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.

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.

Invites to Hippity to ‘be my friend’

I’m finding that the current viral marketing process that many bands/recording artists use today is to look at other bands/artists MySpace pages and invite their friends to “come check out our music” with a friend invite. My avatar, Hippity, is getting as many friend invites now as the Playlist Power app is getting new users. So now, when I get one of these invites, I accept and send this message:

Try the new app Playlist Power and let your friends do your viral marketing for you.
Install the Playlist Power app.
Share one of your playlists with randomly chosen friends/fans.
Encourage them to do the same.
Your songs just may reach friends of friends (and their friends)

Social Media Marketing in Music

Welcome. This is a blog for musicians, internet marketers, application developers and music industry professionals looking for insights, tips and tricks to leverage social media tools and web services to market your music and your brand more effectively. This blog intially started as a weblog of my social media marketing efforts for a MySpace application called Playlist Power launched on February 22, 2009 at WeekendApps-OpenSocial. Playlist Power was  a MySpace playlist sharing application allowing MySpace users to share Music playlists with friends.

In the 1st part of this blog (under the category “Marketing-Product“), I cover ideas I had and things I learned while executing elements of a marketing campaign for the ‘Playlist Power’ MySpace app.

Several weeks into this blog, I found that my blog interests became more about the larger topic of Social Media Marketing in Music, so on March 10th, I changed the title of this blog and expanded it’s scope.

Read More

Music Social Media

Social Media Music

MySpace and Music and Playlist and Viral and Social Media Marketing and MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn, but especially MySpace or Music and Musicians and Bands and sometimes Record Labels would all be keywords to search for.