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How To Guide: Creating A Digital Footprint (Internet Strategy)
Written by Richmond - Hunter
The is part of our series around our Digital Strategy – this covers how to create a Digital Footprint.
Phase 1:
Getting yourself known via the internet is a fairly new yet well-trodden path. So, to start with it is probably best to look at how other artists have done and their internet strategy, lets start with the obvious one: “Ok Go”
Artist: Ok Go
This is easily the most widely known “internet star”.
What made them a hit to begin with was with the music video to “A million ways”:
This is a prime example of a cheap yet effective music video. Getting known is all about having that one creative and innovative video hit (something that we’re still working on). The good thing about the internet is that if you have something creative, chances are it will be seen.
Their fanbase remains strong to this day for a number of reasons:
On Youtube they only have 39 videos uploaded, which isn’t terribly big but an over-60,000,000 total views of all their videos. Besides releasing regular fun music videos, such as the famous “Treadmill” one, they also have a number of behind-the-scenes featurettes.
This is a common theme in many online bands. Abubilla Music would certainly benefit from having some form of behind the scenes feauturette, a weekly video talking about all that is new with the band, essentially a video version of the newsletter. Once Abubilla Music has a large number of subscribers on youtube, vlogs will certainly get more attention than the newsletter. Thanks to the youtube “annotation” feature, links can be put into the videos themselves.
This is an interview style, behind the scenes video, it is very important to film these along side the making of any new music video.
Vlogs are another key example of youtube video, but I’ll come back to those later
Actual website:
Their own website is fairly similar to Abubilla Music’s. One nice thing that they do regularly is some sort of competition which the fans can become involved with. For example they filmed one music video entirely from one shot in front of a green screen, and asked fans to remix the video.
This generated a fair amount of interest.
As Abubilla Music begins to release more and more videos, it is important to make them all readily available from the homepage, as OkGo have done. Even with the one video out at the moment it should be readily available from the homepage.
There really is not a great deal you can do with a facebook. As long as you maintain daily status updates, a good set of photos and links to all the videos it should be fine. You can also use something called iLike, to embed music into the facebook page
So there you have all the general need to know stuff about “Ok Go”, now onto a very different type of band. “Alex Days” and “Chameleon Circuit” are bands which were formed by vloggers on youtube. The power of the vlog is extraordinary. they are relatively big and doing fairly well, especially considering the fact that they’re not connected to a major label, oh and that “Chamleon Circuit” is a novelty band which sings songs about Doctor Who.
So this brings me onto what really should be a mjor part of the future of Abubilla, vlogging. A vlogger like “sxephil” gets around 1,000,000 views a day. It is definitely a good idea to have a daily/weekly vlog, essentially a video version of the sort of thing you’re reading right now.
If Abubilla Music wants to do something similar it is important to have some sort of ‘face’ to the band, who would be willing to create a talk-to-webcam style video a few times a week, in which they talk about life and the band etc. To give you a taste of what the vlogs are like I’ll link some over. Do not underestimate how much this will help your fanbase.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81e92_FOl7U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtGBE3StNSc&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/charlieissocoollike#p/u/3/O5ZwnmJgC-g
Now I am going to talk about something very different, “Dead Weather”, Jack White’s new bad. Dead Weather is a band which shows you what can be done with a youtube account . As you can see the account is like a website embeded into youtube. Youtube now allows you to completely change the entire aesthetic of one of your accounts. It is plastered with links of where to buy the songs. The band should not be used as an example of how to become big, as they are at an unfair advantage by having jack white in the band. This is an example of intergrating different internent mediums done right.
Another band worth noting in “The Bastard Fairies”.
The Bastard Fairies is a good example of a band which became internationally famous because of a video they made not related to their music at all.
This video of a young girl talking about her liberal views got the attention of Fox News, and from that the band has been rather successful online.
This is an example of how you can become well known without even doing something related to the music. So any funny video idea or anthing that anyone comes up with, it would be a good idea to link it to the band.
Another artist who has used youtube extremely well is the rapper “Charlie Sloth“. He was becoming frustrated with not being found so he took youtube marketing into his own hands. With self promotion on music forums as well he is now recodring with Dominic Owen, who has recorded with such greeates as Notorious B.I.G. His videos are very simple but very inventive. Many consist of him walking towards the camera, but in very creative ways. Simple video effects like this mixed with genuine talent is very effective.
Another key element of being found online, is to get your stuff known and reviewed.
Having your music reviewed could really help to give you credibility
If you want a broad sense of artists out there, this site is very good
This site offers album reviews to anyone, and it would be a good idea to ask them to give you one. Scrolling through the bands which have been reviewed should make you fairly confident, there are lots of crap music websites outt here.
This site also offers professional reviews, so if you’re feeling confident, send the album off, :
Here are some other good reviewers:
http://www.musesmuse.com/musicreviews.html
http://www.songoftheyear.com/critiques.htm
So there it is, a bit of advice for phase 1 of creating a credible digital strategy.