LinkedIn

If LinkedIn isn’t fun, why should my band care?

Friday, January 30th, 2009
by Mark Carras

Now I was going to blog about HeavyAsHell for today’s update, but I think it would be more important to make that post on Monday. So you will all just have to wait. Instead I am going to blog about the site LinkedIn. Now many of you may not know about LinkedIn because it’s not one of the hot and trendy social websites. This is not the new cool place for kids to hang out. This is the business social network. Now for the longest time I didn’t really care about this site. Then I discovered they had forums they called “Groups”. I started looking around and found several music industry “groups”. I joined the two that I thought fit me the best. Now I am networking with all levels of music industry types.

With all the other social networks I have talked about in the past two weeks it was about finding more fans. This one is about finding contacts. You might want to give this job to the member of the band that is always way too serious and really has a business mentality (probably the one reading this article). You might as well just accept everyone that wants to be on your contact list for this site. One person may know another person, that may know the guy that gets you on a really amazing tour. So this site is all about that other type of networking bands need to do.

Don’t just beg for help “getting a record deal” though. There are tons of people doing that and they almost never get anyone of value. That is not the way to do it. Posting new topics should be about ten percent of what you do on this site. It should mostly be about replies. Be very picky about when you plug your stuff. Otherwise you will be dismissed as a spammer. Instead ask questions, give your viewpoint on a debate, offer info someone else needs. Then when you do plug your stuff in that ten percent of activity people will pay more attention.

It may not be as fun as playing with the millions of time waster type apps on Facebook, but this will do your band 100 times more good. Why waste time anyways. Screw Facebook I say!

Why Ping.fm can be the most powerful tool a band has

Thursday, January 29th, 2009
by Mark Carras

Why Ping.fm can be the most powerful tool a band has

Ok, this is where things get very powerful. Imagine you are busy as hell, but have time to send a quick text message while in the bathroom. With this one text message you update your band’s profile pages at 32 of the hottest social networking sites. No joke! With this service you can update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, LinkedIn, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Blogger, Identi.ca, Friendster, Delicious, BrightKite, Yahoo 360, Plaxo Pulse, Koornk, Live Journal, Diigo, Bebo, YouAre, Hi5, Multiply, Mashable, Yammer, Kwippy, Flickr, Xanga, Utterli, WordPress.com, Imeem, Rejaw, & Seesmic with nothing but a simple text message. Now it may be a pain to get it all set up, but after you do that you don’t even have to log in. Do I have your interest?

Now Ping does have a nice mobile version you can use, a simple full scale online version, and I think some freaky email version. I have never tried the email version though. Why bother when I can do it with a text message? Of course most will not want to sign up to all those networks, but if you are a band that wants to network with as many fans worldwide as possible I would. Imagine if each one of these sites got you a few sales of your cd a day? Not saying that will happen…you might suck. I’m just giving you something to think about.

Although you don’t have to sign in to Ping ever again, I would do that at least once a month just to make sure everything is working the way it should. I would also check a couple of these sites a day to make sure they are getting your updates. You might also want to log in to all these sites just to accept “friend” requests, answer messages, and make sure the account is doing what it should. Check 5 of them a week and you should be fine. I really wouldn’t do more than that. You have music to create after all.

Now I know that most of my articles are longer than this, but why say more? That is the beauty of Ping.fm is that it is simple. If you have any questions please feel free to ask me through Twitter, Plurk, or better yet the comments below.