One Track Mind - Music Discovery Made Easy, One Track at a Time

For the next couple of weeks in support of the #FreeChaos competition, we’re going to be writing about music sites that we dig and that offer resources to independent bands / artists / DJs.  One of my favorite sites for music blogs is:

One Track Mind – Music Discovery Made Easy, One Song at a Time.

The idea of the Music Blog has been around many years – getting featured on Pitchfork or even The Hype Machine can do you a lot of favors – but those gates often have ”Industry” keepers – so what’s a band to do?

Well – you could of course sit down with The Hype Machine’s List of Music Blogs and contact every single one of them or – you could contact One Track Mind.  In keeping with their tag line they sure make it easy to discover new music.  Sign up for the daily email or get the track delivered to your RSS reader and every day you’ll get a song that you can stream immediately and download with a knowledgeable write up that delivers useful information about the track and the artist.

Go to the actual site and you can see that Danny (the rather accomplished site owner) grades the track on three scales: Originality, Repeat Listen Potential and Overall Verdict.  Which I initially thought was a little weird but over time has really started to make sense.  You can rate each track on a scale of 1 to 10 and of course leave a comment if you’re so inclined – and the most popular tracks are promoted to the community – genius!

Whether Danny has some Scandinavian roots I’m not sure but he sure does dig northern European bands and my music library has some great music I would never have come across – check out this track from Friska Viljor – “Wohlwill Strasse” – if it doesn’t make you want to get up and move to Stochkholm right now – then I’m a Dutchman.

Of course – couldn’t let this post go without acknowledging the hip to one of my new favorite Scottish Acts – Malcolm Middleton – check out Red Travellin Socks - the build to the final chorus push at 4:20 is one of my all time favorites. I immediately went out and bought Waxing Gibbous as a result – who says the music business is dead?

Finally – if you’re in the Denver area and are looking for a photographer – check out the amazing work from Danny’s partner – seriously good work – Nina Barry makes normal people look like Movie Stars.

Give Your Girlfiend Tim Halperin For Valentine's Day

Tim Halperin's music is piano driven accessible pop / rock – think The Fray, Ben Folds, ColdPlay with an 80’s twist – that kind of thing – he’s got a great distinctive voice that sits nicely on top and he writes the kind of songs that make your girlfriend open up.

But we’re writing about him today ‘cos we want to throw a light on some of the great ideas he’s putting into place to get his career going.  First off – check this video out:

How cool is that – you’ve got another 2 days to get in there.  What a great idea and doesn’t he come across totally charming and genuine on the video – you don’t exactly need a $5k video budget to make this work do you?

What really struck me though his how he’s quite literally “playing to his audience”- clever guy, playing the Sororities – that’s genius!  Not only do you get gigs you get gigs in front of chicks – in their houses – where their rooms are – as I said Genius.

He’s got smart of use of merch with a hook up into Zazzle – a great "Help Tim” page where he tells you how you can help him and how to connect across his various networks – and finally he’s making good use of NoiseTrade – another tool that helps get his music out and about while still allowing him to make dough.

His site design is pretty simple and straightforward – I reckon he could benefit from having a blog – it would put his videos, photography and news into some kind of context. It looks as though he's on the Joomla platform right now - which is fine but not so easy to get blogging.

If Tim entered the #FREECHAOS competition he could win a brand new spangly wordpress site that would make blogging a snap - it would also get rid of those janky urls which must be buggering up his SEO.

Overall however – I think he’s doing a pretty good job.  If that kind of music is your thing – check him out – he makes it really easy to get hold of him.

Is Your Band A Business?

You’d better bloody believe it, and just like any business out there – you want it to be easy for customers – call them fans – to find you and give you money.

I’ve been in bands on and off pretty much my whole life; whether as a 6 year old dressed up as Gary Glitter (which in retrospect is just wrong!) or as a “grown up” keyboard player – there’s nothing like the dream of making it in music.  There is however a big difference between playing at it and actually living it – a huge part of that difference is how you manage your online presence.

We know that there is a growing market for easy to update websites that integrate seamlessly with social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook and that don’t require a computer science degree to use.  We also recognize that having an easy to use website doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s enough time in the day for the business owner (lead singer, drummer or keyboard player – guitar players are usually too busy screwing around with their tone!) to write and respond to blog comments, Facebook friend requests or tweets.

If at this point you’re all squeamish about looking at your music – your art – as a business than you’re reading the wrong website. Remember, to do this professionally you need people to give you money and not just once, but again and again for as long as you are making music.

We work with Bands but we also work with Realtors and Telecoms Agents – the product is different but the business relationship is always the same. If you can find the time to work your website, manage your Facebook page and keep your fans – call them customers – updated by email – you dramatically increase your chances of doing this for the rest of your life.

Want to learn more? Contact us..

Twitter Followers are like Lovers

Actually they’re also like steak, haircuts and ideas – there’s no point in having a lot of them if they suck (well – maybe not the lovers…) I write this post because my brother in law to be recently asked me what I thought of one of those automated Twitter follower services; you know – the ones that promise to get you a million followers by lunchtime.  Eric runs a growing Real estate business in Los Angeles and we recently hooked him up with a Social Media integrated website - he’s been blogging and tweeting diligently for the last few months and like everyone else is concerned with the number of Twitter followers he has.

The thinking goes that if one follower is good then 2 followers are better; if you’re tweeting about your business then the more followers you have the more likely it is that someone will see your information.  And yes – to some extent this is true and from that perspective it makes sense to sign up with these services and grow your base – however…

Both Alex and I have been using Twitter since 2007, my @andrewmccluskey account started on 10/08/07 and now has 877 followers.  I have never used an automated follower service, neither has Alex and we were chatting about this the other day.  Aside from the fact that many of these services over the years have turned out to be nefarious organizations that take your login information to send out spam tweets to your user base (and you’d be amazed by how many “smart” people fall for it,) there’s something fundamentally flawed behind the mass growth strategy.

There’s a great post from Anil Dash on the impact of having hundreds of thousands of twitter followers and what that actually meant to how his information was getting distributed.  In essence his point is that there is really no point in having many followers unless those people were truly interested in you in the first place.  In terms of getting your message out and stimulating interaction – it’s the quality of followers that counts – not the number.

We’re going to have a look at some of these services over the coming months and see if any are actually worthwhile.  There is some sense to having a service that identifies tweets that reflect keywords of interest & suggests followers but both Alex and I shy away from the automatic follow.  When we looked at our behavior, if we’re considering following someone we will check out their profile, read through their most recent tweets and often check out their website before we choose to follow.  Without going through that process you dramatically increase the signal to noise ratio of your twitter stream and who needs that?

Bottom line for small businesses - if you’re producing a business relevant stream then people looking for your type of business will find you.  If you’re writing “sticky” tweets then people are going to re-tweet them anyway – it’s the quality over quantity concept all over again.

There’s a word for people who focus on the superficial and short term benefits of social media measurements such as number of Twitter followers – broke!  Focus on the quality of your output and the quantity of your followers will grow naturally – and most importantly to your business they’ll be genuinely interested in what you have to say.

Facebook Business Fanpages

Facebook is exploding – over 350 million users and growing like a bad staffing problem. Less than 2 years ago networks like Twitter and Facebook didn’t register on business owner’s radar – now – if you’re not on them, you’re probably losing out. We will be writing more on how best to work with these networks but for now we’re going to look at the basics:

How do I create a Facebook Business Fanpage? It’s pretty simple – go here - http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php - and you should arrive at this page:

Use the drop down to choose what kind of business you are – today we’re feeling very healthy – unless you’re one of those super anal types who can’t publish anything until it’s perfect don’t check the box under where you have named the page (remember – we’re in the world of perpetual beta!) Guess the captcha and boff! – hit the create page button. You arrive here:

Now’s the time to make a decision – if you have a personal Facebook profile – do you want to sync your business page with your personal page? You can go either way on this – if your business is about you then it’s probably a good idea, if however you sell adult novelties – which is apparently a very profitable business – maybe you don’t want your page linked. Just for fun – let’s keep this unique and set it up as a standalone profile – enter your business email address – guess the captcha again and away you go - you should end up here:

Ta Da! Ok – first things first – let’s get your business logo up there. Put your mouse over the big question mark - a prompt will come up in the top right hand that says Change picture – click it and you get the menu option to load an image from your computer. This is where you can load up your Business’ Facebook Image ( if you don't have one of these - you might want to check out Kilted Chaos' Logo/Avatar development service)

Here’s one of the tricky things about Facebook and images. The image that you load up as a profile image is also the image that Facebook squeezes down to use as your avatar. Now unless you have the time and are handy with an image manipulation tool like Photoshop, this can be a laborious process. The largest image size you can put up there is 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels deep. But – Facebook will take the information that is between 90 pixels and 240 pixels deep to produce the square avatar that accompanies your posts.

In order to have a good looking Facebook page, you need to be thinking ahead in terms of what your business logo is – how it’s going to translate onto Facebook and how you’re going to produce an image that will produce a good looking avatar. Remember – we can do this for you – contact us here.

Ok – so – your image is in place – what next? Time to fill out your information – start off by getting a link back to your website and describing what your business does in the box that says “write something about…” If you write the URL of your website like htis http://yourwebsite.com – it will automatically become a link when you click out of the box.

Next you want to start populating the tabs that run across the top of the page. Info is pretty easy to handle – events are good ones to use too. You can see on the Kilted Chaos page that we have some fancy stuff going on and you can have that too but that will come in a later post. Here's a screenshot of the Kilted Chaos facebook page - click on it to go there and don't forget to become a fan when you're there - we'd really appreciate it!

For now there’s one thing that you should add to your page straight away – and that is your Blog feed. The whole point of integrating your website with your Twitter and Facebook is that it allows you to get as much bang for your content buck as possible. If you can feed your blog posts into your social networks – you’re getting your content into more places and making it easier for people to see you without having to triple your workload.

On a quick side note – if you’re going to truly drive business awareness through Facebook and Twitter you will need to be producing unique content specifically for each platform – but for now – let’s just get you up and running.

Adding Your Blog / Website Content to Your Facebook Business FanPage

Underneath the question mark – which by now we hope is your business avatar / log – (or even your smiling self!) Click on the link that says edit page. You’ll arrive on the following list of options:

Go to the Notes application and select Edit – you’ll arrive here:

See the box on the right "Notes Settings, " underneath that the link that says Import a Blog? Click on that and you will get to here:

Paste the URL of your website’s RSS feed into the box and away you go. Now – for those of you who don’t know where to get that then maybe you really should ask us to do this for you! However – if you’re using Firefox – then go to your website and look in the URL bar – if you see an orange box like this:

Click on it – and it will give you the address of your RSS feed.

So – to sum up – you have a new page – you have your business image loaded up, you have entered a link back to your website and you have added your website’s RSS feed to the page. Pretty good – now you’re all set up and ready to start attracting fans. This is something we will deal with in a later post.

If you would like Kilted Chaos to take care of setting up your Facebook Fanpage for $150 then click here. You will need to have some idea of a business logo, if you don't and you'd like us to produce one for you that will work across your website, Facebook and Twitter, we can do that also for $150.

Marketing Your Business Online

Kilted Chaos is launching a new service for business owners who want to market their business online.  Focusing on four key areas, we will:

1/ Write quality content that is SEO optimized and interesting for the visitor to read

2/ Manage and respond to responses to content

3/ Produce easy to understand weekly analytics and adapt behavior in light of data

4/ Handle all technical upgrades and implement & suggest new technologies as appropriate

So you’ve got your easy to update website, a professional looking logo and avatar, a Twitter account a Facebook page and a few pictures of your business up on Flickr, what next?  Well, this is supposed to be the easy bit, (easy in that you don’t need any tech skills to do it): adding content, writing blog posts, talking about your business and what you do, responding to comments and tweets, making friends with your customers – oh and yes - still managing the day to day operations of your business.

For the majority of our clients it’s the business owner themselves who sits at the computer, during the trading day if they’re lucky, but more typically out of hours.  The rush of content that seems so easy in the first couple of weeks becomes harder to sustain and after a few months dries up.   There’s no doubt that marketing your business online brings customers in and it’s true that the tools developed in the last few years have practically eliminated the technical barriers – however, no one has yet invented the magic machine that generates the extra hours in the day needed to do all this.

The trap that a lot of small business owners fall into at this point is to think that it is all about the addition of content – and nice “keyword heavy” content at that.  It’s pretty easy to find someone who will write you a keyword packed article for $5.00 that is practically unreadable.   For a better understanding of what your site content should be, check out this great article on web copy from Claire Mason of Leapfrogg – a classy boutique digital marketing firm in the UK.

 But say that you’ve seen the light and have employed a professional writer, one that can actually project enthusiasm for your product with correct spelling and grammar – what happens next?  A new blog post will register on your Twitter feed and on your Facebook page and a customer can interact with that content through a blog comment, a retweet, a reply to a tweet, a post on your wall, etc – who’s going to respond to that?

And with all this activity taking place – who’s tracking what’s working and what isn’t?  Sure you have sales receipts as the ultimate arbiter of success but using blogging and social media to market your business takes time.  You don’t see results straight away, it takes a while to generate reputation and for people to react to that reputation.  If you’re really dropping the hammer you might have produced 25 blog posts over a two month period – which ones were successful and why – how can you learn from your content – what do the analytics say?

Finally – the predominately free tools that you’re now using – WordPress, Plugins, commenting systems, etc – they all get upgraded as new technologies are implemented and security holes fixed.  They’re super easy to upgrade but someone needs to be on top of it – and if you’re allocating out one aspect of your online marketing – should you not make sure the core machinery is taken care of?

There’s a lot to think about – as evidenced by the length of this post – but if you want to start taking your online marketing seriously – get in touch – prices start from as low as $100.

Photo Credit: grunge on Flickr