Best Social Media Advice From This Site
I’m passionate about how certain strategies married to certain technologies allow individuals and companies to build things: reputation, trust, personal brand, community, relationships, and even marketplaces. My efforts to cover larger stories, tools, strategies, and more over the last several months have given you quite a bit to consider. But blogs are a tricky method for learning and reflecting. They’re like a running stream, and if you step out for a moment, a certain point in the stream will pass you by.
To that end, I’ve collected some links to the posts that I think might be helpful to you. Peruse these at your leisure. I’ve grouped them a bit for you. Feel free to pick and choose the topics that matter to you. I hope this proves helpful. If it does, please consider blogging a link to this post, and/or feel free to pass it on to any who might want more of this type of information.
There’s a lot here. Feel free to bookmark it for later. (And if you want even more to read, sign up for my free newsletter, which is even MORE original content.)
Thanks!
Community Development
- Understanding Community Development Strategies
- Ways to Disrupt a Community
- Why Do Community Development
- Should Your Small Business Use Community Tools
- The Long Tail of Community
- If Communitites Are Just Marketing Pools
- The Magic of Including People
- Meeting People at Events
- The Community Play
- The Community Ecosystem
- How Blogs Improve Customer Service and Product Development
Social Networks
- Three Things LinkedIN Does Better than Facebook
- How I Use Facebook
- Things To Do on Facebook
- Facebook - Let Me See My Friends
- Fix Your Facebook Profile Now
- Facebook and the Social Graph - Who Benefits
- Five Things to Do on LInkedIN
- Considering Social Etiquette
- Social Networks are Your Local Pub
- Why Join Another Social Network
- Marketers in a Social Network World
- Real Live Human Social Networking
- Social in Real Space vs. Social Networking
- Making Social Networks Work
- Improve Your Social Network
- The Importance of a Human Social Network
- Three Untapped Values of Social Networks
- Five Things to Do at a Social Networking Meetup
Social Media
- Social Media Starter Pack
- A Basic Social Media Strategy
- My Social Media Toolkit
- A Sample Social Media Toolkit
- Participation- The Key to Social Media
- Social Media - Talk is Cheap for Businesses
- How Big Companies could Use Social Media
- Social Media Inside the Firewall
- Social Media Power Secret - Listening
- Small Businesses And Social Media
- Social Media is a Set Not a Part
- Social Media for Your Career
- Help Someone Understand Social Media
- Social Media as Personal Power
- Snake Oil in Social Media
- Using Social Media to Meet People
- Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
- Social Media Starter Moves for Real Estate
- Social Media Starter Moves for Freelancers
- How I Use Twitter
- Deeper Twitter - Tuning Twitter for Value
- Newbies Guide to Twitter
- Twitter as Directors Commentary
- Twitter as an Advisory Board
Personal Branding
- The Power of Personal Leadership
- Slicing Time in a Face to Face Environment
- Brand Stories
- Some Quick Branding Tips for Individuals
- The foundations of Your Power
- Personal Scalability
- Personal Branding and Social Media
- Passion Drives Personal Brand
- Elements of a Personal Brand
- Challenges of Social Media Types in the Workplace
- The Value of Networks
- Scaling Yourself
Making Media
- Why Create Personal Media
- Whats Your Social Media Strategy
- Media Makers Next Steps
- Blogging Advice for the Next Level
- Expand Your Audience
- The Future of Microcontent and Hperlocal Media
- Why Bother Blogging Podcasting and Using Social Networks
- Consider Your Media-as-Business Strategy
- Marketing Media Means Moments That Matter
- Using Social Sharing to Extend Your Message
- Performance and Your Audience - Blogging Tips
- Advice for Traditional and Local News Media
- Tagging and Metadata and Why Bother
- A Sunday Newspaper Strategy for Traditional Companies
- Promoting Your Media
- The Power of Links
- 20 Blogging Projects for You
- Succeeding in Independent Online Media
- Seven Blog Improvements You Can Make Today
- Keeping the Blogging Fires Burning
- 100 Blog topics I hope YOU Write
- 100 PodCamp Topics for You to Cover
I’m writing new stuff all the time at [chrisbrogan.com]. If you’re reading this for the first time, please consider subscribing for free. If you’re a subscriber, don’t forget to get the completely-different content published at least twice a month in my newsletter. And thanks for your attention and time.
Special thanks to Alexa Scordato for compiling this data on my behalf. It was a lot of work. Thanks!
Making a Business From Social Media
Who’s making a business from social media? Audio and video producers are, for the most part, scraping by, give or take a few notables (several of who are being paid from VC money). Bloggers are making money in varying degrees, depending on their advertising opportunities, or their opportunity for consulting. I’m going to leave the “entertainment” category out of this discussion for that reason (though you’re welcome to argue it back in). So, who’s really making a business out of social media?
Early Adopters: Advertising, PR and Marketing
First to market with actual paying jobs in social media are public relations and marketing firms. Why? Because if you squint your eyes, the tools are the same thing: a means for communicating professionally. Is that wrong? I don’t think so, provided we don’t lose ground with regards to how these new tools re-humanize technology-assisted communication.
Using social media for “viral” advertising is popular, but mostly because it’s low-cost, low-barrier technology that permits folks to get a message across through different channels. Will that last? I can’t see why we’d go back to $100,000 spots, when we can create the media and distribute it for free, especially where the world is shifting to those free methods, too.
Business Users
I’m not sure what department an internal corporate social media practitioner would fall into. Project management makes sense, because inside the firewall, these tools facilitate collaboration, status messages, data sharing, and other uses that would work well for facilitating projects. Product management and R&D might adopt the tools as well, but there probably wouldn’t be a pre-defined role for someone who simply knows how to use the tools.
Comparing the Two Most Likely Businesses
On one side, we have obvious jobs: PR, marketing, advertising. On the other, we have a potential role for daring companies, or a more likely future of an adoption of the tools by several people after receiving training from a more expert user. So, there are two options.
Which makes more sense? On one side, you have a mountain of communications companies hoping to adapt quickly. On the other side, you have businesses who aren’t as motivated to change their internal processes. But will there be a point where businesses take back their external arms for outreach to their customers? In a world where companies talk directly to their customers, the media, and prospects, will the business of communications go in-house?
Not Necessarily a Primary Business
We’re all jumping up and down and excited about social media and what these tools can do for us. WHAT, exactly, do these tools do for us that translates into a business directly? My answer: for lots of people, they don’t.
Looking for a career in social media would be like seeking a career in email. Instead, use these skills to cultivate another ability of yours. If you’re a salesperson, use social media tools to build leads, understand need, get the word out about your products. If you’re a nonprofit professional, you’ve already figured this out, and use these tools to aid in awareness, fundraising, communication, and more.
Instead of focusing on how these tools will become a career, focus on how you can equip others with these tools. THAT, I believe, is the business, in the short term. But even that will be the short term.
What do you think? Agree? Disagree? What’s your take?
Photo credit, Greg Westfall
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
On Managing A Community
I wonder how most organizations are handling the role of community manager. I’m curious where a community manager reports. Marketing? HR? Customer service? I wonder how organizations are justifying the cost, and what they believe the role entails for level of effort. How are companies using the role in either direction?
Depending on the organization, I imagine the role of a community manager would be different, so I’m going to walk through what the role might entail for a media and events company (like mine), and see what comes to mind. I could do the same for several other professions, but let’s start here. Want to follow along? You can help me refine it in the comments.
Strategy
My strategy for a community manager would be to accomplish the following:
- Develop an awareness center for our industry (so we can listen and know what the community at large feels).
- Build a non-marketing community outreach to deliver a voice for our organization to the industry.
- Engage the community we embrace, and facilitate learning and education from our organization’s perspective, and through relationships with other trusted organizations.
Reporting Structure
My company is a fairly flat organizational structure. At my office, a community manager would report in to me as the VP of Strategy & Technology. Why? Because I’m charged with setting the tone and the look and feel of the content for all of our events. To me, the role at my organization would be to help me build on the customer experience.
Duties
My community manager (and I’ll use the feminine pronoun to save both of us the “he or she”) would have accounts on the following platforms:
- Ning
- YouTube
- Google Reader
She would have responsibility to set up tracking and alerts for keywords specific to our industry, to subscribe to several industry blogs, podcasts, and video channels, and to subscribe to certain topic categories on YouTube.
She would comment on appropriate blogs. Not about our events, but about the topics at hand (the comments would at least have a URL back to her blog, so that’s enough self-promotion on that front). Listening and commenting would be the bulk of her first three months’ duties.
She would blog when she felt comfortable with the space.
If we decided to grow a Facebook or Ning community, she’d help facilitate good conversations there, too.
Measurements
I’d measure my community manager on the following:
- Responsiveness to communications (blog comments, emails, twitter messages and forum threads) less than 24 hours max.
- Number of QUALITY blog posts read and shared via Google Reader.
- Number of meaningful comments (more than a few words, on topic, pertinent to the space) on appropriate blogs, videos, and other media per month.
- Overall quality of her Twitter stream ( maybe a 60/30/10 mix of industry-related / personal @ comments / and off-topic).
- Engagement on our blog/community/network. (Number of subscribers, number of comments, number of links out to other blogs from our community site).
- Number of quality blog posts and linking posts (probably a 40/60 split between original and linked, though some would argue for 30/70).
- Eventually, number of links from other sites to our blogs and media.
Success of the Project
I’d feel our community manager was a success if she accomplished the following through her efforts:
- Empower the listening ability of our organization to our community’s needs and desires.
- Build an awareness of our organization through non-marketing efforts, measured by favorable or at least non-negative mentions on other blogs, forums, and in Twitter.
- Deliver a blog and/or media platform that’s useful to the community at large, and that grows in number of subscribers as well as engaged commenters.
Overall, I believe these efforts would be measured by an increase in attendance at our face-to-face and virtual events, an increase in subscriptions to our newsletter, and a larger blog commenting community. This would be a win to our organization, and would thus be worth the expense of another salaried employee.
YOUR Turn
How would your organization incorporate a community manager? Where would they report? How would you measure their efforts? Do you see any flaws in my suggestions? Are YOU a community manager? How does this sync up with your world?
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The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Starting Points for Online Presence
Getting started in social media might feel daunting. In considering what would constitute a “passport” for a would-be “web native,” I found myself adding more and more services to the list of things one might consider adding to their collection of applications and services to use.
Start at your own pace, and go as slowly as you need to for you to feel comfortable getting to understand all these services, but here is a list of applications and networks that I think you might consider joining and developing into your online reputation and presence platform:
The Basics
- Take a reasonably decent photo of yourself for an avatar pic. Size it to 100×100 pixels if you can. (most services want this as a default). If you’re shy off the bat, put something more fun than your corporate logo.
- Twitter - Be sure to add your nifty new photo. Then, if you don’t already have friends on Twitter, check the public timeline to see who’s doing something interesting, or check out Twitter Packs for some starting people to follow.
- WordPress.com Account - Even if you eventually choose another blogging platform, building a WordPress.com presence means that you get an OpenID account, a place to build a profile for lots of the popular blogging platforms (I recommend getting a Blogger/Google account for that reason, too), and also a potential “scratch blog” for putting up ideas that might not fit your larger presence.
- Facebook profile - There are millions of people using Facebook (and even more on MySpace). It’s a good place to build an account that tells people more about yourself, and as an outpost for your blog (add your RSS feed to Facebook through one of many 3rd party apps that will re-post it there), which all goes towards establishing your reputation online.
- YouTube account - YouTube serves millions of videos a month. It’s a great place to comment, to submit your own stuff to a larger audience, and/or to find points of interest. If you want more serious, better considered video hosting, try Blip.TV.
- Gmail account - which will give you access to Gmail.com, but also Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and plenty other useful services. I use Google Reader as my preferred news reader, and I use Google Calendar for ease of use of scheduling.
- **UPDATE** Google Reader for listening. Recommended by David Usher
Bonus Round
If you’re feeling like you want to participate even more, you’ll need these:
- **UPDATE** FriendFeed is a way to aggregate your presence and that of your friends online. Suggested by Ontario Emperor
- Digg and StumbleUpon and del.icio.us accounts - Use social bookmarking communities to share things you like, to find things you’re interested in, and to grow a social view of news and information.
- Upcoming.org for events to attend in this space.
- Flickr account - (which is technically now a Yahoo! account, as is del.icio.us.) This is for photo sharing, and gives you an easy place to put your pictures on the web.
- Skitch account - for screen captures, should you want to post a picture off your computer screen simply.
- PayPal account - for easy financial transactions used by many websites.
- **UPDATE** Plaxo for contact management. - Recommended by Susan Beebe.
Your Thoughts
There are certainly dozens more applications to consider, and this doesn’t count one’s primary blog, podcast, video property or otherwise. But I’m wondering if I’ve missed any “fundamental” sites that you’d recommend we add to this list, or if there are any that should come off. What’s your take?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, hji
College Student Twitters Arrest in Egypt
“Arrested.” That’s what 29 year old James Karl Buck sent from his phone out to the world via Twitter the other day. It seems Buck was snapping photos of a demonstration, and police collected him up and put him in jail.
It turns out that his message on Twitter caused his network of friends to reach out, call around, and get people mobilized to help. There’s tons more to the story.
Greg Barnett sent me a message on Twitter reporting this news article about James Karl Buck. Steve Rhodes from Twitter sent me the link to Buck’s website. **UPDATE: Buck is @jamesbuck on Twitter, and his Flickr photos are here. (All those updates come from @tigerbeat / Steve Rhodes).
What’s important about this story? Everything. Twitter has a powerful ability to move people to action, to deliver help where it’s needed, and more. If a messaging platform can free a man from prison, what else can it do for YOU?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
What I Want a Social Media Expert to Know
There are lots of people throwing “social media expert” out there. Hell, I had it as part of my “about” on my blog, but I’ve chosen to just say that I advise people. It’s more accurate, because expertise is fairly darned fleeting out there right now. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about things I want a so-called expert to know (and I want you to add to this list, or call me out if you disagree):
Strategic
- Which department you think your role should fall into.
- How your role ties to marketing, PR, advertising, R&D, finance, HR, sales.
- What tasks you’d expect a community manager to perform, and how would you measure them.
- How you expect a company to engage in “the conversation,” and what processes will go into place to make any of that matter.
- How to turn blog posts into business leads.
- How to listen and find where people are talking about you.
- Ways to report your weekly listening and community work to a very senior level person in a huge company that has about 2 minutes of time to hear your briefing.
- Know about 100 people in the space who are doing something. The more diverse the profession and location, the better.
- How to launch and operate a blogger outreach campaign.
- How to tie other media into social media as an integrated campaign.
Tactical
- How to install a blog (pick your software) on a hosted server.
- How to edit the sidebar to include a widget, or an embed, or anything.
- How to create, edit, and post at least one other type of media besides text.
- At least five social network accounts active, including but not limited to: LinkedIn, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
- How to find and subscribe to a podcast WITHOUT using iTunes.
- Five stats worth knowing for any blog/website.
- How to structure a blog post so that humans and Google like it.
I’m thinking there are probably another 40 things I could add to either list, but instead, I’m going to let YOU. (Ones that I agree with will go up into the main post until we have a pretty decent list.)
And remember, call me out if you disagree. What’s your take on what you expect a social media expert to know?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com].
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Photo credit, Joe Shlabotnik
Customer Service Needs New Channels- Or Does It
Michael Arrington opens this discussion by sharing how Comcast responded faster to his complaints in Twitter than they did to his customer service department phone calls. If I said nothing more and pushed “publish,” a business owner should at least raise an eyebrow and ask herself, “Where are my customers? Do I have listening posts and responders there?”
Customer service exists on phones because the bulk majority of people in most countries use and have access to a phone. But do YOUR customers use phones as a primary source of contact? Email? Where are they? What are they using to communicate quickly?
In the 90s, I worked in customer service, and eventually became manager of the local telephone company’s 411 offices (who handle directory assistance calls). I have about six or seven years (a while back) of front line and management customer service experience, so I understand about handling times, about the cost balance, etc.
But are there low cost, flexible, measurable ways you could be improving your customer service channels by investigating and understanding where your customers are spending time and energy online? Absolutely.
For everyone? Definitely NOT. But I could probably name about 1000 businesses who’d do better having someone monitoring blogs, twitter, and facebook than they would reducing handling time at a call center in Dublin.
What do you think? Who are you doing business with that would be better suited to reach you online?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Making Business Sense of Social Media
Talking to people isn’t much of a business, except it is. Customer service has some talking in it. Sales has talking. Hmm, okay, so maybe there’s lots of talking in business.
Blogging, podcasting, video, microblogging, presence platforms all help facilitate communication.
Following the happenings around you in your industry won’t help you get ahead, except that it probably will. Knowing where people are, what they’re interested in, what they like and dislike, as well as understanding shifts and trends and news seems like a good way to stay up on what might impact your business.
Twitter and Facebook and all those social networking sites facilitate sharing of information.
This blogging and social media stuff is just for marketing and PR types, except it’s not. Building networks of interaction, delivering new tools for collaboration, empowering knowledge compilation are all opportunities for the use of these tools that don’t fall into the hands of only the communications team.
Status and presence and wikis and collaboration tools are useful to business teams, and not just marketing and PR.
It’s not immediately obvious why some of these tools apply to some businesses, and it’s DEFINITELY true that not all these tools will be useful to all businesses. But to not even consider how your organization can improve their productivity, their customer service experience, their product design, their hiring processes, and more, well, that just seems like a ticket back to 1996.
What do you think? Is there a business application to all this? Why are big companies delving in? What will convince businesses to dig in and experiement a bit more?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Social Media Starter Moves for Entrepreneurs
This could be considered a “backwards” post. I tend to talk from the perspective of a user of technology, but I am writing this one for the point of view of people who might be seeking to build new tools, to join the social software scene. I love entrepreneurs, and I enjoy the notion of building new, amazing things. But I do want you to think about this space, too.
If you’re NOT building a social network or platform, stick around. I want YOU to tell folks your thoughts, too.
The Platforms We’re Using
I’m definitely not going to list out every social network and social media tool, but I do want you to understand a bit about HOW we’re using these tools, so I’ll mention a few.
- MySpace or Facebook - Not just for kids any more. The grown-ups I know use both of these services for roughly the same thing: connecting with people they already know and making some new connections.
- LinkedIn - Business social networking, and the top of the heap. It’s getting a little more interesting, because of their status stream, and the redesign.
- Twitter - Not everyone’s on there, but we’re more on there than Pownce and Jaiku. Why? It’s not because it’s better. It’s just because we’re all still there, because it’s simple, because it solves a lot of needs.
- Flickr - We’re sharing photos on Flickr and SmugMug.
- YouTube - We’re sharing video on YouTube and Blip.tv and a few dozen smaller places.
- Digg - We’re getting news from Digg and Reddit and SlashDot, and there are lots of new upstarts for specific niches. We seem to like these sites because they let the crowd vote on what’s newsworthy to US as a niche.
So that’s some of what we’re interested in. You’ll certainly want to add places and tools into the comments section, so that we can get those called out, too.
The Marketplace Overall
I’d say the barrier to getting me to join a new social network is getting higher and higher. If you’re doing a business network, I’m already using LinkedIn. If you’re building a place for friends to connect, Facebook in all its annoyance still handles that enough-ish, and Twitter handles it great.
What comes next for networks? Velvet rope. Lots of it. I think the next step (and this was once prophesied by Eric Rice somewhere) is something closer to an anti-social network, or more accurately, a professional social network. Want to see a top shelf example? Check out Sermo, a social network for physicians. I met with Daniel Palenstrant, the founder, recently and he’s a smart cookie. He’s got a great product and he knows it.
What about tools?
Social Media Tools
There are lots of overlap experiences going on at the moment. For instance, there’s an entire social information aggregation space, all with different spins. There’s Lijit for search, FriendFeed for aggregation, and then maybe a dozen variations on the theme thereafter. Check out Louis Gray’s site for TONS of these types of apps. (Good guy, Louis).
There’s Blog Talk Radio and Talkshoe offering phone-to-podcast experiences with different twists (and I’m friendly with both companies, and they’re both full of great people).
We have Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku. We have Utterz for the multimedia-meets-phone. We have Qik and Seesmic and a flavor in between.
In blogging software and content platforms, we have WordPress, Drupal, Tumblr, Blogger, Joomla, TypePad, LiveJournal, and another million opportunities.
There are MANY tools. So then, what is the barrier to entry with either another tool or network?
High. Challenging. Difficult.
So What Do We Want?
This is your turn to answer. What do you think is necessary out there? What do you want built to suit YOUR world? How can an entrepreneur turn your head and get your attention? What would lure you off your platforms right now, or what aren’t your existing tools covering for you?
The comments section of this post will far outweigh the value of the post itself, so remember to click through to [chrisbrogan.com].
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
Social Media Starter Moves for Entertainers
Twitter brought me a really special gift a month or two back, in the shape of Grace Nikae. She’s a concert pianist who is exploring the use of social media to build relationships with her audience and fans of music. In imagining how I’d advise someone who was a professional entertainer to use social media, I doubt that I could find someone more accomplished at reaching into social media than Grace. Let’s explore a bit.
Blog Behind the Scenes
Grace has a great blog called Stretching Intervals, which is a perfect mix of what goes on behind the scenes, as well as information about what it’s like to be a pianist. She writes posts that are worthy of being full fledged journalistic articles, and yet, they’re very approachable and readable.
By blogging what’s on her mind, Grace gives her fans, aspiring pianists, professional women, and anyone else who wants to know what it’s like to be a busy creative and professional a glimpse of what we all want to know.
Share a Little
Grace provides links to her YouTube videos, to photos on Flickr, and to other little tidbits all through her website. It gives you a sense of what she’s about, her style, and a peek at what you’re missing if you don’t go to her concerts. Sure there’s a store and other things you’d expect from a professional musician, but if you fault her for that, you’re crazy. After watching/listening to her YouTube videos, I plan on picking up her debut solo album, Fantasies, myself. : )
Stretch Out
Grace also maintains a presence on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a few other social sites, and though it’s a bit challenging to maintain it all, I’ve seen her have conversations on Twitter, and have been privy to several thoughtful comments on my blog. So she’s managing to find a little time to cover some thoughts and have conversations with people well outside her typical sphere of the world of a pianist.
Will it be fruitful? I guess Grace will have to tell us in several months whether all this social media brought her a different experience than before she started using it.
For Entertainers
Musicians and comics know that MySpace is a viable place to meet new audiences, build community, and promote your performances. Dane Cook made a good chunk of his career’s launch off MySpace’s mechanisms. Facebook isn’t as effective for performers, but I know that more folks are coming over to try it out. Twitter? It’s not exactly teeming with celebrities, but savvy folks like Grace are trying it out, so we’ll see how that turns out. My advice?
- Do this social media yourself. Don’t use an assistant.
- Communicate two-way. Just blurting out your calendar isn’t going to win you friends.
- Be just as much about other people as you are yourself.
- Give us peeks behind the scenes.
- Share a little something.
- Don’t get lost in all this stuff, as your real product is your performances.
We have lots of talented and upcoming performers and entertainers in our midst, several of whom already use these tools to great effect. Is it having an impact on their career? Will these tools benefit the mainstream stars as much as it does those who have a built-in appeal to the social media set? Time will tell.
What other advice could we give entertainers with regards to social media? What’s your take?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.
