A Facebook Fan page is one of the many ways for fans to stay connected with you. More and more artists are recognizing the importance of a fan page. They are going beyond the standard lackluster fan page look and feel to create pages that fans actually enjoy using and interacting with.
I have recently been browsing through the The Facebook Showcase blog to see what other artists, brands and businesses are doing to pimp out their fan pages. There are tons of great ideas and examples of excellent page designs there.
One of the more notable fan pages (and also one that Oniracom designed!) can be found in the Celebrity and/or Enterainment categories - Lenny Kravitz! The Facebook Showcase describes the page as having “a nice tab promoting his new tour dates”. You can check out Lenny’s fan page here and “like it”!
Today’s online networking environment requires simplicity and solutions in response to demand. First people demanded a more open Facebook, and now they’re demanding ease and integration. Everyone tweets, posts, updates, links, likes, comments, and tags these days, and although Facebook is admittedly the best, there will always be room for improvement. This stage in the social networking game will be won with easy and open integration.
Facebook and Pandora are on the leading edge of the key players in this relatively new game.
Found this interesting message when I went onto one of the pages I admin on Facebook this morning:
It seems that Facebook is doing away with dealing with ‘Fans’, substituting for the lighter-weight term ‘Like’. As far as I can tell (thus far), “liking” a page on Facebook is the exact same thing as “Becoming a Fan” was.
Facebook has yet to change their “Become a Fan” button to the new “Like” button on some profiles and also the Fan Badges that you embed on your webpages.
MGMT. Initials that became a topic of daily conversation on radio stations and music blogs everywhere in 2008. The band formerly known as The Management went from a small electronic Indie band to a global Indie phenomenon over the course of a few months. Their debut release "Oracular Spectacular" was met with huge success by international audiences courtesy of their wildly popular first single off the album called "Time to Pretend" which according to Wikipedia was featured on five television shows and three feature films in the year 2008 alone. At the time, Time to Pretend was admittedly one of the most fun, energetic, and innovative songs I'd heard in years. Sure enough the song started popping up everywhere and the band was tracked down, researched and sought after by the general public and musicians alike. Before they knew it the Band was opening for Music Industry giants like Radiohead and Paul McCartney, and receiving awards for their wildly popular recordings and performances.
As a fan of the music I found it almost magical that the band would receive so much wild and rapid notoriety from all channels of the media, the pubic, and the industry. Everyone wanted a piece of MGMT. In various interviews about their influences, it was obvious that the band's most potent influences came from the likes of Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin, the typical drug fueled rock gods of the 70's. For me at the time this was a big red flag. A band of kids, singing about how much they want to be famous and do drugs (Time to Pretend lyrics). Abbreviating their band name before getting famous and talking about how much they love the seventies. Their first batch of music videos from oracular spectacular were no less than "trippy." Featuring wild shroomy fairy parties (Electric Feel), primitive kaleidoscopic bonfires (Time to Pretend), and horrifying monsters stalking a baby (Kids), So what comes next? Worried? I am.
MGMT recently fell prey to the digital age, their new album, "Congratulations" leaked online around the 19th of March. The album is currently streaming for fans on their website whoismgmt.com. The streaming page reads quite honestly, "Hey everybody, the album leaked, and we wanted you to be able to hear it from us. We wanted to offer it as a free download but that didn't make sense to anyone but us." I'll get back to their online presence in the next paragraph. Their first *single from the new album, "Flash Delirium" was released on March 9th and is now accompanied by a music video that streams from their website. Flash Delirium is a musical description of momentary hallucinating and paranoia. And the music video is a visual representation of this assumingly drug induced disorder. At the end of the day you go with your gut on music reviews, and I must say that when it comes to Congratulations my gut has been about as unsettled as the album's themes. Congratulations is now available everywhere, and I must say that after a few more listens the album is beginning to grow on me. There is still a chance that the album will fall by the wayside in comparison with the band's more popular past exploits. However it must also be said that an album can be brought to life on stage. So if MGMT can manage not to creep out their fans too bad, and not get too high to perform or think, the album could be a huge success. Listen to the band talk about their album on NPR
Something interesting that I love about this band is their website. Whoismgmt.com is not particularly complex or even tech stimulating. However their page backgrounds and banners are 100% designed by their fans. One of the benefits of being a stoner-friendly band is that you have an army of stunning visual artists who are willing to work for you free. MGMT takes advantage of this by allowing anyone to submit their fan art to be added to the site, and their standards for professionalism in design are lax and welcome to even to casual doodlers. All posted content fits in some way or another to the Band's image. Their druggy image allow them to mismatch logos and banners without really confusing their brand, which is great for brand awareness and fan loyalty. Their simple online presence is shockingly effective and inviting, and I give them a thumbs-up on their fan-built brand and website.
You can listen to Congratulations here.
*The band did not want to release the album with any specific “single� in order to encourage fans to listen to the whole album. Although Flash Delirium was the first song to be released off of Congratulations.
Direct-to-Fan (D2F) marketing is essentially creating a relationship with your fans through a marketing outlet, fans help you and in return you help them. D2F marketing is a creative business model that allows artists to eliminate the need for a middle man by delivering music directly to fans. Which means, artists keep a higher percentage of their own sales, compared to the current business model where major labels, distributors or even iTunes take 30% or more away from the artist! D2F is most easily identified by free content give-aways in exchange for a tweet, Facebook shout-out, or e-mail sign up, reference MattCosta.com.
However, D2F marketing is evolving to include custom storefronts and marketing analytics that enable you to better grasp your audience and sell directly from your website and various social profiles. After researching the following sites; Bandbox, Nimbit and Topspin, I have outlined a detailed explanation of the costs, benefits, similarities, and differences between each platform.
Everyone knows (at least we hope) that as an Artist, building a solid email list is one of the most important things you can do to build and maintain your relationship with your fans.
A sound email list will turn your current fan base into an extremely solid one. The relationship that you foster with your fans, keeping them up to date on the latest news and them getting to know you even better is what’s going to build their loyalty and help you become even more successful.
Oniracom recently created and implemented an email list marketing campaign to increase the number of subscribers for G. Love and Special Sauce.
When designing the campaign we made sure we followed these 3 simple rules:
Give fans incentive to sign up to the mailing list
Promote the mailing list; feature it everywhere to increase it’s visibility
Keep it simple for fans to sign up; don’t make it too complicated
By employing these 3 tactics and using a little Oniracom creative magic, we were able to grow G. Love’s mailing list numbers at a phenomenal rate. As might be expected, the mailing list continues to grow at this rate.
The case study below details our strategy and the step-by-step process we used to create this unique campaign. This case study among many others can also be found on our website - www.oniracom.com
I’ll be honest. When I see the ubiquitous PowerPoint title page start off a presentation, I groan inwardly. And I’m guessing you do too.
Despite becoming a staple of the business and scholastic world, Microsoft’s presentation application hasn’t evolved beyond its linear bulleted slide formating since its release over twenty years ago.
Prezi is an online presentation tool that does away with the slide-by-slide approach of Powerpoint entirely. Instead, it utilizes a visual map with embedded words, links, images and videos. Users can navigate this visual map by zooming in and out, resulting in an interactive and visually stimulating product.
Perhaps Prezi is best explained by watching a sample project. I wasn’t completely sold on the idea until I saw a demonstration on their site. Check out the video below:
The pliable interface of Prezi means that every presentation is unique to its creator. And it’s FREE. Best of all, it’s web-based, which means that Prezi presentations can be created and shown on any computer with internet access. No more emailing presentations to yourself, hoping desperately that the computer you’re presenting on will have the necessary OS and software. Users are also provided with an offline player in case you’re presenting somewhere without access to the internet.
Prezi offers three different levels of pricing: Free, Enjoy & Pro. Every version grants users access to the editing software and an offline player and the ability to download & embed presentations into websites and blogs, as well as the abiliy to import images, videos, PDFs, & Flash files. The free version allots you 100MB worth of file storage but ensures that all your presentations will be public. For $59 a year, users can quadruple their file storage and are given the option of making their presentations private. Pro, at $159 a year, lets premium users download a desktop application of the editing software so they may work offline.
Prezi.com also has a forum component, in which you can view the works of others, comment and perhaps choose to “pat them on the back” for a job well done.
One of my favorites is the Prezi that accompanied the lecture “Mixing Mind & Metaphor,” at TED Global 2009 given by James Geary. Check it out here.
I’ll admit at first it takes a little while to get used to the interface, especially if you’ve been brought up on Powerpoint. But Prezi is relatively intuitive and the site contains many helpful tutorial videos to assist with the basics and offer tips and tricks. Once you get the hang of it, the entire process is strangely liberating.
What do you think? Will you be using Prezi for your next presentation?
Motorola recently released their new Smartphone the Motorola DEVOUR on Verizon Wireless. The phone looks essentially like a shrunk-down and better-engineered version of their holiday marketing success the Motorola DROID. However the new Android powered Smartphone has not only received a firmware update, but also an innovative integrated social widget called MOTOBLUR (Motorola really takes to YELLING in their brand marketing, for the sake of your eyes I’ll refrain from emulating their extravagant use of text size).
Everyone knows (at least we hope) that as an Artist, building a solid email list is one of the most important things you can do to build and maintain your relationship with your fans. 
