A Manager to Manage Your Tweets

Jeanette Lundgren aka "Mom Hen" heads up Mother Hen Promotions.

I have a job that didn’t exist five years ago. I’m a social media manager for independent musicians. In the old days, promoting a musician meant putting together a press kit with a CD, paper press release, photocopies of reviews and interviews from magazines, and any number of other promotional items that might interest the receiver. It meant sending out postcards to fans to remind them of upcoming shows. It was slow, clunky, and hit-or-miss.

Today, it means shouting out from the internet rooftops about shows, reviews, blogs, videos, new songs, radio-play – practically anything that a fan or a friend will want to know about a musician. I am able to do this in up-to-the-minute reports via MySpace, Twitter, ReverbNation, Facebook, Sonicbids, YouTube, AirPlay Direct, Yahoo and Google groups, and e-mail mailing lists. Phew!

A musician hires me because they simply don’t have time to keep up with all of these tools and update them regularly. In upcoming posts, I will talk about each tool separately, and the best way to use each if you’re an aspiring, semi-professional, or professional musician.

Another way to use the internet for your music, besides promotion, is to locate venues. Say you will be touring through Colorado, but you have 200 miles in between stops. You can simply do a search for “Colorado music venues” or “Colorado music coffeeshops” or become a member of House Concerts In Your Home or Indie Venue Bible to find locations you may not have known about.

In the old days, you’d send your CD (or LP…) out to a radio station – and wait. Now, you can simply point the station to a location where your MP3 or .wav files live so they can instantly download and play your music to their radio audiences – whether they are terrestrial (tower-based), satellite, internet, or podcasting radio stations. 

Another way to use the internet is to approach websites and blogs and ask if someone will review your album or interview you about your music. If something is published, you can then run the link on your site, or copy the interview and clearly display the source, copyright, and permissions.

Social media operates largely as a barter system. The website or radio station writes about you or plays your music as a way to increase readers or listeners, and you, in turn, help promote the website or radio station when you post a link from the site or station to your own sites.

The internet is basically a civil place. Just make sure that you are not consistently asking for favors, but offering them as well. And check out Mashable to stay up to date on Web 2.0 and social media trends.

Jeanette Lundgren aka “Mom Hen” heads up Mother Hen Promotions, a social media management company that represents the social media needs of independent musicians that are not signed by major labels. Her clients include Tracy Newman and John Batdorf, both of whom were interviewed by Music After 50, a good example of Mom Hen’s efforts paying off!