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:

[More]

Noticed a posting over at MarketingBreakdown.com where Allen Woodstrom feels that hip-hop artists are not having any particular success marketing themselves through Twitter. Which is true, except that it’s not. He states, for example:

MySpace and Facebook have two major things that Twitter does not: users and features. It was estimated that Twitter has about 3.5 million active users. Compare that to Facebook and MySpace, who respectively have 175 and 110 million users and it’s clear which network has the greatest opportunity for exposure.

Unfortunately, he bases this judgment largely on major, established artists, (who are really not even trying to market themselves much on Twitter in the first place. They don’t need to.) It’s a little strange that he wonders about whether Twitter can launch a career like MySpace did to Soulja Boy and Sean Kingston, but his ‘research’ doesn’t take strong upcoming artists into consideration, when many (@charleshamilton, @mickeyfactz, @asherroth) have a good presence on Twitter, and smartly so, as Twitter users skew to include bloggers and journalists, the exact crowd who have been hyping the next generation of hip-hop artists in the first place.

What Mr. Woodstrom doesn’t realize is that the discovered-through-MySpace-buzz phenomenon is turning into the discovered-through-blogger-buzz phenomenon, which is fueled more by the type of folks who are heavy Twitter users, then by the regular MySpace users, regardless of how many there are. To say that hip-hop artists are not finding success using Twitter is not quite accurate, and premature.

- @MannyFaces