I really need to practice writing shorter posts. It’s harder to keep
people’s attention these days and often, you just want to hit them with
the sharp end of an idea.
Right now, I’m posting about my membership site and artist community
New Music Marketing it’s really getting over run by spammers and I don’t even have much foundation content there.
So the outcome is a forum needs a lot more maintenance than a blog.
But I really feel I need to get active there.
I don’t care about controlling the content. What I’m motivated by is
creating a “tribal” environment. I don’t claim to be an expert, but
there is clearly a methodology I’m developing and I’m happy to discuss
this on my blog in kind of broad theoretical terms, but I’m desperate
to ensure my actual clients are the first to benefit from my knowledge
and I like the idea that inside the forum, discussing practical
techniques as they apply to specific artists, as well as being
completely open about what is available in terms of scripts, bots,
automation, outsourcing, etc. - this is stuff I’m not keen to discuss
on my by public blog, because I generally tend to charge for it, that’s
my living!
The idea for the forum originally came from all the value I was
putting into 1-on-1 email consultations and wanting other clients to
benefit from what I was saying.
A lot of my clients, I have to accept, are not very advanced in web
2.0 and often this is precisely why they’ve come to me. They don’t read
my blog and for a lot of them the pieces of the puzzle are only slowly
coming together.
The forum can become an interactive environment which could provide
controlled access to content and 3rd parties - outsourced staff such as
graphic deigners, web designers - who could work directly with artists.
So all I need to do is focus on bringing my clients together there.
I see this as being efficient without even thinking about the main
point of such forums - you’re leveraging your user base for content and
feedback. When you can control your tribe within such an environment
which is perceived to be somewhat insular, we can talk freely about the
issues and what blind spots might be coming up for artists in the
process - I can respond directly to their actual needs, rather than
waffling on my blog.
It’s just a bit of a mess in there right now! I had plans. But those
plans have been on hold. These holidays hopefully I’m able to rally and
move forward with this platform. It’s something new, I see benefits, I
see scale, I just have to tackle the challenge of maintaining it to a
point I can dedicate outsourced staff to it’s upkeep.
Or at least stop the spam!