Ten Online Marketing and Social Networking Tips for Authors, Artists and Musicians

This is a response to David Battino's request for suggestions on online marketing and social networking for authors at http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2009/03/web-presence-for-publishers.html

1. Structure your socials 

Utilize the constellation of social networks – find out where your readers and market hang out and create a presence there. For that matter, create a presence on as many sites as you are comfortable with maintaining.

The key to this is to have a master collateral store of your bio, pictures and “metadata” style information – everything that you need to set up an account/page at any given social networking site. Think of each site as a copy of your book, placed where people congregate. In this way you can be everywhere all the time. Your master collateral store can also be your personal webpage…

The setup is just the beginning; make sure you have the site set to email you comments made on your page so you can monitor them. The next key is to use each service at their “sharp end” (like a pencil). For instance, LinkedIn is great for business relationships – only connect to those you would like to have refer you or that you would refer. Facebook is the stage your life is played out on – connect here with those you wish to have and interact with in your life. In addition, create a Facebook Artist page for your general public interactions. MySpace is a good place to reach out to a broad, generally younger audience. Take all comers and monitor comments for “kitty porn” spam.

There are and will be more focused sites as well for books and publishing, feel free to add those to your constellation, but be careful of the echo chamber syndrome. Best to address the audience where they live…

2. Leverage your status

How can you be everywhere  at once? There are secret weapons. Hellotxt.com is one of these. Status entered here propagates to all your social sites that provide status updates. In this way, a generally static page at one of your many points of presence can appear to be regularly updated – and you can create the generally static page from your master collateral store.

With all these sites, use the concept of leverage and fulcrums. If you are doing everything yourself manually, it is as if the fulcrum is very close to you, and you have to expend lots of energy. Using tools that multiply your leverage is like the fulcrum far away, giving you much more action with much less time and energy expended.

3. We are creating the story together in the Emerging Global Consciousness

In this new world (which is just the old world multiplied infinitely) each person is becoming a responsible intelligent agent, a neuron in the Emerging Global Consciousness (EGC). Email and twitter are the synaptic connections of this structure. Understand that there is a very big echo chamber; writers and storytellers are now meme generators. We create thoughts in the EGC.

4. Transparently share your research in real time

As authors, we constantly research. I know I spend most of my non-externally-paid time finding information. On Facebook (and other sites) you can post links to interesting items, which appear on your connections pages (and their links show up on yours). This is one of the sense organs of the EGC. Enrich it. When people that you are connected with post interesting links, it creates an info waterfall on your page. This becomes a source of information that you can selectively repost from (and it keeps you up to date with a broad scoop of research!).

5. Maintain your brand

This comes back to your master collateral store – which helps you present a consistent appearance and integrity across the social networking space. Do post a picture, and give as much information as your “privacy policy” is comfortable with. Since the audience is going to be spread out over as many sites as you wish to monitor and maintain, it is a good idea to present a common image to them all. This does provide a leverage point, however – if you hide different aspects of yourself (or “Easter Eggs”) at different sites, it may benefit the dedicated fan to find you on all of them!

6. All the world's a stage...

Do you remember the movie “Stop Making Sense” by Talking Heads? It begins with a guy with an acoustic guitar and a boombox… From there bits and pieces are added through the show until – a huge stadium show with full stage. The same continuum can be used on the social networking sites. It doesn’t matter how big and complex your presentation is (simple is just as good) as long as you realize these are performances - and that your presentation is crafted. Be aware of your audience and respect them…

7. Diversify your offerings

Your creativity is your currency. Make once, deploy many. There are several great authors who post their work for free on the web, but also publish hard copy. Using the Nine Inch Nails model, you can pre-sell a work at several price points and quality levels – including giving the information away.

8. Make it easy to get paid

Prominently display PayPal tip jars and links to your works on Amazon and any other place your work is available for sale.

9. Encourage comments

In the continuing communication to your audience, include “The Ask”. Make sure you let them know where they can buy your work, and solicit comments generally. Ideally solicit them to be placed somewhere you can control and delete the unhelpful ones…

10. Enrich the community - be an asset

The whole idea of Social Networking turns the old way of cocooning and “woodshedding” inside out. You now are working in public – but the trade-off is that you get to select the forums and presentation of your work and image. Information not only wants to be free – it wants to be meaningful. That leads to relationships – and that leads to sales.