The development of my music marketing campaign includes promotion but another crucial aspect is monitoring your band’s niche and what people are talking about on the web. It can serve multiple purposes for your blog and keep your marketing active and fresh. Two tools I use are Google Alerts and Monitter.
Google Alerts lets you enter in search terms and you can decide what results you want to see from that search term: such as news, blogs, web, comprehensive, video and groups.
You choose how and how often you want to be alerted. My personal preference is using Google Alerts and having them sent to Google Reader via RSS. You have the option to change how you receive them from the manage alerts menu and these alerts can also be sent to your email. Choose you own time intervals. I enjoy receiving them once a day.
As a musician, I use these alerts to monitor my band name, album names and my genre. For instance, I set up and alert for my Label “Fried Roots” and also created one for an album release we also have called “Lost In India”. Anytime these phrases show up in Google, I am sent my daily alert with where it is mentioned, whether its an article or forum discussion.
Now the point of this is not to boost your ego and see how many times your music is mentioned. The activity includes participating in discussions around the web that mention your music or operation. Track what kind of press your music operation is getting whether good or bad. Join in conversations and comment on blogs that mention you and give your music operation a positive appearance. Create some Google Alerts also for keywords related to your blog. It’s a great way to find other bloggers in your niche and is a great networking tool.
Twitter is playing a big role in my music operation currently. I am not here to tell people how they have to use Twitter or tell them Twitter is the answer to all their problems. From most responses to Twitter, you either hate it or love it. I’ve found it very useful in finding relevant readers to my blog and hip hop listeners to my music. One tool I use is Monitter, real time twitter keyword results.
Monitter allows me to see what is being talked about on Twitter currently. I type in 3 keywords of particular interest to my music operation and get to see who is discussing anything related to this topic in real time. I can now add relevant people to my music operation based on their interests and help gain subscribers to my blog. This has been a great networking tool as well, being able to quickly shoot back and forth messages.
