Social Media
Social media refers to computer based social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., that can be used to promote business, connect to people, or deliver messages to a mass audience. It also encompasses issues such as techno-self (a term used to describe online persona), Internet fraud, reputation management, privacy laws, etc. Social media creates communication channels between you and your audience which can be used to deliver important messages related to your products or services.
Social Media Goals
The first key to understanding social media in the context of a tool for musicians is that the purpose is to quickly deliver messages to your audience. Social media can be used to deliver messages about new releases. It can be used as a social platform to promote performances, tours, and any other event associated with your group.
A secondary goal is to build a long-lasting connection between you and your audience. Some fans may become like super-fans, promoting your band and acting as ambassadors or moderators in your social media real estate.
Social Media Guidelines
One of the goals in implementing a social media presence is to adhere to the guidelines of the ‘hypermedia computer mediated environment’ (Hoffman and Novak, 1995), meaning that the site should be easy to use, fun to use, fast, comprehensible, highly visual, as well as easy to personalize and browse.
Consumer Generated Media
Consumer generated media is one of the keys to keeping your site lively. Using a membership system you can provide your members with the option of joining your Facebook page and being active participants on your forums. One of the keys to expanding a site in Europe and Asia is to take advantage of the many emerging social forums outside of the United States. Facebook and MySpace have a significant percentage of the market share within the United States, but there are many strong competitors that do a better job integrating with the local media and culture outside of the United States. The European social networking site www.vk.com has more than 100 million active users. These non-English social networking sites can be leveraged to develop mind-share in your target demographic.
Environmental Scanning
Environmental scanning is the process of gathering information about the external environment. Recognizing social media trends early on may help your band reach a much wider audience by beating the majors to new platforms. To do this, choose a few popular artists and then study their social media strategies. Try to weigh the value proposition of each social media strategy before implementing it. The value proposition is a term describing the effort or cost of a project or task, and the benefit that performing the project or task will bring about. Consider how long you think it will take to implement each strategy, and how much reward it will provide. Implement the strategies that provide the greatest, short-term value proposition first. It is also important to consider that building a social media presence may have very little short-term reward for a band that has a regional audience, but will provide significant rewards for a nationally or internationally recognized performer or group. Building a social media presence can be quite costly and if a label builds a presence for you, they likely expect compensation for the time and money spent building it. Major marketing firms and design shops often charge in excess of one-hundred dollars per hour to work on design and social media, if a label does this work for you, they will likely charge you similar rates and deduct them from your overall royalties. The more that you can develop your brand through social media and other platforms, allowing for greater analytic prediction of sales performance, the greater the probability of a company offering you a higher percentage of royalties and a larger signing bonus.
The Value Proposition
Implementing a small scale social media strategy takes some guess work. Analytics can provide accurate forecasting of the probability of a positive value proposition from many social media strategies, but unfortunately analytics is generally the most costly aspect of social media, forcing small scale marketers into estimating the value proposition of each strategy. Larger media outlets have significant real-world experience learning about which kinds of strategies provide the best value propositions, so simply copying those strategies is a good approach for a band who is on the verge of gaining national or international exposure. The underlying theme in evaluating social media is to think about the social lives of your audience and how you can tailor your social media to fit in with that.
By Jack Johnston, MA Applied Linguistics, MBA, MSML