How I ran social media for One Movement For Music Perth, July-October 2009

This was my first venture into blogging on behalf of a commercial entity. It was a massive learning experience and I’m grateful for the opportunity to run what I believe was the first dedicated Australian music festival blog.

The first One Movement For Music Perth ran October 16-18 2009. The event was a bold combination of music industry summit, artist showcase festival, and local artist street performance. Think of it as a nascent SXSW for the Southern Hemisphere.

Between July and October 2009, Nick and I ran One Movement’s blog and social media presence.

Located at onemovementword.com, the One Movement blog became the central hub of online activity surrounding the event. We published interviews, festival announcements, guest posts, a ‘four questions with‘ series, and event coverage.

From July-October, traffic looked like this:

One Movement promoters Sunset Events handed over the event Facebook and Twitter accounts to us in mid-September.

By the end of October, our Facebook fans looked like this:

And our Twitter followers looked like this: (Source: TwitterCounter)

So, what worked for us when blogging for One Movement?

1. Short, sharp posts that featured the input of festival artists. The ‘four questions‘ series proved particularly popular and attracted the attention of the fanbases surrounding the dozens of bands we profiled. (Witness the Big Day Out blog successfully replicating our formula here)
2. The guest post by Kyle Bylin of Hypebot, and the couple of One Movement-related placements we coordinated on their site.
3. Our Indonesian music industry feature, which was the second most popular entry on the blog.
4. Embedding music videos wherever possible to encourage visitors to stay on-site. This was especially useful during ‘four questions‘, as we asked every respondent to name their favourite song of the week, and included the music videos where we could.
5. Seeding exclusive content among fan communities. This involved posting links to the blog articles on artists’ Facebook pages, fan forums, and Last.FM profiles as soon as relevant articles were published. We also used artists’ Twitter usernames where possible to notify them of the new content, and encourage them to retweet the content.

Why did these work?

1. Put simply, people want to read artists’ opinions. They also want to know what artists are listening to; what’s influencing their work. The ‘favourite song of the week’ offered a quick snapshot into the artists’ mind, and offered a talking point for their fans.
2. Hypebot is a popular music news destination, and my relationship with associate editor Kyle Bylin ensured that he directed traffic off-site to provide OMW with the exclusive on his latest article, which we used as a guest post.
3. Indonesians are interested in reading about analyses of their music industry, since it appears that such articles are few and far between. Check out the response on Indonesian band The Super Insurgent Group of Intemperance Talent’s Facebook page.
4. Most users will stay on the blog to watch the embedded videos, which increases ‘time on site’ metrics. And obviously, a combination of image, video and text makes for a visually appealing blog.
5. We decided early into the ‘four questions’ series that it’d be valuable to make each artists’ fan communities aware of the new content by posting the link on the most popular Facebook page/group, their Last.FM profile, and by including the artist as an @reply in our One Movement Twitter updates whenever we posted new content. This ensured that any switched-on fan (or fansite/forum operator) could easily find new content relevant to their artist, and reblog it wherever possible.

Facebook and Twitter

Once we were in charge of the event Facebook and Twitter, we built communities by posting daily updates based on the blog content, as well as responding to @replies and Wall posts as they happened.

Project Outcomes

• 6,700+ unique visitors to the event blog, One Movement Word
• 600+ Facebook fans
• 280+ Twitter followers

What did this mean for One Movement?

• Within four months, a thousands-strong community of passionate music fans built around a new event on the Australian festival calendar.
• Accolades surrounding the construction and ongoing maintenance of the first popular blog built around an Australian music festival.
• The ability to listen to, and learn directly from these engaged fanbases. (see below; click for full-size)

This post that originally appeared on waycooljnr.