JAVS Spring 2011

Twitter is a site devoted to real time updates about news, sto ries—and often, personal ram bling. The best way to use Twitter in a professional context is to cre ate an account for sharing the most relevant, new information about you and your performanc es. For example, if you are devis ing a program combining music and religious practices, “tweet” about it, and anyone following you will get the update. If you are performing a benefit concert for the Greater Boston Food Bank, tweet the time and place for your followers. Twitter is a great way to stoke interest in your projects and a great method of free advertising. Myspace: a very similar network to Facebook in that it allows you to create your own musician page, but the major plus is that you can upload your music samples! With Myspace’s artist profile, you can advertise yourself with your music, photos, videos, and event advertising. All of these features are available if you select a musi cian account type when you sign up for a profile at www.myspace.com. Similarly to Myspace, a YouTube account will offer you profile building centered on your videos. The difference between YouTube and Myspace, however, is the audience reach—if you post a video to YouTube, you have a bet ter chance of accessing greater numbers of fans because people don’t need an account to view a video. Often, artists will drop a Twitter is easy to join—just visit www.twitter.com.

a social intent. However, it has also become a place where indi viduals can create their own “artist page” and advertise their music throughout the Facebook site. The benefit to advertising yourself professionally on Facebook is that you have access to a huge popula tion using the Internet; the down side for musicians is that Facebook isn’t equipped to host music samples, though it does have video capabilities. Another useful capacity of Facebook is group building. If you have a larger organization like the AVS, you can create a group to collect your current, lapsed, and potential members all in one place. By using the wall and mes saging effectively, you can adver tise events and member news. If you want to create a group, you will need to log in to your account at www.facebook.com. Go to the homepage on your account and look for the “Groups” link in the left-hand column. By clicking that link, you’ll be taken to a location where you can create a new group. Facebook also offers the ability to create pages, which may be more useful if you are an individual looking to track your fans. If you want to create your own Facebook page, you will also need to log in to your account at www.face book.com. Then visit this url: http://www.facebook.com/pages/c reate.php. There will be user prompts for you to create the type of page that best suits your needs.

link for YouTube on their web sites or in e-mails that anyone can access. Great aspects of YouTube include the ability to restrict your audience (if you have a video audition that you need to submit but don’t want the whole world to see, you can make the video pri vate and e-mail the link to only those who you want to see it), the ability to create search engine tags for your videos, the opportunity to receive feedback through com ments and responses, an optional rating system, website embedding, and the ability to allow your work to be viewed on mobile phones and TVs. Furthermore, you can also build your own artist profile and create playlists to organize your work. The nice thing about YouTube is that if you have a Google account, you can use that account to log in at www.youtube.com. You can also sign up for an account with YouTube if you don’t have a Google account. The music upload equivalent to YouTube is ReverbNation, a site dedicated to promoting music artists, labels, management, ven ues, and fans. As with all of the sites above, you can create an artist profile and upload music and video, build a fan base, and advertise upcoming events. A new and awesome thing about this site is the service labeled “FanReach,” an e-mail blasting service that allows you to send out e-mail advertisements for your events and projects to all of your fans on ReverbNation. The other unique

aspect of this site is the “Opportunities” tab that

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