​A wonderful discovery with this business: Many musicians are music geeks as well. I sometimes wondered if it was only the non-rock stars like myself who could spend hours discussing info about bands culled from interviews, liner notes, etc. 

Yesterday I had a great discussion with client Mark Bryan (pictured) of Hootie and the Blowfish. In addition to talking about his new solo album, we also discussed REM, Eric Clapton, The Police, Sting, Little Big Town, Lindsey Buckingham, and – a band I had never heard of before – Scruffy The Cat. 

As many have said, advantages in business often come when you play to your strengths. Doing social media work for musicians (and also businesses) definitely plays to my natural delight in digging for stories, quotes, and interesting bits of information. - Cris

​Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest all use algorithms that determine how many people see your posts and which people see your posts. You do not have full organic reach to all of your followers.

​Many people use ad blockers with their web browsers. These people do not see any ads you run in the right column of Facebook.

​A reminder about why it is important to: 
- Be platform agnostic
- Create content that can work on multiple environments
- Update the content of your own website (a property you own and control)

​Customize posts for each platform you post them on. 

Many people push posts from Instagram over to Facebook. Thus their posts are filled with hashtags that, while important on Instagram, are ignored on Facebook and just create a big mess. 

Also, the tags they used in Instagram for other profiles don’t work in Facebook. So the post on Facebook then has names with the @ symbol attached that don't link anywhere.

Thursday I witnessed an example of "the show must go on." Two hours before sound check, Kurt Neumann of clients the BoDeans found out his mom had died.
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Despite this heartache, he still put on a great concert, dedicating a song to his mom early in the show.

​As various people have pointed out recently, if you advertise or boost a post on a social media platform, then you are their customer. If you just use the platform -- posting, liking, sharing -- then you are their product. 

I have found that even a small boost can put a platform's algorithm more on your side. 

However, it is important that you also target an audience already open to hearing from you.

One of the key sentences from this New York Times piece - "The tech giants have upended much of society, but even they have difficulty understanding and navigating the chaos of the new platforms they have built."

While this has resulted in some massive Snafus recently, I think it is also a sign of opportunity and possibilities. The tech behemoths don't have the stranglehold on things that they would like you to believe.

​According to an article in the New York Times, "Google has found evidence that Russian agents bought ads on its wide-ranging networks in an effort to interfere with the 2016 presidential campaign."

I see it as a warning about what can happen in the world of social media when you lean so heavily on automation that things are on cruise control and there is no actual person at the steering wheel. 

Just because something can be automated doesn't mean it should.