I read this article and thought I would help get it out there. This explains the importance of a web presence and how to actually navigate in www dot land. Pay up nerds…..

Courtesy of PMPWorldwide

For any music business entrepreneur the dilemma of monetizing a company’s entertainment content online becomes more intense on an almost daily basis. The ever expanding sea of content on the internet is constantly being filled by, in many cases, the same people that you’re trying to entice to consume your content (product). By now were all aware that there are many popular websites catering to people’s desire to shout out loud “LOOK at ME… LISTEN to MY music”, all the while the typical web user has become more a consumer of processes than product. The irony is that these are the very processes that the modern era music business entity has to master and coordinate in order to filter out their target audience, determine how these folk interface with media and understand what types of entertainment they desire to consume (monetarily).

When you utilize different websites to conduct business are you setting forth a series of tasks that you want to accomplish through each site, or do you try to accomplish every task you need to complete on every site you’re working? The fact is that some sites can be more effective tools for promoting video while other sites are designed primarily with a listening experience in mind, but there are very few websites that are all things to all people. Knowing which online platform corresponds best to which task you need to complete is becoming increasingly important on the wild internet frontier and learning how to manage these diverse tasks can help you chisel your business efforts into a viable online operation. Let’s look at an example of how an Indy project release might use a task-related diversity approach to growing a target audience:

A 23 year old session singer from the Midwest US just finished uploading a video blog about her latest song which was written, arranged and performed in collaboration with her sister and produced by an up and coming producer from Japan she had found on line. On her group’s Youtube page there are 2500 subscribers who hit an embedded link to the new song and are instantly redirected to her Imeem playlist, there they can hear a 1:45 sec snippet of the new work as well as additional songs that the visitor might not be familiar with. At the same time a bulletin goes out to all of the group’s Myspace and Facebook friends and now 50,000 people from 8 different countries know about the new song and are directed via link to CD baby and Itunes to download the complete version of the song.

Next up for the group is to increase their brand presence on Last.FM, their goal is to have one of their songs played more than 30,000 times in a week so that they can chart on the “Top Artists for the Week” list. To pull this off the sisters know that they have to grow their target audience by another 5 to ten thousand people that are interested in their music. Once again as part of the plan to expand on their online influence they’ve set their eyes on a producer from outside their home country with a solid internet following to provide the track and collaborate on an internet based cross-promotions campaign. Their goal is to introduce their sound to a few thousand new potential fans that already support this producer’s exploits. This time the full link to their newest song will redirect their supporters to Last.Fm and a full compilation of their work will be available via Amazon.com and Itunes, along with a podcast of a recent performance.

This approach, which is not particularly difficult to carry out, enabled these artists to expand their online influence in a way that begins to identify potential members of a target audience. By fine tuning your business’ use of social networking sites it’s still possible direct potential fans away from their social networking comfort zone (where they’re just as important as you) to an interconnected world managed by your company. Sites like IMEEM, YouTube, Myspace and Facebook make it easy to encourage feedback from your potential audience, and they also make it possible for you to maintain numerous relationships that are beneficial to your brand. However, as I mentioned earlier, due to subtle differences in their functionality designs they each have a different type of effect on user experience.
Most social network style websites incorporate a strong content discovery component that entices those wanting to promote any and everything under the sun to go on pseudo-spamming campaigns in an attempt to build awareness for their content. When you take the time to develop a diverse task oriented strategy that utilizes the appropriate website for the job it’s best suited, you can bet that there will be a noticeable effect on the project that you’re working. If you can grow an awareness of your product across various online communities, while retaining control over what content is accessed and how, sustaining a cohesive project shouldn’t be much of a logistical problem for you.
Another task that can be accomplished in a diverse internet environment is the growth of an artist or group’s international accessibility. By using the work of producers from potential markets outside of the US to build an awareness of their project the group in this example has effectively expanded their circle of influence on the net. If producer x from the UK is willing to promote your work to their audience then you have, by default, grown the acceptance of your product beyond your normal sphere of influence. If you’re skilled at maintaining relationships the internet is the perfect tool to reach international audiences and expand your existing markets. Involving outside entities in the development of your product is one of the most effective forms of viral marketing and, at the end of the day, maintaining a diverse task oriented approach to marketing /promoting on line with the help of other business entities can reduce the one-off transactions (thanks for the add homie, check the new songs on my page!!!) that are so prevalent on social networking sites.

As the entertainment industry advances toward the age of the niche target audience we may soon see the day that knowing how to diversify project related tasks across numerous online destinations will become an essential element of any effective online campaign. If you’re able to successfully interconnect the various web based applications, whether via giant social networking sites or smaller special interest destinations, you’ll have a heads up on the operating tactics that will surely be needed to effectively function in the entertainment business of the future. With portability technologies continuing to boom, enormous sites Such as Myspace and Facebook will become more and more like an interchangeable commodity. Enhancements in RSS reader and instant messenger technology may someday rewrite the concept of “friend” from someone who asks permission to be added to an online digital photo album to someone that has direct access to data files protected by an electronic privacy permission statement in your company’s online address book.