From Scratch – Adventures in Independent Music Making

Posts Tagged ‘Networking’

Week 8 in the Music Success in Nine Weeks Blog Challenge

My new business cards ordered through Vistaprint

Week/Chapter 8 is one of my favourites from Ariel Hyatt‘s book: Music Success in Nine Weeks. Though I was a VERY shy kid, I became a bit of a social butterfly when I moved away from home to attend university. The excitement of the adventure (and knowing absolutely nobody at my school … or anyone within a 20 hour drive from where the school was) really brought that out of me. Traveling Europe on my own also made an impression in this manner.

In a strange way, I think it’s easier to open up and reach out when we take a chance on being alone. There is a beautiful poem/you tube video by Tanya Davis called “How to be alone” that speaks to this. I saw it for the first time this weekend, so I’m glad that not finishing this blog on time meant I could include it in the post. A similar thing happened with my newsletter. No matter how many times I sat down to finish it and send it out, something  would get in the way. Then, this weekend I found out about the sudden and unexpected death of one of my friends (Cristina Taborda. You may remember her from my ‘perfect pitch’ video during Week 2 of Wave 2) and attended her funeral/memorial. Again, I am grateful for the delay, because it enabled me to sift through my old video footage and put together a piece to honour her life and, in my little way, keep her memory and music alive by sharing it with others. Here is the link to that video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpwJR6nt7jU Please pass it on :)

Coincidentally, I met Cristina in a “real live networking” situation: At the Music Industries Association of Canada (MIAC) 2010 tradeshow. I was introduced to her and her brother through a mutual friend who was representing me as a booking agent. I didn’t have any of Ariel’s networking strategies under my belt at that time, but we did set up a gig together after stumbling upon them in the lobby, so it worked out well in that regard.

More currently, after re-reading chapter 8 and keying in to Ariel’s advice on stepping outside of the music scene for networking, I decided to give my gumption a workout and went to the International Game Developers Association social meet up. In Toronto these gatherings happen on the first Thursday of every month at Elephant and Castle, but they have chapters all over the world. So, if you’re interested in  meeting people that might be interested in placing your songs in games or having you compose music/record sound bites for them, you should check it out.

I found out about the meet up through a faceook event page: I was invited by the guys at DARC productions (who brought me in to be on their charity compilation CD and recorded “This Song” for us). Unfortunately, they weren’t able to make it out, but the group was very welcoming of this outsider and when I went up to the first person I saw and asked if they were there for the IGDA meet up they invited me to join their table . From there I met a bunch of really cool people including the CEO of Frozen North Productions, Julian Spillane (very humourous guy. The gamers out there may recognize him and his company from articles in Nintendo World magazine). I had a really fun time and am looking forward to the next one (which I believe is in February due to holidays, etc.) … this time I’ll bring friends who I feel will benefit from the experience.

This month’s newsletter, as previously mentioned, has gone over well. As many of you may have noticed in the forum discussions on Ariel’s Cyber PR site, Ethan Waldman and I did a “list exchange” this month. That doesn’t mean we gave away the confidential email addresses of our loyal followers (that would be VERY bad). It means we introduced each other to our respective fanbases by writing about each other in our own newsletters. I sent mine out about 30 hours ago and the read rate is at 34%. It will probably creep up a few more percentage points over the next week (not everyone checks their email everyday, nor do they prioritize newsletters), as it usually does find it’s way closer to 40% now that I’ve started doing my “choose your own adventure” style of newsletter.

To incorporate Ethan into the story, I reinvented him as a Koopa Paratroopa who saves you (the reader) from being eaten by a Piranha Plant. I found it funny :) and Ethan’s response to the newsletter leads me to believe that he quite enjoyed it too. The attempt at creating a more intriguing subject line (as discussed during week 6 of wave 3) didn’t seem to make a difference. The open rates are still around the same (with more members, however, so maybe the effect is masked by the increase in subscribers?).

Now… I’m supposed to be writing about week 9 this week, but my week 9 activities (mainly buttons) has been keeping me SUPER busy, so I will be firing that one out later this week. It’s going to be nice to wrap up this second wave with so many exciting developments to reflect on.

Thanks for reading!

Meghan Morrison

www.meghanmorrison.com
@megsmorrison

Sign Up for My Monthly Newsletter & Get My Album FREE

I will never sell, rent or lend your email address to anyone else and you can unsubscribe at any time

Original Post

Read this blog in 27 different languages

(Pictured: “a little more than six degrees of Kevin Bacon“, Matt Leclair

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommericial-ShareAlike 2.0 license)

I’ve been at my computer so much over the past 8 weeks, I think I’ve forgotten how to speak to people … in person … with words … that come out of my mouth. Little tweet bubbles appear in my mind’s eye when I’m not at the computer and I type 140 characters to update my world from my cell phone multiple times per day. Needless to say, I was quite relieved that Ariel included “Real Live Networking Tips” as chapter 8 in her book, Music Success in Nine Weeks.

Though social media is very important and valuable for taking charge of your music career, it is equally as important to be able to market yourself and communicate effectively in the real world. Unless all of your gigs are on SecondLife, you still need to be able to represent yourself and get people to join your mailing list at live shows. Same goes for meeting new people at house parties or on the street, catching up with old friends you haven’t spoken to in a while, convincing your family members that you don’t need a real job because you’ve got a solid marketing plan for your music, and attending music conferences (If you’re not already volunteering for these, get on it! Free admission to the sessions and festival shows, plus it’s an amazing opportunity for networking with other artists and people in the industry. In Toronto, here are a couple I have volunteered at: CMW, NXNE)

In Chapter 8, Ariel brought up an approach to networking that has helped me to become more aware of the flow of my conversations with people. The concept is this: “The more they talk, the more memorable you are”. This spoke to me (no pun intended) because I easy fall into rambling on about my musical projects and ambitions when someone asks me about them; I hope it’s an affliction of passion and excitement rather than self-indulgence. Regardless, I recognize that people want to connect with each other and that can’t happen if the conversation is one sided. So now I try to be more observant of my own conversational patterns. Even if I haven’t finished saying everything I wanted to share with them, I will stop myself, turn the conversation back to being about them, and then I’ll finish saying what I wanted later, if it is important or if a segue presents itself.

I didn’t realize how much forethought was involved in speaking to people for networking purposes. It feels a bit calculated at first while you’re trying to get the pattern right, just like learning a song, eventually the flow comes along. For instance, keeping in mind what you’re looking for and deciding what to ask for before you even enter a room. I had never considered doing that before.

Ariel’s networking and communication tips have helped me a lot over the past week as I bumped into people. With those that I met on the street or in passing, I would practice turning the focus of the conversation to them. With people or situations I was expecting and had more time with, I would practice keeping a goal in mind of something to ask for while trying to keep the focus on the other person at the same time. These strategies, as well as the tips Ariel provides for following up, worked really well for me while meeting a number of musicians that I came across this week. I now have their contact information and have invited them to be on my webcast. Touching back on Week 7: Building Your Mailing List, these addresses are now in my “Newsletter – Potential” folder so that during my designatied list building time I can ask them if they are interested in joining the mailing list.

Also, Ariel stresses that it is important for you to “GET A BUSINESS CARD NOW!” and points out that they are free on VistaPrint, a company that I have used in the past for my business cards and was quite happy with. I have been waiting to order new cards for a while now because I wanted my new branding/website so that I could design them to be consistent with the new look. VistaPrint is great for having free business cards (you pay the shipping), but if you’d like to use a custom design/upload it will cost you more for the premium cards. There is a company based in Toronto that is focused on indie musicians and offers a business card service, Firebrand is their name and, by the way, they also have AMAZING deals on short run CDs. If you only need 100 copies, call Scotty. He’s a cool dude.

Get a FREE download of my tour album when you …

I will never sell, rent, or lend your email address to anyone ever and you can unsubscribe at any time

Original Blog Post

Read this blog in 27 different languages

I have become immersed in the world of blogging. Chapter 5 of Ariel Hyatt’s Music Success in Nine Weeks does a great job of summarizing a strong rationale for why musicians should blog. It also provides a number of valuable resources for starting a blog and, later, takes you step by step through establishing a protocol for getting the most out of your blogging efforts. This provided some reassurance when I started going into panic mode this week because, let’s face it, blogging is a big commitment and we musician-types still need to have time to write music too.

The overall process, in short, is something like this:

1) start a blog

2) subscribe to some relevent blogs (publications that might review your music)

3) start reading those subscriptions

4) leave some comments (that are related to the actual post, not just a plug for yourself)

5) then ask for a review after you have developed some rapport with the writers

I already had a blog, so I was able to skip step one. I didn’t, however, subscribe to or read any other blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my email, so I’m not sure how this is going to go, but I’m determined to try. Ariel suggests establishing a list of 50 blogs to subscribe to, so that’s what I did and though there are 50 of the list, for now I have decided to just focus on one or two of these blogs for a few weeks and then move on to a few more afterwards. That way I can give adequate attention to any particular blog even when I don’t have a lot of time for reading.

That number 50 was a bit intimidating at first, I must admit. It took a lot of mouse clicking and searching on Technorati and then often times struggling to find the RSS feed links/buttons on a page I liked once I found it. That part was very frustrating. In my head I kept saying, time after time, “I want to follow you, but you’re making it impossible!!!”. Who knew having that little orange icon would make such a difference.

Once I found one good and relevent blog it became easy because their blog roll was also relevant to what I was looking for. I found a lot of great blogs in the blog roll of Einstein Music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an RSS feed for their own page though, so I had to bookmark them instead. Chances aren’t good that I’ll remember to go back and check on that one when I have 50 others being brought to my Google Reader though.

This “blog roll” thing had me a bit perplexed at first. I understood what it was (a list of links to other blogs and sites that blogger post on their own pages -usually in the right hand column), but I couldn’t figure out where mine was on my page. After some handy Google Mcguivering I learned that it was a multi staged process with WordPress (the program I use) and was able to set up my blog roll after watching a few videos. If you use word press, here are videos on how to add a link to your blog roll and How to make your blog roll visable to readers

Other ways I found blogs to follow: 1) New Twitter followers (a lot of bloggers have Twitter accounts). Here’s one for local Toronto bloggers 2) Indie Charts – you create a profile and submit songs for review by other artists, industry professionals and … yep, writers. 3) Newsletters. In particular, The Digital Media Wire newsletter is where I learned about the MOG Music Network (a network of top music blogs).

Another strategy for finding potential reviewers/bloggers that Ariel recommends is searching your name for existing articles you don’t know about and leaving comments on articles written about artists you know/play with. She suggests starting with a list of ten. This is what I came up with:

Chloe Charles – we share a violinist (Kelly). Chloe is amazing!
Radio Belle – I met Cristina and her brother at the MIAC/PAL 2010 tradeshow and have since gigged together
The Mudmen – a mutual fan connected me with their guitarist
Oliver Pigott – I met through MySpace and wanted to do a cover of his song. He gave me permission and invited me to open a show for him.
The Station Agents – Billy Fong has been playing guitar with me, has been on my webcast, and we gig together often
Beth Moore - she lives across the kitchen from me and has been on my webcast
Hayley Stark – Did a songwriters showcase together and they have also been on my webcast
MIP – I met at The Painted Lady open mic and, coincidentally, my favourite computer repair man is her drummer
Alice Stops Time – I set up a show with them in Halifax on Leg 2 of Dara’s Wedding Tour 2009
First Rate People – we were on Indie Idol (indielove.ca) together and they were one of the first guests on my webcast
Blake Bliss – used to gig together in Hamilton when Purl of Surf was in full swing.
The Skirt Chasers - Hilary and I used to fence together. Now we gig together.
The Danger Bees - played a show with David in Dartmouth during Leg 2 of Dara’s Wedding Tour
Courtesy Blush - Jon and I go to the same vocal school
Axe to Mouth - I’ve been gigging regularly with these guys thanks to The Dishes

… as you can see, I started getting carried away (extending my list past 10). Though there are many more I would like to add to this list, I had to cut myself off and move forward with this week’s challenge (including leaving a comment on each artist’s myspace, since they don’t all have blogs, to let them know I’ve mentioned them in my blog. Sig file -or signature file- will be added at the end, as recommended by Ariel)

Another time saving strategy Ariel recommends is to join MyBlogLog and/or GoogleFriendConnect. That way, if you don’t have time to leave a comment on everyone’s blog, the authors still know you have visited their site. Though not as memorable as a comment, it helps to establish a connection and rapport over time.

Blogging. Some call it a hassle; some call it an addiction. It certainly is an avenue for ranting, raving and sharing news. It is also a networking and marketing tool. My favourite function of a blog: discovery.

Blogs have the ability to tell stories: within an individual post, through a nine week series, or over the writer’s life. It’s not just about connection, but also growth. The writer opens a window for the public to see  into their inner world but can also control how high up they pull the blinds. By reading blogs we discover new things others want to share with us. By writing blogs we reflect and learn more about ourselves. This has certainly been true for me as an artist. While my Dad was up visiting this week, there were a number of times where there was no technology around to distract or interrupt our conversations and as such, I heard tales of his childhood and my own (which I don’t remember) that I had never heard before. With all the blogging I have been doing lately, this experience triggered the thought in my mind that people are more than their thoughts and opinions, they are their stories … and blogs are a great way to tell stories.

My story this week (outside the context of blogging itself) was pretty exciting. The Horsehoe show (my biggest show to date) was a success, we bought a house (home studio and webcasting set here we come!), I finally got caught up with all of my social media sites from last week (the MySpace page was the biggest obstacle) and I found out that Mike the Bee featured one of my songs on his podcast in the UK after I signed up with Music Alley last week. Not too shabby.

I feel more comfortable moving forward with the marketing side of blogging now that the idea of storytelling has returned to my line of sight. I started blogging by telling stories, but lately, with all this reading about business and promotions, I have found myself becoming a bit blinded by the exciting statistics, increasing quality of interactions online, and other new developments.

Now, if Ariel could just teach us how to deal with Blog Comment Spam. I had over 200 comments this week, which made me very excited until I saw that they were mostly either:

1) Utterly vague: “Incredible, that’s definitely what I was scanning for! You just spared me alot of looking around”

2) Self-promoting and irrelevant to the subject matter of the post: “if the cops werent so bad in florida it would be really awesome” has nothing to do with my Week 3 post on website optimization.

3) Template messages being sent from different people from the same agencies. Grrrrrr.

For example, I received such similar posts from a 3 different virastop.net users:

“What a blogpost!! Very informative and also easy to understand. Looking for more such blog posts!! Do you have a myspace? I recommended it on stumbleupon. The only thing that it’s missing is a bit of new design. However thank you for this information.”

The other commenters just substituted “twitter” or “facebook” for “myspace” and “digg” for “stumbleupon”. If it wasn’t for the fact that there was more than one comment saying the same thing, I would have thought it was a legitimate comment. So now how do I know which ones are the fakes and which ones are real? I would hate to delete a legitimate comment.

To end on a positive note, my web guru Byron has hooked me up with a translator for my blog so that anyone around the world can read my posts. I just need him to help me install it now haha

Next Week – Challenge Week 6: Newsletters & Surveys

Last Week – Challenge Week 4: Social Media for Musicians

Ariel’s Book: Music Success in Nine Weeks

www.meghanmorrison.com

Share