In these times where peer to peer networking and community sites have become bewildering in their sheer numbers, you may well be on the point of returning to your computing shell and simply running out of computing time trying to keep up, lets talk about ways of organising that time and maximising the effort.
In these days of widgets and apps it is possible to organise your publicity work so that it is easy to maintain any number of ning and other social network sites with minimal keyboard time.
Ning is the coming thing for sure and communities like this are sprouting all over the music scene, many of these the independently minded musician will feel they should have some sort of representation on and really feel an affinity with and want to help, I have started a ning community for House Conters here www.houseconcert.eu and have added others from the drop down links menue. Here are some tips that might help, please share any other tips you have found that may help us all keep our internet jugglers act together Ive opened a forum discussion on this subject at our home site group to.
Its a good idea to get into a rhythm when setting up these sites,
use the same theme,
then you can cut and paste the same text into your text space,
If you don’t want to post music to a site, take the player from your house concert site share link and post it on any of the other pages, then you only have to keep that one up dated.
I do suggest you do post music to sites your particularly interested in interacting with because people can then post your music to their page and as their network grows they will also introduce your music to their circle of friends.
Some sites don’t allow music, you can bypass that with this technique.
Keep one blog updated (usually MySpace is the popular one) and add that rss feed as news to your rss feed aplication on all your nings,
use plenty of graphics and links on this blog and that appears on your page, looks great and updates every ning site with your information automatically.
For videos cut and paste from youtube is best, incidentally you can use www.reverbnation.com to post your music to your face book (and Bebo) site or to help set up a face book account, (their fan reach and venue find is way in advance of of all others and they split advertising revenue with you)
Face Book is important, its like The Masons for the modern media that site and people who might never return an email will interact on Face Book, strange as it may seem, many hi profile people lurk on Face Book and never post a page but do keep up with what’s happening in area’s of interest.
Get into the habit of posting your events somewhere (preferably set it up here, with links and graphics then you can cut and paste them easily across your ning network ) and the odd blog but always post them to your face book profile from the invite tab on ning you can bulletin and blog (even post to your) space, as well as twitter and any amount of other sites from that interface. As well as your ning friends (and mailing lists) that you collect on any of these sites , so always use the same ning log in and password that is important, if only for your sanity.
Ive got 15 of these sites working away for The Radio Show in a plate spinning sort of way, one or two I keep a close eye on. I visit the rest at least once a week and accept adds and return correspondence while I’m there, one trick is to always add something a blog/event/video an event. Or just a photo is enough to keep you in the minds eye on most of these less busy sites, join at least one discussion helps to and is an interesting way to get a feel for the people behind and within these communities, you’ll find most people are right on in their reasons for offering the service and taking part in its aims and well worth getting to know and support where you can.
There really is some great work being done out there in the name of Music and Community, Ide interested in your findings and thoughts to please discuss.
Rob Ellen
