The Center Of Your Online Universe

Here's another excerpt from the 2nd edition of my Music 3.0 book, this time about how to keep your online life from overwhelming you, as well as making it more efficient as well. This is called "social media management," and is a big part of the book, but you can get the general concept from this excerpt
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"So many areas of social media require attention that it can get a bit overwhelming at times, and that’s when you need a social-media management strategy. 

A common mistake that artists who manage their own social-media assets make is to have too many focal points (like YouTube, their Website, their blog, Twitter, and Reverb Nation, for example) all residing in different places and requiring separate updates. You can imagine how tough it is to keep every one of those sites updated regularly! Worse is the fact that it’s confusing for the fan, who just wants a single place to visit. Yet another problem is that you may be collecting email addresses from each site and they may all be going on different mailing lists.

The solution is to use one site (usually your Website) as a your main focal site and use that to feed daily updates and info to all the others via RSS or social-media broadcast tools like Dijit (dijit.com) or Ping (ping.fm). This means that you only need to do the work of updating a single site, with all the others getting updated at the same time.

The second component of this management strategy would be to have all of your satellite sites (blog, Facebook, and so on) designed in such a way to feed your social media viewers into your website (see the graphic on the left). At a bare minimum, the email registration of each satellite site should feed into the same list as your main site.

At some point social-media management gets too complex for the artist to maintain, and third-party help is needed. This is usually a good thing, since you’ve progressed to a point that things are so massive that you need help. Furthermore, a company that specializes in social-media management can keep you current with new tools and techniques that you might not be aware of. Even when outside help arrives, remember that you are still the one that drives the bus. Be sure to take part in all strategy discussions, but leave the actual facilitation to the company you’ve hired.

So to summarize, here are 6 ways that you can keep your online life from getting too complicated.

1. Keep a single site as your main focal point.

2. Feed all your updates from your main site via RSS or social media broadcast apps.

3. Develop your satellite sites so they all feed viewers into your main site.

4. Email list subscribers from all sites should go to same master list.

5. Get 3^rd party help when you get overwhelmed.

6. Keep driving the bus!"

To read additional excerpts from Music 3.0 and my other books, visit bobbyowsinski.com.

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