see their videos. Being an “early adopter” of a technology may have advantages. Here is a video on blip.tv of Padraig Rushe playing “Mo Bhréag Aisling” at The Zodiac Sessions open mic night, Dublin, Ireland.

http://blip.tv/file/1866260/

After seeing/hearing this video, I checked out Padraig Rushes MySpace page (which he provided in the description text of the video).

Update:  Padraig Rushe’s debut CD “Greyworld” is now available on iTunes.  I predict a “Best New Artist” Grammy nomination if some Saturday Night Live host picks him for the Music Act in 2009 and he gets the exposure he deserves.

Leave your room and meet new people

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.  ~  Carl Jung

Social interaction via the internet will only get you so far. I would highly recommend leaving your room and finding events or meetups to meet real people in real time.  Meetup.com and Facebook groups are a good place to start. If you don’t find a group that looks interesting, why not start one yourself? I live in the SF Bay area so my problem is not “finding an event to go to”, my problem is sometimes “choosing which event to go to”.

Here is a chain of events that led me to doing my blog right now:

1. I joined Meetup.com, found Silicon Valley New Technology meetup to attend in Palo Alto.

2. Went to Silicon Valley New Technology meetup in Palo Alto and heard about Weekend Apps Feb 20-24. Signed up.

3. Did the Weekend Apps event February 20-22. Wrote my 1st blog entry on the Weekend Apps blog. Decided to blog about my teams app Playlist Power as part of marketing strategy for promoting the app.

4. This is my 15th blog posting about 2 weeks.

5. There are now about 5 other distinct active sidechain activities resulting from my doing step 1 above and I’ve met about 20 new people as a result.  My world is much larger.

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.

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.

Seriously leveraging MySpace

How to get Britney’s and Jonas Brothers attention?
My first thought for promoting the Playlist Power app is “If I can only get our app noticed by a major artist or even get noticed on a major artist’s fan page, we might get hundreds or thousands of new app users!” How do I do that? Britney and the Jonas brothers have nothing better to do than read all their messages from fans, notice mine, and think “Yeah … that sounds like fun, I’ll add the Playlist Power app and spend the next few hours sending my playlists to friends.” Right. That’s not going to happen. Think. What’s our best draw for a new user? How about that cute “thumbs up” bunny character Geri designed for Playlist Power?

(Character design by Geri Wittig)

Hippity MySpace Avatar spokesperson account for the “Playlist Power”
1. Figure out a name for the spokesperson character. Hippity Hopmop.
2. Get a new email account so I can create a MySpace page and separately track Hippity’s message activity.
3. Create Hippity Hopmop’s MySpace account
4. Create profile information so any new friends can learn about the Playlist Power app.
5. Start adding major recording artist’s as friends.
6. Post forum messages.

Please make me a “top friend” !
Ok, so now I have the cute Hippity avatar that … maybe, just maybe … I might get the major artist’s attention. So in my “Friend invitations” I add a few sentences about the Playlist Power app and how “if you add me as a ‘top friend’, your fans can discover how to share their playlists ‘with your songs in them’ with other friends. Viral marketing!
No response. In fact, some artist’s automatically add new friends. That message I added won’t even get read.

Ok, let’s try a label
I add Jive Records as a friend. Jive Records is Britney Spear’s label. Also, Backstreet Boys, Buddy Guy, Jordin Sparks, Justin Timberlake, NSync, Nick Carter, Outkast, Pink, R. Kelly, Usher, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and many other artist’s I’m not familiar with (my musical tastes are a bit more eclectic … definitely not mainstream). It was an “automatic add” as Jive records immediately showed up as a friend. When I tried to send Jive Records a playlist to rate with Playlist Power, I got back a response “Jive Records is either not a friend, currently not accepting messages from apps, blocked this specific app, or does not have HTML enabled for comments. The requested message or comment from this application will not be delivered.”  MySpace shows Jive Records last login is 1/13/2009 (more than a month ago).  They are not checking  messages.
I also attemped to add these record labels and CAA as friends:

• Virgin Records
• Sony/BMG
• Capitol Records
• Universal Music Group
• Warner Music Group
• Creative Artists Agency

One week later, none have accepted my invitation to be a friend.

Noise Pop artists
Changing my strategy to up-and-coming indie artists, I noticed there was a Noise Pop Festival happening in San Francisco. Looking at the lineup, there were links to most of the performing artist’s MySpace pages. It took quite awhile, but I managed to invite most of them to be Hippity’s friend. I was also probably one of the few people to hear 15 of the bands play a song simultaneously by opening each of the MySpace pages in it’s own tab. 15 browser tabs playing music all at once is quite a cacophony of sound. It reminded me of Seattle Artist Bret Marion’s A Spectacle of Concerns Soundtrack (about midway through). But I digress. By the time I finished adding all the Noise Pop artists I found myself distracted from making “marketing progress” with the pleasant diversion of trying to create a playlist with one of each artists songs. Then I tried creating smaller playlists and sending out a few playlists to be rated by my new friends. While I now have many recording artist friends, none of the playlists I sent out with the Playlist Power app returned with a rating. I am however getting invites to be friends from other musicians, so there is something of a viral nature going on here.

How about a real person at a record label?
Maybe I can just get to a real person at a record label? Larry Rudolph is listed as Britney Spear’s friend. OK. With my experience so far, my guess is that no industry heavyweight is going to care to hear my Playlist Power app viral marketing pitch from a MySpace friend invitation. I’ll try a LinkedIn trick I figured out. If the person you want to send a message to is not in your network of contacts, try joining a LinkedIn group they might belong to.  However, a LinkedIn search of Larry Rudolph gave me:

• Larry Rudolph -VMware & MIT. Researcher
• Larry Rudolph – VP Business Development at Kuna Foodservice
• Larry Rudolph – Project Management at US Steel
• Larry Rudolph – Three Rivers Dental Group

Ok. Let’s stop for a minute and think. Britney Spears has a huge fan base. She has 36721 friends on MySpace. If even 1% of that number “really wanted to meet Britney” or thought they had what it takes to be a star as big as Britney, if I were Larry Rudolph, I’d probably be as far removed from any internet networking database as I could get. If Larry has a LinkedIn account at all, it’s probably under an alias that he only gives to close friends. Something like ‘Rudolph Laurence – Three Rivers Dental Group’ just to be safe. But wait a minute. Maybe joining some LinkedIn groups is not such a bad idea even if I abandon my quest to connect with Larry Rudolph. Some of those LinkedIn groups are pretty big.

Full Disclosure
Before I go further, I must divulge the urgency from which my marketing actions result. One of the prizes of the WeekendApps is from MySpace and it is a week of heavy rotation promotion for two of the applications developed at Weekend Apps (winners to be chosen by MySpace). We figure that sheer uptake from MySpace users may be a considering factor. Our app Playlist Power was 1st to launch and, on day one, had gained an impressive 300 new users in just a few hours. But Fluffy Puffy Cloud Pets was right on our heels. 24 hours after launch, Playlist Power has 1300 users but Fluffy Puffy Cloud is closing fast. I guess its really hard to resist “Showin’ your carin’ side!” by adopting and nurturing a virtual cloud pet. By day 2, that darned Fluffy Puffy Cloud has passed us up. Now you can see why I was determined to find a way to get MySpace users to add our Playlist Power app by the hundreds.

Recently Popular

Result:  Sunday Feb 22 – Playlist Power  is live !

The Playlist Power team is first to have their app go live on MySpace. It now shows up in the app gallery near the top of the “Recently Popular” apps list. Bemmu says that lots of MySpace users sign on and regularly go see what new apps are installed and which ones are being downloaded by other users.  We watch the downloads of Playlist Power grow.  100 users … 200 users … nearly 300 users in the 1st 3 hours.  24 hours later we have 1,300 new users.

This is the beauty of Social Media Marketing.  MySpace listing the application in “new apps” and “recently popular” gives us a good start. Any new user sending a playlist to a friend makes their friend aware of the Playlist Power app.

… and if you’ve gotten this far in the blog without checking out our Playlist Power app, what are you waiting for ! Go for it. Get a new MySpace account or login again if it’s been awhile. Download our app.  Build a music playlist. Use the Playlist Power app to share it with a friend.