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.…

Just like the mighty Soviet navy we’ve launched new tech to help you focus on the fans that matter. We’ve called it a PING.

Each week we’ll notify you when a fan has been highly active

We send you an email showing who these fans are and how many points they’ve earnt over the last two weeks. You can use the links in the email to communicate directly with these fans.

Your fan message page filters to your very active fans & lets you communicate via Facebook, Twitter or Email

You use our page to tell your fans via email, Twitter or Facebook:

• thanks!

…

Our two big winners of the Fan Drive are Wellington & Archie.

They’ve both won a 6-month free plan on MusicHype, plus they get to give two of their lucky fans a year-long subscription to Rdio, Spotify or Deezer.

And don’t worry we’ll be having another fan drive later on this year.

 …

 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.…

I sat down with Wick-It the Instigator for a two part interview on the importance of fans. Without fans…….there is nothing!

Update: Below, I sang the praises of Ben Folds and his band mates touting their fans, first, for the announcement of a new Ben Folds Five album. The following week I was more than delighted to see that Ben launched a Pledge Music campaign. The campaign launched just over a week ago and has already generated 4,146 pledges, exceeding the bands expectations and pledge goals by 206 percent. What’s interesting is that Ben Folds has 522,000 likes on Facebook and 486,000 followers and Twitter. His blended social equity puts him in the neighborhood of 500k, not bad.…

There has been a lot of discussion lately about measuring influence online, and influence scores from services like Klout, PeerIndex and others.

One recent book, Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing (Zowee, what a title!) provides details on how influence may be leveraged effectively by marketers, “this eye-opening, action-ready guide shows you how to reach the superconnectors who ignite epidemics through word-of-mouth influence . . . and become one yourself”

But many others are questioning what these influence scores mean, and argue that they: actually measure popularity, rather than influence; have murky algorithms; and often lack proper context.…

Our CEO Kevin turned us onto Gary Vanynerchuk’s latest book, The Thank You Economy. He told us how the book fired him up & ultimately lead him to our company. It helped him figure out the kind of culture he wanted to be a part of. That inspired me to read it.

Part 1 “Welcome to the Thank You Economy” covers why you should care about social media & how we’ve circled right back to mom & pop principals. With the birth of social media we have the ability to talk to everyone, just like a customer who’s walked into your brick & mortar store.…