Using Blogger Motivations to Drive Fan Connections

I was reading David’s post on “Music Blogging in 2011” and was especially moved by the comments. Dozens of bloggers chimed in with their viewpoints on blogging, and, most importantly, their own motivations for blogging.

I’ve written before on constructing personas for bloggers, but I think it’s worth looking at the personas in a different light: motivations. Most music bloggers exhibit some combination of these four motivations:

 - Participating in a community - Bloggers are almost always the biggest consumers of other blogs as well. They comment on each others’ posts, repost content they’ve found on other blogs, join forums, and go to meetups. People like to feel close to people similar to them, and musical taste goes a long way towards identifying potential friends. 

 - Sharing with friends - Most bloggers are the same folks who made all the mixtapes for their friends and parties in high school and college. They want their friends to hear great music, and blogging is a great way to publish their favorites. I know a good portion of the subscribers to my blog personally, and often subscribe to their blogs on other topics.

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Learning From Facebook Ad Failures

As with most folks who work in the tech business, I think it’s important to celebrate failures — they often teach us more than success. As such, I wanted to share a few Facebook Ads campaigns I experimented with and why they didn’t work.

The question I wanted to answer after the almost-too-easy success with the All Smiles campaign was “How easy is it to convert fans of related (but not directly tied) artists from Facebook Ads?”

Answer: Not easy.

I set out to target three groups of fans with free downloads from A B & The Sea: Jukebox The Ghost (with whom they were touring), Katy Perry (whose song they covered), and Beach Boys (to whom they sound most similar). I set up Facebook ads driving to dedicated landing pages (eg - http://abandthesea.net/jukebox/) with unique Topspin widgets on each so I could track conversion data at a granular level. Here’s how each campaign broke down:

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Finding 5,000 Fans Under Your Nose: A Case for Facebook Ads

One of the biggest challenges a music marketer faces is selecting a channel (or multiple channels) to focus their efforts on. More than anything, this means researching and understanding the ways existing and potential fans discover and consume music.

In the case of a young, hip band like A B & The Sea, it was clearly the social channels — with a product that is almost universally appealing and a fanbase that spends hours upon hours daily on social networks, it was a no-brainer. All Smiles, however, is a different case entirely.

Jim Fairchild spent most of his musical career influencing a generation as the guitarist in Grandaddy. More recently, he’s touched another generation as the touring guitarist for Modest Mouse. His work isn’t relegated to these well known bands, however — he’s also put out two LPs and a few EPs as All Smiles (with some help from fellow indie-famous friends).

The first All Smiles LP was put out by Dangerbird Records, replete with marketing budget, press tour, and all the other standard trimmings of a major indie album release. The second LP, however, came out independently with little more than an old-school (read: largely ineffective, for a variety of reasons) PR campaign behind it. As a result, it made about $1,900 (against production costs of $19,000) and Jim, somewhat disappointed, wrote it off in favor of other professional engagements.

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