4 ‘Normal’ Challenges to Building a Strong Online Brand

The key to establishing yourself online and within your niche, is building a strong brand. Unfortunately this is far easier said than done. The process of designing, building and nurturing a new brand means you have established:

• A unique voice
• Consistent compelling content
• A trustworthy reputation

The problem for most comes down to the simple fact that there is no single path to achieving any one of these things. And yet, you need to achieve them all in order for your brand to blossom.

Click to read more ...

Maximizing Your Engagement - Dillon Francis Case Study [Infographic]

For the past six weeks we’ve been busy keeping tabs on 20 different Fan Pages from different bands and brands. Through this research, we hoped to find out what drives strong and long-term engagement and why it does so.  We’re still crunching all the numbers and putting together all our fancy graphs, but our fantastic intern, Katie Kernoodle, put together a case study of the most impressive artist in our study. As a teaser, we’re giving you this infographic and a break down from Katie as to why this artist was better than all the rest. Enjoy!

Click to read more ...

Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites - GigFunder

Fan funding: it is the saving grace for the broke independent band. Where before bands couldn’t consider studio time or hiring promotional companies to support their release, with a little hard work, some social media love, and good old fashioned word of mouth spread, bands can raise the cash they need to fund their dream projects. With the big four players fairly entrenched in the field (PledgeMusic, Rockethub, KickStarter and Indie GoGo), it’s hard to imagine a new player coming into play. However, GigFunder has found a unique need to fill in the fan funding world.

Click to read more ...

Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Facebook's Timeline

It’s a big day today, folks, and the office is all a buzz about the exciting new Facebook developments. What Facebook developments, you ask? What!? You haven’t heard??? Timeline has arrived in full force and is now available for brands! Timeline has been received with resistance by some users (but what Facebook update isn’t?), so this may not be music to everyone’s ears. But as far as bands and brands are concerned, this is a powerful move. I tend ramble on a lot at the beginning of these posts, but I’m pretty excited about Timeline, so I’m jumping right in here.

Click to read more ...

Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Crowdbooster

Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’ll be going over analytics. Too few artists actually pay attention to their social media analytics. Some just don’t know analytics for social media exist, some don’t know where to find them and some don’t think it’s important. It’s time to remedy all of this here and now. Crowdbooster recently launched the public version of their site (it had been in private beta for a while), and they join a legion of other social media analytics solutions available to musicians. I choose Crowdbooster to write about due to it’s ease of use and affordability (how’s free?). Crowdbooster provides straight ahead, no nonsense analytics in an easily digestible format.

Click to read more ...

On Being An Entrepreneur - Ariel Hyatt Interviews Andy Bernstein Founder of HeadCount

Last week I went to Nashville to guest lecture at my Cyber PR® Course at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU).  The class has 18 amazing students in it.  17 of them are certain they want to create careers in the Music Industry.  I believe that they can.  I told them hat the best way to do this is to follow the path of the entrepreneur and not the path of the CEO. They shared with me their visions for their own futures and I will be posting much more about them here in the coming weeks. This is the 4th installment on entrepreneurial leaders in the music business for Music Industry and Music Business students, so that they can begin to follow their paths and look to them for inspiration.  This weeks inspiration comes from a man who inspires me deeply.  Why?  Because of him and his vision (which was born out of just one frustrating political conversation) there are now 175,000 new registered voters and a network of 8,000 volunteers working to make a difference for the future of our country. Please meet Andy Bernstein who like so many of us started as a fan…

Click to read more ...

The Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites Featuring BandsinTown

We test a lot of Apps and tools and look at a lot of websites. On behalf of our artists and me and the Cyber PR team are going to start featuring them here at MTT. I’m thrilled to introduce you to Jason Loomis. Jason has worked at Ariel Publicity for a year this week, first as an intern, then as my assistant and now as our Director of New Media Maker Relations. Enjoy this first installment of The Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites

Click to read more ...

The Indie Maximum 100 Goes To Texas ...Industry Experts & Musicians Dish Out Their Best SXSW Tips

As a follow up to last week’s The SXSW Survival Guide, I’ve decided to take some of the best tips from some of the experts of today’s music industry and provide them for you here! I took the time to talk to some of the contributors from our 2009 Indie Maximum Exposure list to see what they had to say.

Over the next several days, I will be posting all-new tips that you can use to maximize your South by Southwest experience.

Click to read more ...

Social Media & Online Marketing For Musicians - 10 Questions For an Expert in the Trenches

I am just back from SXSW Music and I was sad that I missed the Interactive portion of this years SXSW which from what I could follow online was amazing… I spoke on a great panel called Social Networks for the Anti-Social which was wonderful and I’ll write more about it soon but there was one person who in my humble opinion should of been on that panel with us… Cory Denis. Cory was busy speaking on her own panel Rawking SXSW Year Round: Staying Inspired

Cory Denis is a woman I admire deeply. She and I have an interesting history. She worked at What Are Records? the label I started out at. But she arrived after I had already left, so we never actually had the pleasure of working together during the time. Cory is nothing short of a genius at marketing bands and artists.

She is brilliant because she thinks about both sides of the fence from the both the artists and the fans perspective.

I’m thrilled that she was willing to be interviewed for this piece.

Social Media & Online Marketing For Musicians 10 Questions For Cory Denis

Click to read more ...