Face-to-Facebook

Javier Dunn

The problem is pretty clear-cut:  local bands don't have a "machine" behind them to do their marketing; yet they need that sophisticated marketing to get the fans... that get the attention of the record labels who run the promotion "machine." If that paradox isn't enough, musicians are often on tour or hold down 40+ hour/week jobs (or both), so they're always tired… and usually a little skairt of the internet, an important promotion vehicle.  Complicating matters even more, the number of available online promotion tools is expanding nearly daily; it's hard to know which one is best for each musician.  

Facebook is becoming the favorite social networking site for many local (and national) bands, so it was a logical choice to explore in the second of our series on Internet Promotion. Examiner.com interviewed one of the faces of Facebook, Meredith Chin (Manager, Corporate Communications), who brought along a West Coast singer-songwriter, Javier Dunn. Javier came to Meredith's attention as an example of a local, unsigned musician who 'Facebooked' with great success.

Javier Dunn: Internet promotion is a tricky thing; it can be helpful, but also hurtful to a musician.  Helpful in all the obvious ways of giving an indie artist exposure and a platform to be heard, but I also know a lot of musicians who spend entirely too much time working on their web presence, and not their music.  You can spend a lot of time on the marketing, not knowing if it's working.  It's tricky.

Our local musicians echo this sentiment.  Just the other day I heard Jason Smith of Hippocampus, one of the area's most successful bands, remark, "What I realized is that I spend a lot of time on internet promotion.  It started because I can do it on my job, but now I am almost substituting the internet for music.  In my opinion, we do not rehearse enough, so it's almost like I can feel like I am filling that void by at least doing something that is band-related."

Time suckage is a common problem with the internet (for all of us!), but the online work still has to be done, and done consistently.  Dunn prefers Facebook out of all the Web marketing tools because "it's the most personal of the connection networks.  Whether we, as musicians, like it or not, fans want more personal connections." According to Meredith, this is what Facebook was built for: "Facebook lets Javier's fans know he's listening."

Like other social networking and fanbase management sites, Facebook gives artists the ability to load up their pages with all sorts of goodies – music clips, videos, pictures – which leads to the question: Is content (as opposed to the music) what drives fans to be involved?

Javier Dunn: I'm not really sure what makes fans want to be involved, but I think when you connect with them, they feel connected and invested back.  And then they tell their friends and it builds.  That's the idea anyway.
Meredith:  I only knew Javier's page was "successful" because I am a fan of a lot of pages and see how different people interact with their fans... Javier is really genuine and connects with his fans in a way others do not. People tend to gain a larger fan base when they interact with their page more.

Javier Dunn: I feel that the music that really hits people is genuine - you feel it.  You believe it.  You think it's about you and you are about it.  This all ties in with Facebook, too. I feel like people respond to genuineness. So, that's sort of my music and marketing strategy - just a real version of me.  Normal. For better or worse. But always with an emphasis on the music. Always. The very nature of Facebook - being more like a giant multimedia conversation between friends - lends itself to being real.  In my opinion, anyway.  It's just easier for me to stomach promoting myself if I'm just... myself.

That approach takes away much of the fear a band can feel when promoting itself online.  But, how do they know if Facebook is working for them?  The obvious answer is an increase in concert attendance and CD sales, and Javier has seen a rise in both.  A more subtle – and potentially long-term – value of internet promotion is consistent and growing exposure.

Javier Dunn: I know it's working because of page views, friends, interactivity... mostly interactivity.  The key is getting people to want to be involved in sharing it.  I'm mildly obsessed with fan counts (a Facebook metric), but on the other hand, I don't really employ any "tactics" to raise its numbers. A fan count is good because it just means more ears and eyes for my art to hit, but the fans who care are the ones who show it.  They're the ones that make and sustain an artist.  To me, that data chart is totally helpful, but success is measured in the comments people write.  It's a bigger deal to me when someone decides to write something about how they like a song or a photo or a comment or whatever than it is if I just got another 35 hits this hour.
Meredith: It's about conversation.  People think it's about pushing out content to as many people as possible, but if you are not interacting with your fans, they don't feel as connected to you or see as much value in that connection.

One way fans show they care is by being part of a street team.  'Street Team' is a buzzword describing organized fan groups who do the concert promoting for the band, with minimal supervision and for free.  Javier doesn't have formal street teams, but he organizes his fans on Facebook, letting them know in advance that he's coming to a town so they can gather concert-goers, for example.

Javier Dunn:  Yeah - I do what I can to spread the word, hype shows, alert fans to new material, etc.
Meredith: On Facebook, every single fan has the potential to build a street team.  Every musician/band has different methods for managing their fanbase, but one of the most powerful parts of Facebook is the stream of real time activity.  For instance, when Javier updates his status with "I have a show coming up," that goes to almost five thousand people who have become his fan.  That, among other things, can be leveraged to mobilize things like street teams.  So, if I said, "I started a Javier Dunn street team, email me to join," that will go to all of my six hundred friends.  It's word of mouth on a massive, massive scale.

Exposure, an energized fanbase, higher concert attendance and CD sales… but what is the real cost?  There are only so many hours in the day…  Javier's answer to this question took me by surprise:

Javier Dunn: I spend about 30 total minutes per day on Facebook.  I do lots of two minute visits.

It's clear – music prevails over all the digital bells and whistles, and musicians don't need to spend hours in front of the computer each day to keep fans happy, at least not with Facebook.  For a new-fangled tool, Facebook's success seems to depend more on old-fashioned methods -  musicians interact with their online fans the same way they relate to them in person, with the result that their music gets spread far and wide – sometimes globally.

It's time for a reality check, though – without the music, there'd be no fans to reach out to.  This leads to Javier's last words of advice for local musicians:  More importantly, I think, for any musician trying to make it big using Facebook - spend three times as much time practicing and playing as you do online.