Social Media Statistics Aren't Fans

Remember when we talked about how easy it is to buy 1,000 likes on Facebook and the rise of fake fans (aka Sockpuppets)?

Social media's connection to real people continues to become more and more tenuous.

Wired just covered a competition to make Twitter bots that pass as human so well that Twitter themselves can't tell the difference:

Hwang’s bots can be programmed to have different personalities at different times of the day. On midday Friday, TrazHuman is not a happy camper. 

“I feel angry and guilty about it,” says TrazHuman, an artificial intelligence and baseball fan who has been a bit of a bummer to follow these past few weeks. TrazHuman is programmed to alter emotional states between bored, angry, and excited, all the while pumping out about 100 Twitter messages per day. Not surprisingly, given his negativity, TrazHuman is near the bottom of the contest’s leaderboard.

...The contest’s winner, a business school graduate bot with a “strong interest in post-modern art theory,” racked up 14 followers and 15 re-tweets or replies from humans. The followers were worth one point each. A re-tweet or a comment was worth three points. Ecartomony scored 59.

That would be a pretty weak response for a Twitter consultant, but Hwang says that the experiment — and this his his second Socialbot Contest in two years — has proved that bots can both generate followers and conversations. “We definitely see that,” he says.

But looking through Twitter profiles of the bots, there is something else at work here. Almost none of Ecartomony’s followers are real people. They’re mostly corporate Twitter types that appear to follow just about anyone who follows them.

For more than half a century, the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence has been to create a program that is indistinguishable from a human. But the things that we do on Twitter and other social media have become so concise and so robotic that maybe it no longer takes the same effort to pass as a human.

Chasing social media numbers is a highly deceptive goal. Since the numbers are easy to track, it's easy to feel like you're "winning" if you keep seeing growth. But if the faces behind these numbers aren't committed humans, the numbers don't mean anything.

The only value of a social media follower is the Customer Lifetime Value. Investing in a real fan can net you purchases on the next show, a shirt, or even a personal recommendation for your music that results in another fan. Investing in a fake fan returns nothing more than "a possible chance to deceptively lure in a new fan".

If you make an excellent album and market well, social media numbers will go up as a consequence. Music is the goal, not numbers.

Are Facebook's "Promoted Posts" Good or Bad for Bands?

There's been a huge uproar about how Facebook's new Promoted Posts feature is "screwing" local bands and businesses by limiting how many fans' newsfeeds actually show status updates. Dangerous Minds described it as "a James Bond villain calmly demanding that a $365 million dollar ransom gets collected from all the Mom & Pop businesses who use Facebook."

Not quite.

Facebook has been hiding status updates for years. Facebook accomplishes this by adjusting your newsfeed according to which people, topics and events you care about. If you Like a series of DJs, Facebook will ensure DJ-related posts get seen. If you Hide Updates from all of your overly-political friends, Facebook will reduce the visibility of politics in your feed. Again, Facebook has been trying to increase user retention using data mining for years. Adjusting your newsfeed to what you find relevant is about making a better experience to the user.

Casey Johnston's article in ArsTechnica elaborates:

...if your news feed was an equal-opportunity space, it would be at this point nothing but offers for FarmVille produce and a thousand status updates on everyone's new babies. Should that happen, your interest in checking the service might wane. Facebook doesn't show you everything every person or brand you subscribe to says, and it's always been that way.

The only difference with Promoted Posts is that now you can increase your posts' "newsfeed importance" for really important posts, such as announcing a new album.

The article continues:

Facebook told Ars separately that the converse of this statement is also true: if a post receives few or mostly negative reactions, it is more expensive for the page owner to promote than if the post were popular on its own, and such posts don't reach as far. The goal is to make sure that even promoted posts feel relevant and interesting to read.

Making it harder for crappy posts to fill up your newsfeed is a very, very good thing.

Promoted posts provide a balance between keeping advertisers (paying customers) happy while not scaring away facebook users (data for paying customers) with cluttered newsfeeds. Considering Facebook's terrible stock performance it's a surprise the measures the company has taken to make more money aren't more obtrusive.

So what's the final verdict on promoted posts?

If you're enriching your fans, you pay less and get noticed more. If you're wasting fans' time, you pay more and get noticed less.

Poor Uses of Social Media

Social media revolves around Permission Marketing.

As Seth Godin describes it;

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. 

If you're not adding value to your fans' newsfeed/social media, don't be surprised when they unfollow you. 

Please, no more "what's your favorite sandwich?" posts. (Local / mid-level bands, I'm looking at you.)

These "question" posts don't accomplish or convey anything. You don't really care about any responses as long as you get likes or comments. This insincerity is passive-aggressive and manipulative.

Fans are allergic to insincerity.

Fans don't fall in love with your music because you ask them what type of bed sheets they think are the best. Fans want to know about your art and your stories. That's what connecting to fans is about. Loving a band is an identity decision. 

Likes and follows are only as valuable as the fans behind the numbers. Don't obsess over social media numbers simply because they're easy to quantify. Focus on doing what you do best, bringing art and value to your fans.

Please respect your fans' time and attention.

If you don't have anything worth reading to post, don't post.

Why I Don't Spend Time On Internet Music Startups

Every day there's a new "social" music startup that promises to revolutionize the music industry.

Every day another one goes out of business.

There's no need to pay attention to a new service until it gets too huge to ignore. A majority of these startups will be a net waste of your time.

1: Brand new social websites offer low value.

The value of a network comes from how many other people are in the network (see Metcalf's Law). As much as I'd like them to, fax machines won't die because they're ubiquitious and easy to adopt. Each additional fax machine purchased makes every other fax machine more valuable. If you're the only one with a fax machine, it's a useless piece of rubbish.

2: Startups fail all the time.

63% of IT startups fail within 4 years. If I'm going to put in substantial effort, I don't want to risk that a substantial amount of it will be worthless in a few years.

3: There are costs (time, money, sanity) to using a new service.

Setting up a website takes time. Effetively marketing a website takes even more time and effort. Given how you've got limited time, money and sanity to spend on marketing, each additional avenue of promotion will dilute the amount of marketing weight you can put into all of your marketing channels. Half-assed marketing is good for no one.
 
4: Go where your fans are. 

I don't play music for startup companies, I play music for fans.

Unless your fans love being early adoptors of new tech, which they may well be, there's no incentive for you to invest heavy amount of time into some "Web 2.0 Startup That Will Revolutionalize The Industry." Not only will you have to learn the new service, so will your fans.

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In choosing to adopt an unproven service, you've effecticvely increased the amount of effort required to be a fan.

Which brings me back to important point number inifity of The New Music Industry:

Making your music more difficult to hear is 9/10 times a bad idea.

Sure, Beck's sheet-music-only album got a lot of press, but think of how limited the market for the item is (groups of musicians, who are willing to assemble to learn the songs). As an art piece, it's a really sweet concept and a throwback to the history of music. But will Beck have fans demanding these songs at a show? Probably not.

I'm not saying startups are a bad thing, nor do I want them to fail. I'd love for nothing more than gamechangers like Bandcamp to show up in droves. Innovation helps everyone. Avoiding startups and following only the winners is the best decision for one band, not bands in aggregate.

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Coda: One glaring problem I see with many music startups is they try to attract bands AND fans at the same time. Without fans, a band is posting in oblivion and wasting time. Without bands, fans don't have much reason to add another login name and password to their list. A website would be much wiser to focus on one group first, putting all effort into growing the "artist" or "fan" network as fast as possible instead of dividing efforts between the two camps. The value of a network is how many people are involved.

How NOT To Social Network

Myspace, as a medium for social networking, is useless. The signal to noise ratio has plummeted so low that there is essentially no point in trying to reach fans through MySpace. It's all comment spam, automatic "friending" programs, and bots. Most myspace comment boards look like this:

Do your fans really want to be spoken to in this way? What does it say about you as an artist if you use the same tactics that mass junk mail operations to reach them? Does ANYONE ever have meaningful conversations through this medium that lead to a minor fan to becoming a superfan?

Let's think about this. You are a musician, and you have limited time. Presumably, you are much better at music than most other things and should be spending most of your time on it if that's how you intend to create a career. As such, you should always be conscious of the return on your investments (ROI), whether you're spending time, money, trust, or fan attention (yes, it IS a currency). If you put in x amount of time putting up myspace comments, how do you expect this time spent to pay you back? If you're sending out spammed messages, you're spending time, attention, and trust.

Would it take 10 of these comment posting to lead to someone buying a song? Probably not. How about 100? A 1000? Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a comment posted on a MySpace page and thought "Hmm, I should give these guys ten bucks" ?

Think on it.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

When you are choosing how you're going to market your music and talk to your fans, be very conscious of your ROI. You've got limited resources. When you spend, make sure that you'll be getting more back than you spent.

Unless, of course, you really want to get burned out and quit music forever. Then by all means spend frivolously!