I find that often, I hear about a new group or artist by name, and interested, I attempt to go to their website, or Google them. Sometimes, I run into the problem where I don’t know how to spell their name. This happens a lot in hip hop, due to the (over)use of intentionally misspelled names.

You know. Cuz it’s cooler.

But what happens, in my case anyway, if after a few tries, I can’t find them, I forget it and move on.

Think about this when you choose the name or moniker you go by these days. Remember that this is an internet/search/Google world we live in, especially as entertainers trying to make a mark. And while Google’s oracle-like genius will “suggest” what you might have meant, their clairvoyance is helped by there being a lot of entries online with something near to what you typed in. If you are very new, or there are websites with even more closely matching spelling, you won’t come up.

And then eye myte mis yor intyre webb syte, wich wuld suk four yu.

It is not a “SMASH HIT”. It is not an ANYTHING hit. It is not a hit. A hit, can’t be a hit, until it is a hit. If the DJs and bloggers you wish to reach, have not already heard of it, and their role is to know about the hits, why are you telling them it is a hit? A SMASH hit at that? They know it’s not. You sound like everyone else who claims their fresh-out-the-frying-pan song is a SMASH HIT. Kinda dumb.

Hype is good. Good copy writing is one of the cornerstones of promotion and advertising, but stop with the SMASH HIT, CERTIFIED BANGER, HOTTEST SHIT IN THE CLUBS, hyperbole.

Convince me, without making it obvious that you are just talking shit.

Name. Your. Tracks. Learn about ID3 tagging. Do it now. Please.

If I get your song emailed, or I download it from a filesharing site, or I rip it from your mixtape, and the name of the track is something like, “Track 03″, I am not going to listen to it. At all. Ever.

You are asking people (not just me but ANY person) to take 3+ minutes out of their life to listen to the result your craft. To wade through 43,589,348,689,464,032 other songs at their fingertips at any given moment. To spend 3+ less minutes with their child/loved one/job, and you are too lazy/careless/amateur-minded/uninterested to actually somehow attach the name of your song to the file?

Not to mention of course, that if your song was to wind up in the hand/computer/iPod of someone who could actually make some kind of positive impact on your fledgling rap career, and this was all they had to track you down, guess what wouldn’t be your ticket to potential stardom?

Track 03.

UPDATE: Look! Someone agrees, and even gives some advice to help! It’s your lucky day.

Mos has teamed up with LNA Clothing to bring to the public the first “Original Music Tee”. The t-shirt will feature the cover of the album on the front, the track listing on the back, and a download URL on the tag.

I think this is a great idea, because not only will people be buying the album, but they will be promoting it by wearing the t-shirt in public. Free advertising is every artist and label’s dream! That is of course if people buy it, which brings me to some reservations I have about the idea.

Read the rest of the post here.

Mickey Factz

Recently, Honda enlisted up-and-coming artist Mickey Factz to endorse their Honda Accord. The resulting commercial is displayed below.

AdAge suggests that this is a smart marketing move on Honda’s part, and a great way to authentically incorporate hip-hop into their marketing. They say,

Hip-hop’s decade of bling is popping, and it looks more like the housing bubble than a champagne cork. So why, at this point, would anyone take financial cues from a culture marked by conspicuous consumption? Honda Motor Co. thinks it has an answer.

and

“We wanted the balance of having style, a cool look and a cool lifestyle, but doing it in a way that’s sensible for the times,” said Barbara Ponce, manager-diversity advertising at Honda.

Woooha.com’s Scott Yeti is quoted as saying that he “isn’t sure the campaign will keep hip-hop fans engaged”:

“It’s still too early to tell and maybe Honda has some more tricks up their sleeves with this campaign, but I don’t know if the hook there is strong enough to maintain a strong consumer base that will keep coming back.”

We’ll all have to wait and see. The general murmuring around hip-hop business circles is that it’s a good look personally for Factz, but may not be as effective for Honda, or engaging for hip-hop heads, as Honda would like.

Thoughts?

HIP HOP WEBSITE/BLOG MANGR NEEDED (Midtown)

Good Day,

Popular Website That Has a strong presence in the hip hop community is looking for someone to come in & help establish the corporate aspect of things to the website.

We I say help establish corporate aspect, I mean get clients for advertising on the site, do follow ups, close the deals etc.. Help form structure for the organization,

We had to strike while the iron is hot. And now is the time. Our alexa/quantcast numbers are strong. And now it’s time to profit. It’s A Hip Hop Community website with over 50, 000 members.

This is a commission based job.

Please Just don’t send resumes. Please Tell us something unique and different about you. And why you’d be perfect for this opportunity?
Also please send your myspace,facebook pages etc.. you must be knowledgeable of social networks as well

**PLEASE INCLUDE EVERYTHING, WE ASKED, IF YOU CAN’T FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. THIS OPPORTUNITY IS NOT FOR YOU**

Hmm.

Well, it’s a badly written ad, so a bad first impression. I’m not sure that the kind of talent they need will be willing to come work for what appears to be an amateurish site, and for “commission only” on top of that.

Several issues.

But I understand, start-ups and such, no capital to invest in talent, etc. Ok, but…

You represent a blog, an online PUBLICATION! I’m sorry to be so blunt, but the writing in this posting is horrendous! Is anyone who is remotely talented or ambitious enough to want to try a commission-only sales job, taking you seriously, based on that posting?

Advice: Look, even if someone does respond, in order to attract top talent, your company must represent itself better. If this post in any way represents the company, or the content, would anyone looking think you had a product worth trying to sell ads for? Maybe you do, I can’t fully call it unless I know the site we’re talking about, but if you want someone who can attract and close deals, function competently in the social media space, all of this for commission, good luck. It sounds like you are underestimating what it means to succeed in such a saturated and competitive online media world. If major media entities can’t get it right, what makes you think you’ll find a savior for commission-only, who will only be able to work on social media endeavors while selling and closing deals?

It’s clear that you do need some corporate up in there, but I just seriously wonder what kind of talent you will attract with that ad.

I love a hip-hop underdog, but guys, your posting just screams “we have no money, and maybe a crappy product.” Which again, may not be the case. 50,000 members is not too shabby a number! But remember, presentation, representation of your brand, at all times, even when posting anonymously, is a Commandment. And to attract someone who might be respectable enough to make things happen for you, you could stand to look a little more respectable yourselves.

But that’s ok. You admit you need some help. That’s cool. But then being a little salty with the “follow directions” comment, really isn’t necessary. Anyone worthwhile who was to come in and bring a little “corporate” up in that piece, really shouldn’t be taking directions from you in the first place.

I mean correct me if I am wrong. You’re asking for a business development, sales, social media maven, to help establish the corporate structure you are lacking, to do it for free commission, and to be ready to only follow your direction.

Personally, I’d require base salary or project based-compensation, as well as creative control, to perform any of the tasks you are asking for, as I am a professional who gets paid to do such things. So I’ll pass on replying to this opportunity, but I wish nothing but the best to you and your endeavors, and anyone who does join your movement.

Your organization could probably benefit highly from a successful corporate mangr like myself, but as it stands, since I totally didn’t follow directions, this opportunity is clearly not for me.

Jadakiss in Letter to B.I.G.

According to Gawker.com, not only is Coogi aware of the affinity the late Brooklyn rhyme God had for it’s sweaters, they used this connection to their advantage by compensating Jadakiss for the brand-drop in his tribute song “Letter to B.I.G.”

As we have seen in movies and TV, there has been a huge increase in product placement in recent years, the act of integrating a product or brand within actual programming. This practice has been rising exponentially in TV in particular to combat TiVo-like recording, where one can fast-forward through commercials.

As evidenced by Forever, the Chris-Brown-sings-a-four-minute-jingle-disguised-as-a-hit-single deal last year, this practice is increasingly finding its way into the music business as well.

Questions:

1. Is this kind of arranged, corporate-sponsored lyrics going to backfire at some point, as even the most naive-minded of audience members realizes they are constantly being duped and that there may be no “real” music anymore?
2. Should Jadakiss be “called out” for accepting corporate dollars in a song supposedly dedicated to a deceased friend (assuming the rumor is true)?.

As a personal commentary: Between this, and the Vince-McMahon’ing of hip-hop, I am getting very, very disillusioned by the music business, very, very quickly. Even more than before. And before was a lot.

Interestingly, MTV News quotes Jadakiss as crediting “stylist Groovey Lew (Groovey is also credited with giving B.I.G. his first Coogi sweater) for coming up with the idea”, that the idea for the song initially struck Jadakiss as “corny”, but that in the end resulted in a song where, “it’s nothing fabricated on there. It’s gotta be all real on there. Everything was personal.”

Now I think Jada is probably one of the top-5 lyricists out there, and I respect his work and work ethic, but as the Gawker post so eloquently said, “Maybe save the product placement for normal, non-memorial-to-my-deceased-friend songs?”

Nicely written piece

A couple of excerpts:

I’m proposing a stimulus plan that calls on some of hip-hop’s most powerful names to start releasing the music they have been holding back (and, by the way, do it for free). Dr. Dre, we need you right now. Jay-Z, let’s start getting those tracks from Blueprint 3 out to the masses. This message applies to everyone who is holding back gems because they are waiting for the climate to improve. I’m here to tell you the climate for releasing an album is never going to get any better. Hip-hop fans need to be hit by a barrage of new music that reminds us of why we fell in love with this culture to begin with. Our morale couldn’t go any lower.

and

I believe that getting fans excited about the music again is the first step in revitalizing hip-hop culture. It would provide a renewed sense of optimism among hip-hop fans, which I believe would improve conditions throughout the industry. Much like the stimulus plan recently passed by the Obama administration, the results of this stimulus also may not be immediate.

This stimulus plan involves improving our psyche, rather than serving to benefit anyone financially. The money will come, but that’s not what is most important right now. We as fans need to love hip-hop again. Improving the quality of music and providing the industry with something we can truly be excited about will most certainly lead to a revised plan from the hip-hop community as a whole. While sales may not improve, it will actually encourage people to start thinking of ways to become profitable in this new age of music whether it’s from becoming smarter in tour packaging to creating new online revenue streams. The desire to fix the problem will grow stronger once the overall morale is improved.

Right now everyone is dumbfounded, looking for a solution to the problem of the internet. In case you haven’t noticed, the internet is anarchy. There is not going to be a solution, formula or even a game plan that works because we can’t control an environment that evolves through unfettered innovation. The best the industry will be able to do is quickly adapt to change. That means if your label, management company or agency isn’t staffed primarily by a bunch of internet geeks that are able to identify trends, stop on a dime and shift gears in the way they’re working, then you’re fucked.

I’m also working with a client in the journalism industry, trying to convince them to embrace, adapt and adopt new media strategies, and what jumped out at me after reading this posting, is the similar message. Creating excitement. Without the people evangelizing your brand, or your industry, they will undoubtedly succumb to the naysayers and gloom-and-doomers, dragging you down with it. Today’s industries, especially those dealing with different forms of media, MUST NOT WASTE TIME wondering when and if and how. They must plunge in, feet first, and become a part of this new wave of industrialism or they will simply be left behind. No one knows the answers yet, so get in there and figure it out as you go along like the rest of us. Don’t wait for the next company or entity to figure it out. BE the next company or entity.

Good post Xplosive. Read his whole post here.

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].

@BigSteveGee's Twitter Stream

Michael Steele

Michael Steele, you are a jigga-jigga-genius!

The recently elected token president of the Republican Party states that he wants to “convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings,” with a plan to implement a PR campaign to update the GOP brand that will be “avant garde” and “will surprise everyone – off the hook.”

Steele believes that “Republican” is seen only as the party of the deep-South and red states, and that to turn around their catastrophic failures in the last few years, they simply need to “reach beyond” their comfort zone, out to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” appealing to “young people and moms” and the all-important voting bloc of “one-armed midgets” (yes, yes he did say “one-armed midgets”).

Doing so, he reasons, will show “who we are for the 21st century.”

He’s right! After all, the Republicans chose a totally unqualified and out-of-touch woman to be their VP candidate, probably simply because she is a woman, to counter the enormous effect that women voters had for the Democrats, thanks to Hilary Clinton. That candidate went on to embarrass herself and her party with her nonsensical statements to the press, proving not only her own ignorance, but the stupidity of the Republicans for putting her there in the first place, and fueling the suspicions about the ulterior motives behind her nomination.

It’s the same party that chose a totally unqualified and out-of-touch black man to be the GOP leader, probably simply because he is a black man, to counter the enormous effect that black people had for the Democrats, thanks to Barack Obama. That party leader went on to embarrass himself and his party with his nonsensical statements to the press, proving not only his own ignorance, but the stupidity of the Republicans for putting him there in the first place, fueling the suspicions about the ulterior motives behind his nomination.

Oh wait. That second one was Michael Steele.

So apparently, if he had his way, he himself would not have been elected. If the Republican Party was so in touch with the hip-hop crowd, and young people, and moms, they would never have elected him as their party leader. They would know that you cannot simply start a PR campaign touting the imaginary hipness of the party, and that it would magically make people forget that they were behind the disastrous shape our country is in right now.

They would know that Barack Obama did not win the support of hip-hoppers, young people and moms, and ultimately the majority of the nation, simply because he was cool (though he is), or led an incredible campaign (though he did), has an awareness of social media and technology (though he does) which was implemented perfectly, using iconic imagery, branding and all the tenets of a good marketing campaign.

They would know that all of those things mean nothing without sincerity.

The Obama campaign touted change, change with a purpose. Mr. Steele must have forgetten that the slogan wasn’t “Change For The Sake Of Change” or “Change Because After All People Will Vote For Anyone Not Named Bush”. It was “Change You Can Believe In.” That was the difference.

Now Mr. Steele says the GOP will change. He stated, “I don’t do ‘cutting-edge. That’s what Democrats are doing. We’re going beyond cutting-edge.”

Hmm. Let’s imagine the mindset at work here.

GOP: “Hey! We can appeal to women and moms too!” the party seemed to say, “Look! Sarah Palin!”

Didn’t work.

Then: “Hey! We can appeal to youngsters too! Look! Sarah Palin’s on SNL and Twitter!”

Still didn’t work.

Then, after losing to President Obama: “Hey! We can appeal to blacks too! Look! Michael Steele!”

Now Michael Steele says they need to do something different. “We are in the crapper now,” he so eloquently stated. So he says:

“Hey! We can appeal to women and moms and youngsters and blacks and hip-hoppers and one-armed midgets too! All we have to do is change!”

Changing the party leader’s vernacular to include phrases like “bling-bling” and “off the hook” may fool the ignorant members of the Grand ‘Ol Party into believing that you are in touch with the hip-hop generation, and can somehow cook up a scheme to wrest them away from the President and his party, but will not fool anyone else.

Pay attention to the advertising business Mr. Steele, before you go off hiring big PR firms to orchestrate your makeover. The same young people and members of the urban-suburban hip-hop settings you wish to target, don’t really fall for the okey-doke anymore.

By miserably continuing to get ahead simply by copying what the Democrats were able to do naturally, you, Mr. Steele, are changing nothing.

In fact, Michael Steele, I’ve changed. My mind. You are an iwwit-iwwit-idiot.