Oh man, is social media overwhelming—

ahhhh, no.  Gotta stay positive :P

This week’s chapter of ArielPR’s Music Success in Nine Weeks (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for all working musicians) is dedicated to helping musicians navigate the constant flux that is Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 refers to the rising of interactive social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. that have turned the web into a very interactive and social place. 

And a very messy one too.  Even though I’ve managed to dip my toes into the waters of several of these platforms during my college years, it can be really hard to keep track of all of them.  The connection options are welcome but a bit of a double-edged sword — if you aren’t strategic about how you wire platforms, your Twitter feed might cause your Facebook to burst with redundant content. 

But thanks to the good people at ArielPR forums, I found out about ping.fm, which is a service that allows one to simultaneously post to several social media platforms at once. Before, I was trying to draw out a connections diagram to figure out how I wanted to wire the different networks together, depending on what I wanted to send out (song, blog, pics, etc.):

Ping.fm is much simpler.

Haha.  But if you’re a visual person like me, I still recommend drawing out a delivery diagram for each of the types of things you want to share over social media — it was really helpful in clearing up the different ways I wanted to share content as an artist.

Another cool social media tool I found was RootMusic, which creates pretty slick Facebook tabs that you can integrate into your Facebook Artist page.  It’s got all the doohickeys most musicians will need for their Facebook page (music player, feeds customizable for blogs and twitter, videos, photos, etc.).  I prefer the aesthetics of RootMusic’s pages to ReverbNation’s MyBand pages, so if you’re not already deep into using ReverbNation, RootMusic is definitely worth a look.

This week has admittedly been mostly setting up all these things, and I’m just now starting to interact through Web 2.0.  I totally understand now when Ariel says that maintaining Web 2.0 presence is like cultivating a garden — it really requires a certain degree of consistent contribution.  Too bad I was never that great at gardening :P

Whenever you have an overwhelming task, you break it down.  So it’s time to break this garden down into, um, plants.  I figure I’m going to focus only on one community at a time, getting used to interacting in each one before moving onto the next.  Right now I’m gonna spend more time on Tumblr, since that’s where I post all of my song story blogs as part of my Year of Song project.  Once I get my footing there, I’ll move on to Twitter, then YouTube, etc. 

Also, an aside:  there are some really cool, smaller communities of music lovers out there like thesixtyone.com and last.fm (found at tightmixblog.com). I just signed up on them, hopefully I won’t forget about them haha.

So where are all my plants in the bountiful Web 2.0 garden?  Well…

• andrewplan.com (Sign up on my mailing list and get free music!)
• Facebook artist page
• Twitter
• Myspace
• YouTube
• Last.fm
• thesixtyone.com
• Flickr
• OurStage

That’s all for me!  Till week 5…

-Andrew