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@DavidEmery
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I’d like to start today by relaying a snippet of a conversation on twitter:
richtlobf: So: FatCatRecords have signed up today What other indies do we need on here? 4AD, Bella Union, Jagjag and Secretly Canadian would be sweet
me: @richtlobf I’m not sure labels should really be on twitter – isn’t it better that artists are, as opposed to companies with product to sell?
Twitter has seen a massive surge in the last few months – particularly in the UK thanks to @stephenfry no doubt. I’ve seen my followers surge to 334, which is faintly ridiculous – more people follow me on twitter then subscribe to the RSS feed for this site (about 200-ish, for anyone who’s curious).
It’s not just me that’s seen a noticeable uptake. We set up – after many conversations along the lines of “trust us, it’s the next big thing” – a twitter account for Jack Peñate 2 years ago. It worked for a time – we were really using it to enable him to txt to his site, which worked great – but as with all these things if you’re not using these things for yourself, but being coerced to by someone else it died out after a while. I’m sure their will be people reading who’ve tried to get other people blogging, which can quite rapidly turn into blood-from-stone extraction if they’re not a natural blogger – twitter is much the same thing.
When we left it, back in August 2007, I think Jack had about 30 odd followers – not exactly a huge amount, but a nice number to have some fun with (we premiered the Torn On The Platform video to them before anyone else via direct message, for example). It’s now grown to over 200, with about 50 coming in the last couple of months of last year and the rest in the last few weeks.
I think Twitter has the potential to work really nicely for artists that naturally engage with it. Take Colin Meloy, the lead singer from The Decemberists, for example. He’s only recently got on Twitter – like many – but he’s quite obviously taken to it like a duck to. It’s interesting, and works in the same way everyone else I follow ‘works’ – he’s just a guy posting interesting things and ‘what he’s doing’.
Bjork is a great counter example. @bjork is not Bjork, and is instead a combined feed of news from her website coupled with (presumably) automated ‘thanks for following me’ messages. It is pretty much the antithesis of what makes Twitter work. It’s not – generally – an announcement mechanism, it’s a communication and conversation mechanism.
Twitter is not an RSS reader.
It’s very obvious that Twitter has now reached a critical mass large enough to get on every digital marketing plan – ‘oh we must get one of those Twitter sites’ – but it misses the fairly key point that it’s a person-to-person communication medium. You can’t exactly marketing-plan that, can you?
So that takes me back to Twitter versus Record Labels. For the most part, it just doesn’t make sense for a label to be on Twitter. If you’re of any reasonable size it’s either going to end up as a regurgitated news RSS feed, or the Twitters of the one person at the label that wanted to do it in the first place. Which is fine, actually, but surely it would just be better to be you, rather then the label? A group of people from a label hanging out on Twitter and talking would be far better then some odd group feed that has the subtext of promotion behind it?
Wichita’s Twitter is a good example – it’s slightly uncomfortable because it’s fairly obviously just one person posting, but it’s anonymous and mixed in with the expected ‘marketing’ tweets (e.g. “First Aid Kit are on Steve Lamacq’s Rebel playlist this week – get your vote in here…http://tinyurl.com/2cnm37”). Wouldn’t it be much better to use your real name – maybe get all you staff on there if you like – and aggregate them on your site if you really feel the need?
It reminds me very much of the time when Facebook started getting popular and no one quite knew how to ‘market’ on it – should an artist be a group? A person with friends? Luckily Facebook came along and created musicians pages which act in the double role of a) giving marketers somewhere to do their job and tick the boxes on their “social network coverage” plan and b) making it very easy to ignore and get on with using Facebook for what we want to use it for.
Twitter does indeed appear to be – finally – the next big thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a digital marketing frontier that needs to be conquered.
Comments
As ever, I’m in complete agreement. Entities on Twitter existing only for marketing will fail to gel with the community; I hope that their existence doesn’t mislead anyone into believing that Twitter is an RSS reader, they will miss out on a great deal of the experience.
Much like the dreadful retweet habit (and intellectual backlash against the practice), it’s just growing pains for the service. Since Twitter themselves take such a hands off approach to community management (that is, completely absolving themselves of responsibility whenever problems come up), it does at least mean that the dominant tone and practice of the community should propagate.
One thing that did make me stop and think though was with regard to your label. OK, most labels would just use Twitter to churn out press releases and artist plugs, but the work your team have put out over the past few years has been stellar and genuinely interesting in itself. Now, I get exposed to that by following you, but is there a case for someone just wanting to follow your work and not your life? Should those people even be catered for at all on a personal service like Twitter?
Interesting you should say that – for a long time now we’ve been thinking about setting up a blog for our department to do exactly that: promote the sites we make. Of course, we’ve not quite got around to it, but I think a blog – with an RSS feed – is the place to evangelise these kind of things, as opposed to a Twitter account.
Yes, that would be far preferable. I think that regardless of medium you’re a group amongst few who make a conscious effort to try new things with every release. It’s both interesting to observe on a development and music industry way, but also as a flow of artistic inspiration. I’d certainly love to see you guys blogging about the sites as well as the music.
I presume you’ve seen this:
http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/
Too true.
Stephen Fry summed it up well on Jonathan Ross last week. He refers to people who don’t quite get Twitter as “The what I had for Breakfasts”
I have never liked Facebook, and was fairly hesitant to try Twitter. I can safely say, and i’m sure you could too as one of my followers, that I’m a big fan.
I think that one’s inclination to ‘tweet’ is determined by whether they have a mobile device to tweet from or not.
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