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.

Product Development (in a weekend !)

So after the presentations, we started talking about our application concept. Bemmu Sepponen, our only software developer on the team with MySpace app development experience, suggested we do a much simpler app; Friends share their playlist with other friends and get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  Good. Something that is simple enough to finish in a weekend and has the “share with friends” thing happening.  But what makes it appealing ? We need some cute characters to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Geri Wittig, our team’s talented artist/designer came up with some great character sketches which she continued to refine over the course of the weekend. With Bemmu and Alex Yarmula coding into the wee hours of the morning (neither of them left Google that weekend) the goal of completing the app in a weekend was realistic. Carl Heiney and I (Peter Huboi) spent most of the weekend “rediscovering MySpace”, writing taglines, creating and testing playlists, thinking about app ports to Facebook, thinking about viral marketing strategies, and blogging. I wrote a short blog entry entitled Start,Adapt,Do detailing my observations on what it takes to successfully launch a product within the tight schedule constraints of a weekend.

To give you some idea why we followed Bemmu’s sage advice, look how many users he has with with his MySpace app called Coolest Friends !

… and here are some of Geri Wittig’s awesome graphics she created for our Playlist Power app:

 

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.

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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.