Don’t just blind follow a ton of people!

Now there are some bands like Queensryche that just don’t get Twitter. They follow no one. Not even other bands they have toured with. Of course that is super lame and one of the reasons Queensryche will always rank lower than unsigned bands when I rank rock and metal Twitter users. However, there are some people you should not follow. Now this may piss off a few of my SEO and internet marketing friends, but if those people read this whole article I think they will agree.

First off you really need to keep your ratio at least even. It’s even better if you can have your “Followers” number way higher than your “Following” number. A total newbie mistake is to just follow a few thousand people just to see if you get a follow back. This is a horrid mistake because your Twitter needs to be more about quality than quantity. Blind following may bring your number up but will those people respond when you announce a new song available for download on your site? Will the people you blind follow want to buy that new merch you just released? Will they want to talk about your band’s music with you? Then why should you care enough to follow them back?

Now there are a few services coming out that will recommend people you should follow. The way they do this is an automated algorithm. If you follow a ton of SEO types (the spammers and the quality ones), they will recommend nothing but SEO types. In fact, for you bands, I would even go so far as to say to not follow back the tech types. I follow Robert Scoble on Twitter because I’m a geek. You are a band, so you have no reason to follow him. Follow bands, fans, and music journalists. Then when Mr Tweet recommends Twitter users for you to follow, he will give you people that fit that type.

I know it is tempting to just start following people like crazy on these social networks. It takes less time and you are short on time. It takes less thinking and your brain is spent from your day job and creating music. So I understand why a band would get lazy about things like this. All I am trying to say is to resist the temptation no matter how tempting it is. You will get out of Twitter what you put into it. If you make sure you are only following the highest quality of people it will be well worth it for you. Keep it very strictly to your target audience. Never forget that it is about quality and not quantity.

My worst Twitter Habit

My worst Twitter habit can also be used as proof at what makes Twitter so cool. It forces you to get to the fricken point! So then you have people like me who love to talk. I am always pushing that 140 character limit to the wall. Why is that so bad? The Re-Tweet. If someone sends a Twitter message that I really like I may want to re-tweet that message. Now if that message is exactly 140 characters, you can’t re-tweet it without doing some serious editing. Now that sounds easy enough, but trying to figure out what to cut out of someone else’s Twitter message can sometimes be pure hell! More times than not when I hit the re-tweet button on my Twhirl application and see that it is over the limit, I just erase and forget about it. They loose the Re-tweet.

So What do you do to make sure your contacts can re-tweet your best stuff? Keep in mind how a re-tweet is done. On Twhirl they have a nice easy RT button. It then spews out the word “Retweeting”, the users name, followed by their original message. The whole thing can take up 20-30 characters. So it would be best to try and keep the message to around 100 characters. Maybe 120 in extreme situations. If your message is any longer it will be impossible to re-tweet.

Now for anyone wondering what the heck a re-tweet is, it is when you resend someone else’s message. This can be done by hand or with one of the many Twitter applications that are available. The best way to do this by hand is to just type “RT” at the beginning of the original message. It is very important though to make sure you include the full user name of the account that sent the original message. This should include the @ symbol before their account name so it becomes a clickable link to their profile. People will get very upset if you don’t give them credit for being the first to post something.

So I know it is hard to keep those messages to 100 characters. As you can see from the title of this blog post it is my worst habit related to Twitter. But getting your messages re-sent by others can more than triple your power on Twitter in seconds. I also must highly recommend that you do resend other peoples messages. If you resend their stuff, you have a greater chance that they will resend your stuff. Feel free to practice by giving me some re-twits. Really I won’t mind.

http://twitter.com/MarkCarras

So I have been using Twitter for awhile and was going nuts trying to find a tool to clean things up. A big trick of spammers is to follow a ton of people to get them to follow back. Then a week or so latter unfollow the person. So then the honest people end up with a horrid ratio between followers and the accounts they are following. It is a trick to make the spammers look honest and to make the honest people look like spammers. So what do honest people do to defend themselves?

Well I hunted down a tool called SocialToo. It has many options. Some of them I strongly recommend you avoid. However the other half are very powerful and I can’t recommend them enough. When I tried this service out it worked so well that I thought it had messed up. It cleaned out more than 100 people that were not following me back. So when I looked at my numbers I thought it has made my following higher than my followers. Not sure why I only saw the last two digits of the numbers, but I made a total douche of myself and kind of freaked out over the guy who created the thing. When I saw my mistake I made my humble and embarrassing public apology. It worked so well it threw me off!

So let me be as clear as I can with this part. Stay clear of any and all auto-follow features. It will make you look spammy. However, there are two unfollow tools you can pick within the SocialToo service. One of them will cost you a one time $5 fee. After using it I would pay $5 per use. This feature will get you all cleaned up so you can start psedo-fresh. I say psedo because you will still be following everyone that is following you. Just the people that are not following you back will be removed.

Now to keep your account clean, take the guy up on his free stuff too. If someone unfollows you at any time, this will automatically unfollow them right back. These two features will keep your ratio looking very professional. If you are active on Twitter and really trying to get the most out of it this is a must have! If you have way more followers than you are following it makes people think you are important.

When you follow SocialToo creator Jesse Stay, let him know I’m thrilled to find out he is way more cool tempered than I am. Unlike me, he acts like a professional. DOH!

Important links:

• Follow SocialToo
• Follow Jesse Stay
• Sign Up for the SocialToo service
• Follow me!

The Twitter ap I just can’t find

Now I have seen Twitter aps that auto follow anyone who follows you. It also auto-unfollows anyone who isn’t following me back. There is a small problem with this. I am mostly looking to follow people who are passionate about heavy music. People who involved in some way with hard rock, metal, punk, industrial, goth, grunge, grind, or glam. If you listen to the standard (so called) “indie” rock, I don’t think we will have much to say to each other. Plus, I may want to follow accounts like CNN, but I don’t care if they follow me back.

So what I need is something that gives me an Excel looking result. Maybe with clickable links to follow or unfollow as I need. Give me the info and then let me choose what I want to do with it. I have zero interest in blind following someone. I also have very little interest in blindly unfollowing someone. I just want the info automated so I can choose what to do for myself.

Anyone know of a good way to do that? I have several hundred followers to go through so this can’t be done entirely by hand. Thanks.

So why is #followfriday on Twitter so important? How can you get the most out of it? Many use it to find people to blind follow. If I say #followfriday @darknemesis618 but don’t give you any reason, why should you care? Many will follow Keith, but will he get quality followers? Now if I said “#followfriday @DarkNemesis618 because he is a great programmer and fan of hard rock, metal, and punk.” That would mean something! That is the proper way to do a #followfriday in my opinion.

Now why go through the trouble of doing #followfriday this way? Sure the spammers just want to blindly follow anyone who will follow them back. They know that in marketing you almost always get a one percent reaction. So for them it’s just a numbers game. Your band should only want people that might be interested in your music. So if you can get the people in your network to post a #followfriday featuring your account, you get your target audience. I have said it many times before that getting the word out on your band is all about target audience. Twitter is a social thing and in most cases if you scratch peoples proverbial back, they will scratch your back in return. So pimping out other peoples account and recommending them can get them to do the same for you. Helping others in this way gets you not only more followers but more quality followers.

#followfriday is a great thing that can really help you if done right. Feel free to give me a #followFriday and if I can tell you love heavy music I will do my best to give you a #followFriday in return. That’s how it’s done. Next week I will follow up this by ranking my top 100 Twitter users. Yup, 100 #followFridays at once. Beat that!

I have noticed something about the Twitter elite. You know who I’m talking about, the people that have thousands of followers without blind following ten thousand people in a desperate attempt to be relevant? If I have only a few hundred followers why should I care that they are “only 50 followers from 3,000.” Why should I help them if I am thousands away from 3,000? Honestly no one should care. Will they help you get to that same goal? Probably not. The sad thing is though that it works! They get these lap dogs that jump as soon as they say jump. So all their little lap dogs re-tweet the message and the person gets to their next follower goal in seconds. It’s lame, but it works.

So how will this help you? Well, keep percentages in mind. If someone is 200 away from hitting 100,000 people will pay attention because it would be a small percentage of the total goal. Plus, they are sending the request out to way more people than you will be. So for example let’s say in a few weeks I get 20 followers away from hitting 400 followers. If I sent the message out to 380 people I will probably get those 20 extra followers because of their contacts. If you are at 90 followers I would send out a request to make it to 100. It will work!

Now keep in mind that this will not work as well if the goal is not a number you round up to. Keep it to goals that end in a few zeros. If I sent a Twitter message that said “I need 9 followers to reach 340 followers I might not get the impact I would if I waited until I was to at least 375 and only asking for 25. Sure I’m asking for more that way, but the goal is a rounded number. The human brain loves easy rounded numbers.

Now why should you care about how many followers you have? Well without making this article twice as long, let’s just say that when you send out a Twitter message to promote your band (or anything else) you will always get a 1% result. So for every 100 followers you will get one person responding. This is why people are trying for thousands of followers. This rule has been the same since the word marketing was invented. Email lists, clicks on a website from your visitors, paper flyers you hand out at other shows, or even midgets you hire to go door to door. Your return will always be about one percent.

I know this can sound depressing, but remember when you first tried to learn how to ride a bike, drive a car, jump into the working world, or even learn to play your first instrument? Important things take time and you will get out of Twitter what you put into it. Good luck and make sure and follow me, because I’m about to rank the top 100 Twitter users in Rock and Metal to follow up my top 50.

So what is so wrong with the 360 deal?

For those that do not know what a 360 deal is, it is the current trend in record contracts. Labels try and claim they getting enough money from record sales (which many call B.S. on). So they now con the artists into giving up a large percentage of the tour and merch money as well. Many defend the record company saying that they have to make their money somewhere, but I ask why punish the artists? TechCrunch has some ideas on why the labels have no problem with this.

There is also something that I don’t think the industry has thought out. Artist development. For several decades at least artists have not made a penny on their cd’s. When the R.I.A.A. talks about protecting artists they really mean protecting the bottom line of the record companies. You know those big “advancements” bands brag about when they sign a contract? That and every penny the label spends on a band is a loan the band has to pay back. Without going into too many details (and having this article grow to a few thousand words), that loan is paid back by the band’s percentage. So if the band gets 10%, the label of course keeps 90%. The loan is paid back with the band’s 10% and they don’t see a penny until that loan is paid off. This normally takes decades at best. Most band’s never pay it off and then never get paid anything for their own music. The label takes 100% of the money a great majority of the time.

So how does the band get from town to town? How do they pay their rent and feed their family’s? Well, for just as many decades bands have survived from the money they make from touring and merch sales. You always wondered why Kiss has so much merch? Greed may be part of why it happens now, but I am willing to bet it was just Gene’s sense of survival in the lean years. So now that the labels are taking a chunk of that crucial survival money, bands will not have a chance to grow. Unless a band becomes a major hit overnight they won’t be able to survive those first few years. Most of your favorite bands toured for years with several albums behind them before they multi-platinum cd. They had a chance to fine tune their sound through a few years on the road. That won’t happen now because the 360 deal has killed off artist development.

So now bands will be more desperate to become a hit too early. This means more auto-tune, more pro-tools, and less true passion in our music. Music is going to get more sterilized, homogenized, and pasteurized so that there is nothing raw about it. Forget about meat and potatoes rock and roll, because the 360 deal is here and all personality will now be removed from all new artists.

In short, if your band signs a 360 deal you are part of the problem. You also suffer from something called Stockholm syndrome. You might want to get that checked.

Ok, so many of you know that I am the editor and founder of RockMyMonkey.com. 99% of the news is posted by myself. So I go through the press releases and try to make something out of them. Most of the time they are a total mess and need to be cleaned up. There are a few things that the press agents do that annoy me to no end. Here is the top ten list of things that piss me off about press releases.

10. Don’t send me some fancy looking html document as a press release.

Do you want to me to post a link or put your info into my site? Why do they do this? Sure it looks pretty, but I have to work like hell to try and copy that info into my CMS and not make it look like crap. Keep it simple stupid! Plain text emails rule and make my life more easy. If you are a pain in the ass I am less likey to post your info. I will also be less excited about your band because you put me in a bad mood with your unnecessary HTML email.

In short, keep in mind what you want me to do with this info. Make that task easy.

9. Enough about how great the band is…just tell people what they sounds like.

The more adjectives you use to describe how great your artist is, the more desperate and pathetic you come off as. Just today I had a press agent describe an artist as ridiculous. All I could think of was the Family Guy episode where they did a parody of Pee Wee Herman. Just cut to the chase and tell people what they sound like. I had someone say the artist was the range of Mariah Carey with the attitude of Billie Joe from Green Day” and the songwriting skills of Jack White from The White Stripes. I have no clue what the artist sounds like. From that it could be anything from emo, goth, industrial, traditional metal, folk, or pop punk. So by this time I’m just annoyed and don’t care about the artist at all and will do nothing to support them at all. Just cut the BS and tell people what the artist sounds like.

8. Don’t try and help me by doing the HTML code for me
My CMS does this automatically for one. Second, never once has the code sent to me been correct. You are a press agent, not an HTML code monkey. You suck at doing html because that is not your job. So stop trying. Just send plain text and let me change what I need to from there. Using fancy software to create your press releases doesn’t make them better. it makes them less efficient.

7. Don’t over do it with the links.
I get press releases with no clear end in sight. It is just endless links to iTunes, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, images, direct links to items on the labels store, direct links to songs on MySpace, and it just goes on and on. It’s so full of links it’s not clear what the actual message is that you are trying to get across. What if you just link to the band’s website and have them put all those links in? You ever think about that? Didn’t they teach you in school that you need to be short and to the point? Too many words and people don’t even read what you had me post. You waste my time, your time, and my readers time. If the website address is longer than 50 characters don’t put it in a press release!

6. For Immediate Release to start it and Three pounds to end it!
Ok, I know that is cheesy as hell and everyone does it, but it is called a standard. It let’s me know where the press release starts. Standards save everyone time. For those that don’t know what this is, it is how you start a press release. This goes at the very top. Don’t do any variations on this or you will look like a douchebag.

Do you know what a pound sign is? Put three of them where you want the end of the news piece to be. This saves everyone time and keeps me from posting information you don’t want out to the general public.

5. Pick a headline and stick with it!
Many of the press releases have 5 – 10 headlines to them. Pick the most important one and just use that. Now if I do get one headline it is either just the name of the band and the name of the cd or it’s this entire paragraph. If I’m lucky it’s just a really long run on sentence. I didn’t go to college and I know that is bad form! There is a balance between to much info and not enough. Have one point you want to get across and keep to it. Don’t loose focus by trying to sneak in something else. “Details on the new Bloody Eyeballs cd announced” is fine. You don’t need to add in the record company name, the bands they will be touring with, & the sponsor of the bassists colostomy bag. It’s just a headline. Not the entire article!

4. YOUR HEADLINE SHOULDN’T BE IN ALL CAPS YOU DOUCHEBAG!
Why do so many press agents send press releases with headlines in all caps? You force us to do things like automatically change all headlines to Title Case. Which of course makes a rare posting (acronyms for example) look kind of silly, but that it’s better than having a majority of them be unreadable. Most people on the internet have had their eyes trained to just skip over anything done in all caps. It’s hard on the eyes and is considered screaming on the internet. It is very bad form, but yet is done by some very high profile press agents in the music industry.

3. If you link to a YouTube video make sure we can embed it!
I have had press agents send the code to embed a YouTube video, but when you post the video as requested you find out the label has blocked it from being embedded. Remember that labels tell YouTube not to allow people to embed their videos because the last thing they want is for that video they spent thousands of dollars on to be seen by people. So before you send that YouTube embed code, make sure the label isn’t so retarded that they don’t allow videos to be embedded. Yes, labels are retarded. Accept that fact and you will survive.

2. Don’t tell me to hype someone else’s website!
Ok, to be honest I wouldn’t mind it if you want me to help promote an interview done on another website, but I now ignore press releases like this because press agents only pick a small handful of websites to do this with. Be fair and make sure everyone gets this treatment or most of us will just hit the delete button. Sure Blabbermouth is a news source everyone knows about and respects, but to send your press release with Blabbermouth as a source is just unprofessional. You send the press release so we can all be the source or why should we post it?

1. Remember that you can’t polish a turd.
If you try too hard you come off as fake. On the rare time I am forced to read the tripe that is most press releases, they are very lacking on actual info and full of forced “coolness”. Remember that nerd in high school that would try so hard to be cool that he came off as less cool than if he would have just shut the hell up? That is how most press releases sound. Stop trying to be cool, stop trying to be cute, and stop trying to show how cutting edge you are. You are not cool. You are a press agent and your job is to give info about the band. If the band is cool then your press release will be too. When you try too hard it actually makes people dismiss your band quicker. So stop trying to convince us that it will “rip our face off” and let the music do the talking!

Ok, I know I came off as pretty harsh here. Most of the press agents I deal with are pretty cool people. But they are in a dying industry that just doesn’t get it. There is a reason the industry is dying so quickly and what I wrote above might give you a few hints as to why. The industry doesn’t get it! I have had promos sent to me that came with the XCD rootkit. They did this on purpose even after Sony had to pay out for all those lawsuits! Another contact has to fight with her home office because they don’t do business with websites. As major print media outlets are dying, these people refuse to work with online publications! The music industry is killing itself with it’s own arrogance and stupidity. I’m just trying to help.

How The Watchmen can help you with your band

So I just watched The Watchmen last night. Overall I would say it was the best movie I had paid to see in a theater in a long time. There was however one thing that really got in the way of my enjoyment of this film. There is one thing that might keep me from buying the DVD of it when it comes out. There seemed to be an overload of blue Smurf penis!

It’s all about target audience. Now I know I have talked about target audience before, but I figured this controversy over the big blue Smurf penis was a great opportunity to not only bring it up again, but also maybe give people more perspective. So when you decide on a musical style, look, or artwork you have to keep your overall fanbase in mind. What if Gwar put out a cd with no talk of any sex, violence, drugs, or sacrilege? What if Manowar put out a cd about giving people hugs and smelling flowers? What if Nickleback didn’t water everything down to the point where it had no taste? Their fans would be not only disappointed, but they would be probably be pretty pissed off too.

The Watchmen did a smart thing when they didn’t hold back on the sex and violence. There is a major lack of comic book inspired movies for adults. Hollywood always softens thing up so they can get all ages in, then no one cares and they think they have proof that these kinds of movies don’t work. Because the movie is so harsh it is going to attract a very passionate group of fans that will be buying this movie over and over again for decades. However, it is going to cost them a few DVD sales because most guys don’t want to watch a big blue schlong for three hours. I don’t care if the original comic book had that or not. I’m pretty sure the people turned off by the big blue penis greatly out numbers the people that would be turned on by it.

Now of course some may say that you should always push the boundaries and bring things to levels they have never been before, but most bands can’t pull that off. The ones that can still only end up getting a few thousand fans at best. GG Allin never headlined any major club tours. Sure if your band is happy playing to half filled clubs with the capacity of 250 then go for it. This blog is not for you. This is for the bands that want to take it to the next level. Is it about getting your music out to as many people as possible? Then you need to balance the priorities. Stop and think if that soft sappy love ballad is something your fans would despise or love. For most of the bands that would be reading this, a love ballad would be career suicide. It would be like putting a big blue cock all over a movie that would have otherwise kicked more ass than 99% of the movies Hollywood releases now.

My little tribute to Rorschach: