Promoting a Band...Promoting a Brand: The Lessons Are Often Quite Similar

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Back at MIT, my Master’s degree was from a program called Comparative Media Studies.  In short, the philosophy of our program is that one of the best ways of understanding technological and social changes in the media industries is to take a cross-media approach.

As one of my graduate student mentors, William Uricchio, often says, those looking to understand developments online and in mobile today need only look at how television was envisioned as a medium (as his latest work does) or how the cinema screen was originally conceived (as one of my undergraduate mentors at Western Kentucky University, Ted Hovet, is currently researching).

This point was reinforced for me recently as I was reading a blog post from MIT Convergence Culture Consortium Consulting Researcher Nancy Baym, who is a professor at the University of Kansas.

Nancy provides a list of what she considers the 10 best practices of online music promotion.  (Her most recent work focuses on "bandom," looking at how online tools are being used for bands to promote themselves and for to develop fan communities for musical acts.)

While Nancy targets her list at bands in particular, it becomes quickly apparent from a "comparative" approach that her advice is pretty sound across the media industries.  She suggests bands get their "products" online, distribute their presence across multiple sites and integrate those various sites of connection with potential listeners, get to know their most influential audience members, and so on.

Sounds like a message applicable to not only developing creators in other fields but also public relations professionals, marketers, and others looking to build a brand or promote a product.  As Joe advised recently here on the PepperDigital blog, Nancy warns indie bands to "reach out but don't spam" and to give fans access to promotional tools.

As I wrote in my post last week, when a company (or band) wants to become a brand, it requires turning over part of that brand identity to others.  It's inevitable.  If a message is going to find an audience, the message has to be turned over to them, to spread in their own ways--and often in terms the sender wouldn't have chosen or imagined, if he or she had complete control.

But complete control means no audience.  A message that doesn't spread might have sentimental value, but it has little value as a commodity or as a gift.  That is as true for corporate communications as it is for indie bands.

Nancy writes:

Spreadable is the new viral. People who love you want to tell others about you. Create widgets they can embed on their own pages (again, ReverbNation has a great one but it’s not the only one), create ecards for your music, give them mp3s they can post without fear of lawsuits. Whatever it is that you want others to know, give it to your audience in a form they can easily pass along to others.

Her list is worth a full read for anyone who works in promoting a brand (which is all of us, in one way or another)...

By the way, thanks to C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf of Harvard's Berkman Center, both for her ideas on looking at bands as brands, as well as the clever play on words...

Comments

[csven]

Just posted to twitter the coincidence between our recent exchange, the previous twitter comment of mine regarding 16Volt (an old favorite of mine), and this post. Just so happens I'll be watching 16Volt to see how well they manage. Fingers crossed.

[Sam Ford]

I went to check out your Twitter reference to 16Volt and saw the YouTube updates. Several bands seem to be switching to using video sharing sites to give vlog-like updates to their fans, so I think the key is only do it if you're going to engage your audience in the way they want to be engaged. Just curious, if you stop back by the post, as to whether you feel they're speaking authentically and effectively to you, as a longtime fan of theirs...