Give Your Fans Warm Fuzzies

Let me introduce myself: My name is Corie Kellman. I am a music lover, working at Cyber PR® as the Director of New Artist Relations. I review artists project submissions and work to connect them to the Cyber PR® services that are right for them, getting them one step closer to their goals. However; first and foremost, I am a fan and I understand the value we bring to the success of an artist. Musicians would be nothing without their fans. Fans are just as important (if not more) than the artists’ teams.

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3 Critical Reasons Why a Facebook Profile Can’t Replace a Fan Page

Quite often, we at Cyber PR® have musicians who approach us with the same questions: “I don’t have a Facebook fan page, but I DO have a personal profile and everyone tells me I need to get a fan page. Why do I need a fan page if I already have hundreds of friends on my personal page?” This is a very common scenario for independent musicians and unfortunately a personal profile just won’t cut it as an asset in your overall arsenal of marketing tools. While I’m sure we could come up with dozens of reasons to avoid using a personal profile as a marketing tool rather than a fan page, there are 3 critical comments to a fan page that I’d like to shine a light on:

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Making New Fans in Unexpected Places

Whenever I write an article about sponsorship or marketing, I always talk about finding your unique, target audience. As bands, we usually focus on the genre: people who like certain acts that resemble our music. Sometimes, we base it on the subject matter of the songs or even the band’s image image. However, have you considered just connecting fans who have a similar personality or interest as the band members? Using our passions and some concentrated effort, we can make new fans in some unexpected places.

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What if your Band only had One Fan?

What if every band had only one fan? What if live music was no longer available? What if there was no fame or money involved with music? What would you do?

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Buzz: There's More to a Free Music Campaign than Free Music...

You’ve done it again. You’ve given away a free track from your latest album. It’s on your website. You’ve talked about it on Facebook. Job done, you think. Well think again. There’s no doubt about it. Free music is a powerful marketing tool. However, the music industry has become so over-saturated with free music that we’ve become desensitized to the process of consuming, promoting, and thinking about the importance of free music. This age-old debate has become, well, old.

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From the Mouth of a Artist, Tend to Your Social Network Daily and Watch the Roots Take Hold

Lisa Sniderman from Aoede is one of my past clients and for the past few months I had wanted to interview about her experience and growth using social networking to grow her fanbase. Well we were finally able to make it happen. I felt it was important to have a artists say all of this, sometimes hearing it from a peer carries more weight. So take a couple minutes and read about how Lisa went from essentially zero to social networking wiz and grew her fanbase over the last 1o months.

Lisa set the wayback machine to December of 2010 when we first talked. You were a couple months away from releasing your most recent album Affair With The Muse and hired me to help you with your website and online marketing efforts. Your online world at that time was fairly small; less than 1000 on your email list, a handful of Facebook fans, less than 100 Twitter followers. We talked about what you would need to do to grow your fans. How you would have to spend time engaging with everyone on Facebook and Twitter. How you would have to write articles to post on your new blog. How you had to open up and talk about yourself personally more than you talk about the new album. I remember at the time you said you were not sure you could do all of this, that you didn’t know if you had the time. But, you forged ahead.

Now not even a year later and looking back what do you think about that journey?

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Why Is It So Hard to Give a Record Label My Money?

I updated the original article I posted on October 19th.

Maybe I am missing something, maybe I don’t understand why territory restrictions still need to exist. I guess thinking of the world as the territory is wrong.

Maybe my feeling that fans will buy music if you make music available the moment they want it, at a fair price on whatever device they use is just wrong. But right now trying to buy music actually can drive a fan to steal music.

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Why Artists Need More Than The Social Web To Obtain Sustainable Engagement

We like to think of the web as one big, endless, interconnected net of relationship fibers where a tug on a single fiber causes random ripples and pulls all across the entire net; that somehow a path will emerge, narrow as it may be, where a ripple can travel from one corner of the net to the other; and that if you - the music marketer - could only simultaneously pull enough social strings, your message would be riding on a magic carpet instead of a string.

However If the ripple effect worked on the social web, then how come artists with hundreds of thousands of followers and many thousands of fans have so much trouble creating sustainable engagement where the ripples are broad enough (to live upon) or at least endless?  Songs often don’t find their intended audiences, seats go unfilled, videos don’t go viral, and messages get quickly swallowed in a sea of social noise.  It happens every day; it happens to almost every artist on earth; and the exceptions are rarer than you think.

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Who Cares?

How important is it to know who really cares about your business or your music?

Until very recently, most successful businesses would aim to market their goods or services to the ‘safe centre’, the large section of society that follow the crowd in seemingly predictable ways.

Trend setters, geeks and super-fans were not worth marketing to directly because there are never enough of them to sustain growth.

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ODDS ARE… (A response to What are the odds of succeeding without a record label?)

Odds are if an artist has to calculate their potential for success based on statistics – regardless of veracity – they are doomed from the start. Really. Think about it – the only formula known thus far to work with any predictability is BEING an act REMARKABLE enough (thanks, Bruce, a favorite word the past year or so), to spread by word of mouth. A formula NEVER out of date.

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2000 Things to Generate 20,000 – Give a Musical History Tour

    

Author David Meerman Scott made an honest and realistic quote, “if you want 20,000 fans you must do 2000 different things that each generate 10 fans.” This was my favorite quote from 2010 and I am going to take this on as a challenge for 2011 for an ambitious project to give you 2000 different things you can do to generate 20,000 fans.

Some of these items will apply better for larger acts, some items will work for any act. Some may work for you, some may not… not yet. Some these can be done with little effort, some will take some web development, some might even require some significant development. Some of these have successfully worked for me over the years. The point is to create a list of items that would cover a wide range of acts and abilities.

The end result of all this will hopefully be more Facebook likes, Twitter followers, email list subscriptions, more sales and more traffic to your website… more fans!

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Is Crowdsourcing the Future of Rock?

As we rush headlong into an ever more connected society, the preponderance of technology is increasingly inescapable. As entertainment continues to bridge gaps we’re sure to see the growth of more hybrid events anywhere that an entertainment dollar is at stake. For bands like Umphrey’s McGee that are already involved in creating interactive experiences, there will surely be no shortage of those willing to attend and participate in them.

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Musician Email List Etiquette

Your new album has just been released, or maybe you’ve just booked a huge show. Time to email everybody you know! Before you add your entire address book to the “To:” field of a new email, consider a few points of email list etiquette. By respecting the recipients of your mass emails, you’ll have far better results from your efforts, build stronger relationships with your fans, and build a healthy email list.

I’ve been maintaining my own email list for about seven years, and along the way have found many ways to gain, and lose, subscribers. I’ve also been added to many email lists, sometimes willingly, often not,but always tried to learn from other artists’ email newsletters.

There are numerous services available to help you maintain your email list. Some are free, others cost money depending on the size of your list and the features you want to install. Look at the bottom of the emails you get from different bands and you’ll find links to some of these services. I highly recommend you find one that suits you to make this whole process easier.

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The Facebook Dilemma: "New" Media, Just Like the "Old" Media

You can’t live without it.

And you can’t live with it, either.

In the past week, if you have been trying to access the Facebook page for The 1861 Project and wonder why you keep winding up at your own homepage, I have a tale of woe for you.  Bear with me here, it’s a bit of a shaggy dog story…

Two weeks ago I created a Facebook “Fan” page for The 1861 Project. Within the “page,” I added some features using a service called DamnTheRadio (DTR), which adds audio and video to a Facebook page, along with the option to lock some of the content behind the “Like” button.

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