Marketing Hip-Hop Online

After receiving this unsolicited tweet:

Bigstevegee Bang it out my dude!! Black Rob – Jumpin’ Like Whoa http://www.zshare.net/audio…

and noticing that Bigstevegee’s last 20 tweets were pretty much the same thing to 20 different people, I tweeted:

Manny Faces Dear Music Promoters: Spam is for email accounts, not Twitter. Spam me there. Here, it’s like jumping into a conversation. Rude.

I got a couple of replies, giving me e-dap:

djdimepiece @MannyFaces LOL, I soooooo concur! PLEASE RETWEET!
shawtyslim @MannyFaces amen to that… Twitter is like the “last place we got left”. If this turns into myspace, I’m giving up
WILLIAMGONE @MannyFaces good point! stop it vlad!!!

(LOL @ that last one). So, I’m not alone.

I wasn’t targeting Vlad obviously, but @Bigstevegee, a DJ/mash-upper/remixer apparantly down with AV8 records, the “are-they-still-around?” label that releases white-labelish singles, remixes, extended party breaks and such.

Now, a “reply” normally implies that you are “replying” to something I wrote in general, or wrote directed at you. Big Steve Gee apparently disagrees, and decided to t-spam not only me, but a slew of tweeple with variations of the same message (see image below).

Bigstevegee, we may even have communicated in the past, and my apologies if I don’t recall you off-hand. But I too am a remixer/producer cat (www.mannyfaces.com). I think most would say I’m pretty nice, skills and marketing-wise, and as such, I have had nearly 2,000,000 downloads of my remixes, got thousands of MySpace friends and email list recipients, and most importantly to this issue, more than 7x the amount of followers on Twitter than you do. I occasionally tweet links to my remixes and blog posts, etc., but I make SURE I tweet other interesting, relevant, irreverant, humorous and useful stuff at least 9 times out of ten. It is what has make me #5 in my region with a 99.4 score (source: TwitterGrader.com). So here’s some advice on how it works:

I see you got a few @replies that said good job and all that, but you said “many DMs”. You don’t want DMs. For you to add to your followers, you want people to @reply to you with props. Their followers will look to see who/why they did, and they will find you. But if your last 15 tweets are the same thing to 15 people, hawking your remix, many people who might have followed you, won’t. Your efforts will be largely wasted.

Remember that Twitter is a community that does not take kindly to EXTREME self-promotion. It is fine to announce a release to your 180 followers. But understand that @ replying to EACH of them individually, will probably put a bad taste in these people’s mouths, and at the very least, won’t gain you many new followers.

When promoting, I tend to worry more about the handful of people I might piss off, than the handful of people who I won’t. Bad reputation spreads faster. Spamming may be acceptable collateral damage for email or MySpace communication, but start spamming on FaceBook or (especially) Twitter, and you could easily annoy a community of artists, DJs, journalists, PR folk and regular folk who enjoy passing around information. These are exactly the folks you want to pass around KIND words about you. At the very least, I would look into using a site like HootSuite.com, to judge whether you are actually getting clicks from these efforts, so you can at least gauge whether the reward is worth the risk being frowned upon.

Look what it’s doing for Vlad. I wasn’t even talking about him, but here, a bad reputation may be preceding him. Not a look I think you want.

Anyway, just my $.02 my friend. While I don’t normally jump to check other cats stuff, for the purpose of writing this post, I felt compelled to actually download the track. It’s good. Maybe not Whoa!, but good.

All the best Bigstevegee. MarketingHipHop.com readers, feel free to check it yourself @ http://www.zshare.net/download/562284619050918c/ [zshare].

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