WTF is Twitter?

Twitter users are the gatekeepers

to the rest of the Internet

Out of all the digital tools that have sprung up in the last 15 years, Twitter is perhaps the one that is most hated by business owners. Saddled with a ridiculous name and adored by the hipster technorati, the idea of having to “tweet” fills most busy executives with horror. However…

Twitter users are more likely to impact your brand than any other network.

Twitter users are more likely to impact your brand than any other network.

Twitter is Marketing

Conceptually Twitter is no different than traditional marketing channels; you have a message that you want to put in front of potential clients so that they know you exist, are impressed with your offer and remember you when the time comes to purchase a product or service. The difference is the mechanism in which your message reaches potential clients

Twitter is Word of Mouth Marketing

A billboard on the freeway and a Google ad act in pretty much the same way; a static message is shown to hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. Through Twitter your message can also reach hundreds of thousands of eyeballs but it has to be passed on from one person to another, with each person making a value judgment on the validity of your message.

Why does this work?

The number one thing that makes a Twitter user feel good is to have one of their Tweets “re-Tweeted.” This is where another Twitter user takes the time to read a Tweet and consider it relevant or interesting enough to share with their followers.

If a Twitter user develops a reputation for sharing good information they gain more followers, likewise, if they rehash crap they lose followers

Twitter is your access to the outside world

If you want your message to get out to the internet, Twitter’s 250 million users are the gatekeepers:

• 72% publish blog posts at least once a month
• 70% comment on others’ blog posts
• 61% write at least one product review a month
• 61% comment on news sites
• 56% write articles for third-party sites
• 53% post videos online
• 48% share deals found through coupon forums

You only get what you give

I know – you want a quick solution that you can plug in to your existing operations and forget about – everyone does. The reality is that unless you invest a little time in the network, no matter how compelling the content, chances are it won’t be found and shared.

Twitter isn’t about Twitter – it is about people, it is about getting those people to share your message with potential clients. Treat the relationship as a one way street and people will stop listening to you, invest a little time to build a network and you dramatically enhance the chances of your message being shared.

If you would like to discuss a Twitter strategy for your business raise it with me in your next session or drop me an email to book one

Content – Are You Sure You Can Handle It?

You get it!

Adding quality content to your website is the best way of moving up through the search engines – whether it’s text, video, audio, images – whatever – so long as it is relevant and interesting – the more new content you add the more likely it is that people are going to talk about you.

So why do the vast majority of people find it so hard to actually follow through and do this?

Producing Quality Content Takes Time

The majority of our clients are small to medium size businesses – if you’ve got less than ten employees it’s unlikely that you have the budget for a dedicated online marketer – so – whose job is it to write the copy for the website?

We can guarantee that the person with Marketing in their title is rushed off their feet with traditional channels - the longer term ROI of online / social media marketing just doesn’t stack up in the short term; phone a client or write a blog post – guess which one loses?

Writing Quality Content is a Skill

We’ve written this before but it’s worth repeating: just because you watch House religiously doesn’t mean you can diagnose your own illness and a passion for the Practice doesn’t make you a lawyer. Sure you’ve been writing most of your life but it doesn’t mean you’re any good at it.

Writing for the web is different than writing a letter or an essay or even a marketing brochure – there is a structure and an underlying logic to writing a blog post – it isn’t hard to learn but like the professions above, you have to practice it to get good.

Setting Yourself Up to Fail

As a small business owner myself I think the reason people struggle with producing copy is that they don’t allocate a significant value to it. Because they’re smart and capable individuals they look at the act of producing web copy and assume that they can do it themselves - why pay someone for something that you’ve been doing since you were three?

Of course what happens next is that life gets busy, time gets short and if they do actually allocate time to write they suddenly find that it’s hard to convey what they want in an interesting way. Be honest – if you have ten things to do – which do you do first – the ones you know how to do or the ones you have to work at?

Outsource the Writing of Content

We’re working with a couple of different clients who have some copy for their sites but need it optimized for SEO – keyword phrases researched, text tweaked, re-presented and organized. Good copywriters can charge anywhere from $35 an hour up to the $100+ - we tend to work with people in the $50 to $75 an hour range and are delighted with the quality we receive.

If you can establish a relationship with a writer who over time gets to know your business – where you can have a 15 minute Skype conversation with them where you relate the idea of what you want to get across – maybe provide a couple of links to sites – have them produce the copy, tag it and then post it to your site – how much is that worth to you?

This of course has sparked the idea for the next post – which will talk about online marketing spends shifting – I wonder what companies are doing with the hundreds of dollars a month they were spending on “SEO” – link building, multiple sites, etc – do you think they’re now spending it on copywriting?

Image Credit: I WANT YOU to write blog posts! by Search INfluence on Flickr

No point in having a Ferrari if you can’t drive a stick!

Having an integrated digital footprint is not enough; you have to know how to use it: how to add content, what type of content to add, what tools to use to track responses and so on.

Most successful business owners are used to learning new skills and fortunately none of this is rocket science.  A few hours initially to understand the concepts followed by an hour a week for the next month is normally all it takes.

Kilted Chaos will work with you to identify the best place to start; we use one on one Skype training supplemented by client specific screen casts that you can refer to later.  Training is built around you and your business.

Contact us and learn how to get more out of your own time.

Facebook Fatigue

Thought we’d take a few minutes to update on the marketing of @DrasticJo and reflect on a recent Facebook campaign. Jo has an album coming out in November and we’re tasked with finding the people who would like it and developing a relationship with them so that they will buy it.

Tommy Silverman recently made the case in Wired magazine that 80% of the music out there currently is crap – that the signal to noise ratio is so bad that it’s practically impossible for the good acts to break. Clearly one’s definition of good is purely subjective – but it does mean that the value of a personal recommendation becomes even greater.

As part of Jo’s campaign we built out a new Facebook page and wanted to let her friends know about it. We hijacked her personal account – put in a new profile image and sent a message out to all 500+ of her friends asking them to sign up for the mailing list and become a fan of the new page - You can see a copy of the message we sent here

The result: 25 new likes on the fan page and 1 new email address. Even better – one of her friends commented on her wall that they felt the message was Spam. Not exactly what we were going for.

The takeaway for us is that unless the message is personally tailored to each individual recipient – then it gets classified as band spam. Sure we could have spiced up the text – added more of a giveaway – thrown in a video etc, but I don’t think it would have made much difference. We were banking on Facebook friends having a deeper connection and being willing to help – but ultimately it felt like a MySpace campaign and is not something we’ll be repeating.

That’s not to say that we’ll be giving up though – we still believe that it is better to deepen the existing relationships than it is to develop more shallow connections. The value of a true fan throughout an artist’s lifetime cannot be underestimated, it’s apparent that we need to invest more in them at this stage than just a cut and paste form message.

We’ll let you know how well the next approach works out.

Turning Fickle Fans into Friends

Just got off the weekly skype call with one of our artists – Drastic Jo – she has a release scheduled for November 13 and we’re busy developing the direct to fan marketing plan.

Typically one of the most important parts of such a plan is the acquisition stage – this is where you set up the digital platform in order to reap as many email addresses, Twitter followers, Facebook and MySpace friends as possible. Figures show that the more people you have on your “lists’ the more dough you make.

However, over recent months there has been a lot of discussion around the importance of developing a deeper relationship between the artist and their existing fans. Having been out and about this week, it was interesting to hear one established management firm state that “Fans suck – it’s all about Friends” – and he wasn’t talking about the digital ones.

With the exploding number of bands and tracks now being marketed to the same audience – an artist not only has to grow new fans and convert them to friends, she has to look after her existing friends in order not to lose them to a competing artist.

Current Direct to Fan marketing is still based around a traditional release date – it makes sense on many different levels; having a specific event and a date allows both artist and fan to focus on each other at the same time. How then does the artist engage the fan and deepen that relationship outside the period of a specific release?

There’s a longer post brewing here – but here’s the short version.

Up until recently the people behind the music were strange mysterious creatures – beings that had this amazing ability to create stuff that changed our lives and made us feel. We assumed that ‘cos we liked their music we would like them – prior to the last decade the only exposure we had to artists were either on stage or through corporate controlled media channels.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder - though we had their music in our heads every day – the artists themselves were distant figures and we loved them. Compare that to nowadays: bands are encouraged to Twitter their every move – it’s hard to distinguish between your favorite artist and your favorite social media douche.

As the dust settles on the new music marketing revolution one thing is clear – artist’s lives are no more interesting than yours – and considerably less interesting than your immediate friends. If absence made the heart grow fonder then familiarity clearly breeds contempt – just ask John Mayer.

The only reason I am interested in an artist is because they create music – or in Jo’s case not just music but killer art as well. Once I’m beyond the initial rush of having complete access to who they are, the only time I want them to push out to me is when they have something new.

We think artists and bands need to think about how they release their music. We think a combination of specific release date combined with a monthly release of individual tracks allows for dedicated acquisition planning as well as looking after and deepening the relationship with existing fans.

Things have changed – no shit – but things are changing faster than the experts can write about it. A fan will move onto the next new thing – the next free download – the next photo opp or scandal. A friend will stay with you, will open your email, will come to a show and bring a friend. If your marketing plan purely deals with getting fans, you might want to hang on to your day job.

Photo Credit: The Explosion in the Alchemist’s Laboratory, Justus Gustav van Bentum - Chemical Heritage Foundation, Flickr

Marketing for Musicians & Fans

Forget the artists for the moment – forget about what the DJ wants, what the band or their manger wants and let’s focus in on you – the fan – the customer.  What do you want?  It’s great to get a hand written note from your favorite player – maybe a signed T-shirt or a retweet from the lead singer but what if they were so busy interacting with their fans, with you, that they didn’t have time for music?   What if you demand so much of their time that their next album sucks?

We all know there has been a huge change in the Music business over the last decade – it’s not just about music – this affects any business where the product can be digitized and replicated for zero cost.  Everything changes – production changes, distribution changes and marketing sure as hell changes.  I’m currently studying at the Berklee College of Music: Online Music Marketing with TopSpin and it is fascinating.

The core discussion is centered on Direct to Fan marketing; we know you all love an acronym so we’ll refer to it as DTF marketing from here on.  DTF marketing is brilliant – it means you don’t have to pander to anybody else, no dealing with coke addled label reps or bigger picture politics – you can do whatever you want.  You can release your album – call it a ridiculous name and stick candy covered elves on the front and the only people you need to answer to are your fans.  It all sounds utopian doesn’t it?

Except there’s a problem; what if you don’t have a lot of fans?  What if you weren’t “broken” by the existing label system and you’re sitting in front of your laptop wondering who to email next?

The concept being pushed by the TopSpin team is that of the Middle Class musician – basically in the old days (like 2 years ago!) you either made it - i.e. signed with a label, got your album funded and got promoted through the system (and even then it was unlikely that you would actually “make it”) or you didn’t make it – i.e. you didn’t get signed, didn’t get to make your album and didn’t get hot groupie sex.

The middle class musician falls somewhere in between the two extremes – you might not become the next John Mayer or Death Cab, but you do get your album made and can quite probably make a living from having a couple of thousand fans – if you’re a sole artist.  However – the minute you start to scale – the minute you have 5 members in the band you need more fans and without access to label cash and label established marketing channels – how the hell do you get them?

The answer is through hard bloody work, one fan at a time, making real relationships with your audience, answering their emails, responding to their tweets, viewing their videos and listening to their mashups.  By becoming accessible you deepen the bond between band and fan and when you have something new – the fan will talk about it and share it with their friends – the marketing of your music spreads organically through the fan base – your fans are your marketing – not the radio station.

But each fan demands your time – the story of Jonathon Coulton scares the hell out of me – great indie artist, started writing and posting a song a day, got some traction, grew his fan base by developing immediate online relationships with them, was super smart about his career and now probably makes around $100k a year as a truly independent artist.  So – what’s scary about that?  Well – The last I heard, Jonathon was spending 6 hours a day at his laptop maintaining the relationship with his fans which is great – but – where’s the time for music in that?  Not only that – how can he possibly scale it any bigger using the same model – surely more fans means more time online and eventually he’s going to reach a point where he can no longer maintain a deep enough relationship with his existing fans, let alone his new fans and ultimately things will slow down and then decline.

Add on top of that that if you’re a 4 piece rock band – you need 4 times as many fans as Jonathon has in order to get a decent lifestyle, which requires 4 times as much work and we haven’t even touched on upfront costs.

There has to be a middle ground – there has to be a way for the fan to feel that they’re connected with the artists and that they’re not going through some lame corporate PR house and likewise there has to be some way for the artists to wake up in the morning, smoke a doobie and pick up their instrument without worrying about the 170 emails in their inbox.

That’s the challenge and over the next few weeks, Alex and I are going to be developing our solution for this – we welcome your comments.

Image Credit:  Source Flickr Author: Amarand Agasi