Incentivizing fans to take specific steps & actions is a key part of any business, after all we all need to make money. Social media channels now give anyone the power to really dig in & see what their fans are doing, without creating unnecessary social spam.

We’ve worked with bands, labels & management companies over the past three years to run a whole range of campaigns. Based on our experience the most effective and least spammy way to interact with fans is through key social network messaging, and one of least effective can be a “task-based campaign.”

Mission or task-based campaigns usually sit on a stand alone page and show everything the fan needs to do to win the big prize.…

Endless Flowers has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just gotten around to listening to it in the last week or so. The main reason for my delay is that it isn’t streaming on Rdio in my country (New Zealand). It’s interesting how this factor really influences my listening habits these days – if it’s not available for streaming, I am a lot less likely to give it a spin. It seems so silly in 2012 that regional restrictions are still applied to a fully digital medium – why would you not want every possible person listening to your music?…

 I can’t tell you how often I hear from a band, label or management company they want to:

• sell more albums
• sell more tickets
• get more listens on Spotify

Of course they do. This is what any business needs to survive, money in the door.

The only problem is these goals are what Paul Adams calls “heavy-weight interactions,” and they can’t live in isolation.

Imagine you’re in a record store and you notice a buyer picking up your LP and flipping it over to read the back.…

So much happens every day in the sea of social media. This is great for research, trend watching and keeping in touch. But reaching your fans is getting harder every day.

Your Facebook wall posts and tweets are messages in bottle that you toss out to sea. You cross your fingers and hope most of your fans are going to see it.

In fact that message bobs around, gets read by a few fans and eventually sinks to the ocean floor.…

In this age of electronic bombardment I sometimes feel like no one is listening. You put stuff out into the aether and nothing comes back…

When we first started to write we drew symbols in caves, developed petroglyphs and eventually created an alphabet. Each step allowed us to communicate further and with more accuracy. We were being heard – NEIGH!

I used to be a letter writer in my teens. It was the only way I could keep in touch with my oldest friend in Brisbane, Australia.…