MADE

An old acquaintance of mine wrote on my Facebook wall recently. He said, “Wut up Mika check out X’s battle”.( I intentionally left out the battle rapper’s name) There was a link following the post which took me to a YouTube video of a battle rap contest. One of the guys battling is the guy I know. He’s pretty good at it and it’s nice that he and his buddies want me to check out his battles. But so what?

The “so what?” Is what I want to talk about because there are several profound spokes that come out of it. On the YouTube video, each of the battle rappers posted the links to their websites, MySpace, Twitter, etc. So I typed in the website url of my battle rapper acquaintance. His site had almost nothing on it. What it did have were three large logos for his MySpace, Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I do appreciate that the guy understands that we live in an attention economy where having a presence in the social media-sphere is a necessity. But this guy’s problem –like so many music artists—is that his online presence lacks focus.

Unfortunately, I see this kind of thing all the time in the indie music world. So many music artists—especially hip hop artists—do a miserable job of communicating their brand online because they believe that the online space is purely about loosely formed snippets of ideas. It’s an idea encouraged by the extremely informal nature of social media, but that ironically, is inconsistent with what’s known to be effective in social media. This strain of thought, I think, leads to two habits of mind which devastate one’s ability to create a profitable musical brand in the 21st century attention economy.

The first is the notion that attention in and of itself means anything significant. There’s many music artists who post links on other blogs or in their tweets that direct people to their websites or MySpace page for the sole purpose of getting attention and little else. You know what I’m talking about. They’ll tweet stuff like “Check out my new track…”. Then you go to their site or their YouTube video, listen to the track and then…nothing. No call to action or interesting information that would make you stick around or come back. The intention is often to just get your attentions because after all, that seems to be what everyone else is doing.

Attention in and of itself carries no value. Attention can be valuable if it’s converted into something that generates some type of profit in the real world, like selling ads or getting real live bodies to shows. But attention by itself carries no value. Just because I know who you are doesn’t mean that anything is going to happen. Unless you plan it so that something does happen.

Attention, like an uncut diamond is a precious commodity, but it needs to be refined to produce real world profit.

The second curse of the online sound-byte mentality is the grotesque distortion of clear thinking. Remember this little formula.

Poor sentence structure = Unclear Thinking = Low Perceived Value = Low Trust

Now, I’m not talking about something as benign as typing “C u there soon” instead of “See you there soon”. Both communicate the idea clearly. I’m talking about the laxness in online communication that leads to half-formed ideas and incoherent thoughts. I’m talking about the absence of understanding of how verbs, nouns and adjectives fit together. Or of proper etiquette when writing to an audience.

After bad design, bad writing is the biggest scourge on online personal brands. It’s crucial to recognize that if somebody can’t see you in front of them, the next thing they’re going to judge you by is the quality of the ideas that come across through your writing.

Twitter’s 140 character limit should force you to be a good editor. If you can’t form a clear, coherent idea in a tweet, I’m not going to think you’re any different than the next guy. And I probably won’t pay attention to you.

Why? Because I’m a human being and human beings are attracted to quality because poor quality is the status quo. You rise above the masses by generating unique, clean and coherent ideas.

If your online presence is a mess, I’m going to think you’re a mess. And in the post-record label era, where fans and producers are in direct contact with each other you have to be the arbiter of quality because the label isn’t there to do it for you. You have to really care about being someone you’d want to listen to.

By: Twitter Buttons