Ariel: If you could just start by introducing yourself and I’d love it if you could maybe just give a very, very Cliff Note version of how in the hell you found Twitter and how you came to it, kind of what your life was like. What happened and how did it happen? Then, I love the way you talk about it and how it’s radically shifted your life. Then we’re going to go in and I’d love to get your opinions and input on how a creative person can use it because I’ve been getting a lot of push-back from my community of musicians who are a little bit skeptical. They feel like being musicians is very, very important but they don’t really understand the concept of the whole thing and why and how it could benefit them. The goal here is to kind of get them…win them over and then towards the end of the call I’d love to talk about just some practical things that they can do that could help get them on the courts quickly, so that they feel like it’s making an impact. The few that I have had sign up end up signing up and then saying things to me like, “well, this didn’t do anything.” That’s when I look and they’re following no one and they didn’t really get it. That’s a lot, but please introduce yourself and if you could just start with a little background on who you are in this community.
Laura: Absolutely. The first thing you asked was how did I find Twitter in the first place. I found it in a fairly typical way, which was just that as I started my serious blogging in March and April 2007, it was definitely the talk of the town. The blog-erati or whatever you’d like to call the particularly well-known bloggers in the social media space were all saying, “oh my God, this thing is great.” None of them could really articulate why in a way that was particularly convincing. But they talked about it enough that I went and I signed up and looked at it and I thought it was dumb. Just like everybody. It looked stupid. Twitter is the dumbest thing you will ever see. But the truth is it… Now I sound like an evangelical crazy woman. It has incredible power and it takes time to learn that.
What happened was that those first couple months I thought it was dumb. I even blogged it was dumb. Yes, the post is still up. You can go read it and laugh. Around May, I noticed a guy and he mentioned it very incidentally in a blog post and I clicked into his Twitter stream and it was full of really productive things he’d been doing. He’d been taking mentoring meetings. He’d been going to networking events. He’d been doing a bunch of really smart things. This is a 19-year-old kid out in Silicone Valley who’d already founded two companies. He was kind of an inspiring person to watch anyway and this idea that you could watch little snippets from his life as he felt inclined to unleash them made me realize that’s one of the oldest rules in the book of business success, is surround yourself with successful people.
So I started following him and because of the way Twitter is set up, you just kind of wander around and find people. It’s very much accepted that you would be reading someone’s Twitter who you don’t know. So I wandered around who he was following, who he thought was motivating, and I picked up maybe a dozen, maybe twenty people to read. They say follow on Twitter, but follow’s a little freaky. I call it read. Who were just doing interesting things and saying smart, interesting things. I really enjoyed watching that stream come by when I had time. It’s a great work break. It is easy to get drawn in and spend a little too much time there. You do have to watch for that, because you’re going from being who you are your whole life to suddenly being surrounded by people who are really intellectually stimulating, who maybe have common interests with you that you didn’t know that many other people were into the thing you’re into before. It’s a really refreshing, exciting experience.
So what happened, four days after that blog post, a group in Boston got together in public and just said, okay, you know, if you’re following me on Twitter, you’re invited to come out for a beer. Okay, that struck me as really bizarre. But I went. Young mom, two kids under two. I did not need big excuses to get out of the house. We were all meeting at a public place so it wasn’t particularly worrisome. These turned out to be some of the real rock stars of social media. Scott Monty’s gone on to head up social media for all of Ford worldwide. Steve Garfield, who’s one of the first video bloggers ever and has been in Time Magazine and all this stuff. Brian Person, who’s just the heart and soul of Twitter for many of us. We had a great time and that really cemented it.
Fast forward about four months. People started to really start following me out of nowhere and I wasn’t sure why because I really wasn’t trying to build an audience or pursue an audience. But from the New Media & Podcasting Expo… Do you remember that last year, Ariel?
Ariel: Sure, absolutely.
Laura: I think I had somewhere between 300 and 600 followers then. Now I’m starting to approach 7,000 already. It’s really kind of crazy. So one of the things I’m trying to show other people and especially musicians, my God, the opportunity for musicians is huge. If an ordinary person like me can suddenly get an audience and a micro, micro, mini celebrity kind of thing going on, someone with a bona fide audience and something to constantly give their audience, like their music, and relationships to build and peaks into their lives, can really build something substantial using Twitter. The other thing to remember is you’re not just sharing text and it’s not even just text and links. Through those links you can share audio, you can share photographs, you can share video, you can share live video streaming off a cell phone that you carry with you. Imagine that. You’re backstage at a gig warming up and you suddenly give your fans a little sneak preview into what the sound check is like. The type of content you can offer your fans for essentially free, because it’s just the time you take to put into it… And from a mobile base, because I think if you’re on tour, musicians, actors, and executives all fit this profile of probably having some kind of mobile phone with them and being constantly in motion. So it’s very hard for someone like that to sit down and blog or really spend a lot of time in front of a computer trying to share content. Being able to do it through your mobile is really powerful and cool.
Ariel: Awesome.
Laura: You also asked me a little bit about how my life changed. It’s been absolutely surreal. I’m being followed now by somebody who’s known me since I was born. It’s another kid I grew up with in an extended family vacation that we take every year. There’s like 36 of us and we’ve been going for 36 years. It’s pretty crazy. So he just started following me on Twitter, because he just went to work for a company where a lot of my Twitter friends work. It’s so funny because he knows me from real life. We hung out in May. Now he’s sort of stumbling through my work life. Last time I told him about the Seth Godin thing. He said, “oh, you really ought to write a book or something, ha, ha, ha.” I said, “oh, yeah, no, actually I have an agent with ICM, I am writing a book.” He’s like, “really?”.
So even my friends kind of don’t understand what’s happened and I’m really still coming to terms with it. But I’ve been in a lot of newspapers. I’ve been in some magazines. I’ve had a lot of professional opportunities come my way. Sorry, I just kind of alluded to, but we didn’t talk it recorded here on the call, I just found out this morning that marketing and business guru, Seth Godin, in his new book Tribes mentions the effect of what I’ve done with Twitter and what’s happened to me and the kind of business outcomes that have come from it.
It’s something to explore and I always encourage people to feel free to rip on it. Feel free to say it looks stupid. Feel free to say, “I don’t get it.” But give it an honest try. And I met you through Twitter.
Ariel: Yeah, this is the back story of how I met Laura.
That was a great story, that we were following each other somehow and so we had some vague awareness of each other. You were, from the kindness of your heart, when I was coming to New York for Pod Camp and said, “anybody got a couch I can surf?” you opened up your home to me. That meant so much. I can’t even say.
Ariel: That’s the other thing I’ve found about Twitter. It’s amazing how people show up. I had someone I was following the other day and his dog got really, really sick and actually passed away. It was someone I didn’t really know, but because I love animals I wrote him a really sweet note and just said, so sorry. I actually ended up meeting him at a conference and he said, “you know, some of my best friends didn’t say anything to me and you did.” It’s interesting. You think it’s this weird impersonal thing, this giant IM in the sky which is how I like to explain it to people who don’t know what it is. And then you can end up making these real, real connections through it.
Laura: I tried to blog about that this weekend because I got going on a few Tweets in a row about, look, it’s… A lot of what makes Twitter so powerful is that it’s not in-your-face business communication. It’s not that face-to-face, I want something from you, here’s my business card, trying to really make it transactional. It’s this very authentic… First of all, you’re only remarking on stuff that you would just remark on out of the power of your own heart. For companies learning about how people feel about their products, it’s very powerful because it’s very, very authentic information. That depth and authenticity also means that you could go to a total stranger’s Twitter page right now and read their last one to four pages of Tweets, just little, short, 140-character SMS links comments and remarks and jokes and complaints. You read four pages of that, it’s maybe 80 little Tweets. So from 80 little tiny remarks about somebody, you get an amazingly accurate sense of what they’re like. It’s very hard to convince people that that is so, but the more I’ve interacted with people, the more I’ve discovered new personalities on Twitter that…
Incidentally, one big mistake that people who haven’t seen this before make, they think it all happens online. The really major friendships and business relationships and opportunities that have come to me have been a lasagna, different layers. Meeting online, meeting at a conference, hanging out online more, seeing each other at another event, building up a big kind of connected thing. But when I do meet the people in person, it is true that I know them pretty well, just from those little offhand remarks. And it always astonishes me.
Ariel: It always astonishes me, too. People will see me and be like, “how was California?” “How do you know I was in California?” Then I realize, oh, yeah.
Laura: And it’s not just knowing you were in California. It’s the remarks you made when you were on the Pacific Coast. They feel the same way about the Pacific Coast and you’re that much more connected to them now.
Ariel: Exactly. Let’s move on to Twitter specifically for musicians and some practical things. We’ve kind of now given you an overview of who Laura is how she ended up doing it. But I think that there is a plague that happens in the music and artistic community. That plague is thinking that the only way to make a community is by exposing people to your music. I see artists make this mistake consistently. They’re so trained to talk about their music and just go up to someone and give them a flyer or whatever, that they forget there’s an entire other side to them. This, as a traditional publicist, discovering Twitter and getting into it, I had to really lobotomize my old self as the person that was trained. Okay, this is how you create a promotion. You write a release and then you release it and it’s very one-way [unintelligible]. I think this is how a lot of us see promotion to this day.
Laura: Right.
Ariel: It’s all about I must tell everyone everything in one page and blast it. What Twitter is about is it’s the antithesis of this. It’s actually scorned upon to over-hype or over-market. Can you talk a little bit about that and then I’d love to maybe try to set up a roadmap for musicians that might be interested in joining but are completely confused and they don’t know who to follow and they don’t know anyone. That’s another big complaint I get. No one I know is on it.
Laura: Yeah, you need that critical mass for it to make sense. One of the first thing I would say to any musician listening to this, let’s face it, obviously, you only write music and you only perform music so you can sell it and make money. You don’t do it for emotional connection. You don’t do it for artistic expression. You don’t do it because you want to change something in the world. You don’t do it because you feel a certain way and you want other people to understand how you feel. Right?
Ariel: I kind of beg to differ, but…
Laura: Come on. All the basic motivating things that drive you to be a musician are the things that are going to make you really good at something like Twitter. Because Twitter isn’t about push, push, push the music. Obviously, you need the music to sell, to survive and to be able to pour more into your art, but all the things at the center of your art itself, the work you’ve put in, the talent you’ve acquired, the things you know about music, the things you’re trying to figure out in your lyrics or in your performances, all those really soulful things… This sounds silly when I talk to executives, believe me. But for musicians it’s great because all those soulful things are going to be what makes you successful on Twitter. People want personality. They want authenticity. They want a genuine look at the person behind the music. The beautiful thing, especially as you start to get famous as a musician, is that these tools give you the control over your privacy. You’re not dealing with paparazzi coming in and invading. You’re saying, “well, when I want to share something personal, I’m going to let it get out there in a way that is totally on my terms and in a way that benefits my business as a musician financially.”
As for pushing your music, the key is to get… It’s pull. It’s really pull. The key is to get people involved with your life, get people involved with your artistic ideas and expressions, even share little snippets of your music. You can share a photo, say “this is where I write most of my songs.” You can share what you care to share and get people excited and involved. Then, when you do have a new album, when you do have a signing party, when you do have a tour going on, you can let your fans know in a way that they’re going to be excited to tell other people and advocate for you. Because you’ve spent most of your time just engaging with them as humans. If you set up a Twitter account and every day, every Tweet just says, buy my album, buy my album, you’re not going to get any audience there.
Ariel: That’s totally right. What would you do? If you were a musician and you were coming to this site and you didn’t really have a lot of technological social networking know how? What do you do?
Laura: Set up and account and use your brand name, your band, whatever name it is that you want people to be able to find and Google. That’s very important. Don’t just pick a name you like. Whatever name you choose on Twitter it becomes very Google-able. So the thing you want fans and prospective fans to find you as. If you’re just starting out, you might use a generic like singer/songwriter or something. But choose something you’re comfortable with, that you want to do well in search results and that’s the name you want to get out there.
Sign up. Then go to the search page. I think it’s search.twitter.com. It’s that simple. On the search page, start searching key words, words that are important to you, topics that you like to write about, words about the music you play, whether it be the genre or the instrument. Even, gosh, if you want to really bond with other musicians just to start, you can even search the brand names of your band equipment. Like your amplifiers are from so-and-so, you search that keyword, you’re going to find a bunch of other people who’ve made remarks about that word. That gives you a jumping off point. You can click in each of their profiles. Remember how I said reading one to four pages of someone’s Tweets gives you a surprising accurate sense of their personality? Just find random strangers that way and start following them and see if you have anything in common. If you don’t, you just stop following. That’s the way to find people with common interests.
As far as musicians themselves, I know if you ask Ariel or I’m sure you blogged this somewhere, there are a bunch of musicians who’ve done a great job on Twitter and they’re good to follow, just for their examples. I think of Matthew [unintelligible]. I think of Samantha Murphy. You may not know that Henry Rollins Twitters. He doesn’t talk about music a lot, but man, that guy has a personality on him, as anyone knows.
Ariel: The other day I got the best. I got a Twitter that someone had re-Tweeted, which you can do. If you see something you like, you can post. It said something like Henry Rollins just destroyed everything that was cool about him. You went to the page and it was Henry Rollins who had Twittered folding laundry on my bed. Just this image of this iconic man…
Laura: There you go. Henry Rollins folds laundry, too.
Ariel: It was just hilarious. I looked at it and cracked up. If Henry Rollins can admit that he’s not promoting all the time…
Laura: Right, right. So much in music is about generating a buzz, right?
Ariel: Yes.
Laura: The image that Henry Rollins admitted he was doing laundry made someone re-Tweet it, made you re-Tweet it, made you tell the story here. It’s noteworthy, it’s interesting, it’s a funny story to tell. So if you want people to talk about you, you need to give them things to talk about.
Ariel: That’s right.
Laura: That’s an example of one that’s memorable. Certainly with somebody like Henry Rollins, he was huge. But now pretty much just his devoted fan base remembers him and follows him and stuff like that. So he’s able to kind of create new buzz and new information about him by just being him. Which is pretty cool and that can still sell albums.
Ariel: It sure can. They find a few people to follow using keywords. Then what’s the protocol? What should they say? What should they do? What’s the first step they should take? What should they Tweet first?
Laura: Sure. Here’s some jumping off points. One, take some time and set up your profile properly. Think about it this way. You probably had a website made for your music and that either involved spending a bunch of money or hitting up a friend for a favor. You put a lot of thought into it and you really worked it out. Well, here’s a chance to have a free website. It’s not going to be as souped up as your own website, but put a little bit of time. You can set up a static electronic image as your background, just single image, maybe an album cover, maybe a candid of you on the road. Put up a good profile picture. That’s the little, tiny square picture that goes next to all your messages. If you’re in Twitter, you’ll see what I mean. Write a couple things about yourself. Make sure there’s a link to your web page. Just get it all nicely set up so it looks cool when you get there.
As far as the first things to actually say and write, Twitter’s cue question, the jumping off point is, what are you doing. That’s a fine thing to answer. You can just say, “oh, I’m having lunch. Oh, I’m meeting with a band. Oh, we’re rehearsing.” Especially because, as a musician, your life is thought of as very interesting by outsiders so just simply answering that will get you some cool stuff. But I challenge you to maybe take a note here or write down a couple other questions you can think about answering. One of the big things that I think we’re all doing on Twitter is that we’re answering and at the same time asking, “what do we have in common?” I know I’ve gone into situations that I thought were fascinating and I’ve Tweeted, okay, I’m here and I’m doing this and I’m seeing this. People are kind of like, “oh, that’s cool.” But then I Tweet something really dumb like why do we all throw rocks into water. Why is that so compelling? And I get 40 replies because everybody knows that feeling of standing on the shore and just lobbing rocks into the water. So it’s the things people can really identify with.
Here’s an anecdote that has good play into the music world. This was specifically regarding promotion for a play in New York. The person Twittering it was telling about the play and giving a link to buy tickets and saying, “yes, this is my client, but it’s a good play.” I said, “look, I think a more effective approach would be to Tweet questions about the experience of going to a play.” If you say, “what was the first play you ever went to? Have you been to a Broadway show and which one? What do you love about being in the theater? “, people are going to really engage with that and then you can still deliver the same content with the name of the play and the link to buy tickets. But you’ve gotten people’s attention around it. They have a reason to think about that experience and maybe even an urge to want to go see a play. You can do the same thing with concerts, with albums, with whatever stuff you are talking about at the time.
Once you get to be a little more comfortable with the platform and a slightly more advanced user, or right away if you have good tech support, you can create something called a Widget. A Widget is just a little box that can go on any website in the world that is going to contain all the Tweets you’re doing. Because one point for a musician is you’re trying to use this to engage your audience and to share more with them. They may not be on Twitter yet. They probably aren’t on Twitter yet. So rather than try and teach them about this new platform and make them go sign up and make them go log in, you can deliver all the stuff you’re sharing, the photos, the videos, the audio, the remarks, lyrics, whatever it is you’re producing on your own website using a Widget.
Ariel: And you can synch it with your status updates at FaceBook, which I think is an amazing little…
Laura: Exactly. So Twitter almost becomes a little engine for generating content that can go anywhere else. If you have one of those Widgets built, which they’re not expensive, there’s a ton of ways to do it for free, you just need a little tech know how, your fans can pick that up and put it on their own websites. So, again, it becomes a way to help your fans help you and help them have a little piece of you to engage with, to have relationship with and spread the word about.
Ariel: Couple of questions. First of all, how do we follow you? Let us know.
Laura: I am Pistachio. So all you have to remember is the nut and then you have to figure out how to spell it, which can be tricky. But I’m Pistachio on Twitter and if you have any doubt about what I said about the search engine thing, pick a name that you want to be searchable, go to Google from anywhere in the world and search for the word Pistachio, which by the way, is a product, a nut, something people buy, lots of people selling them. Nonetheless, I’m the third result. Sometimes I’m number four or number seven. But generally I’m behind Wikipedia and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Just by interacting with people with that name, I’ve come to own that word in Google. So, yes, please come follow me on Twitter. I’ll warn you, I Tweet a lot, so follow a bunch of other people, too.
Ariel: Aside from Henry Rollins and Samantha Murphy and Matthew Ebolt(?), do you have any other creative people or people that stand out in your mind as people we could…
Laura: There are gobs and gobs of them and they’re going to be different from people’s specific genres. So I can’t think of any other names offhand, but I would say use that search tool. Sarah Burelis(?).
Ariel: That’s right. I think she signed to Sony.
Laura: She’s kind of getting up to speed with it. I wouldn’t say she’s an uber-user. Henry Rollins is like he totally gets it. Many people are on Twitter but don’t quite get how to use it to their advantage. MTV did a promotion from the Music Awards almost over a year ago and it was cool, but it kind of fell flat because there wasn’t a lot of run-up to it and there was no follow-up after it.
Ariel: Yep, they used it. That’s the incorrect use of Twitter.
Laura: Once you’ve built your network there, it is fantastic for organizing little flash mobs, getting extra people to come to your show. It’s just such a great tool for that because people see the Tweet. Oh, ten o’clock at the Orpheum? Yeah, actually I’m around tonight. Maybe I’ll run into town and see that.
Ariel: Thank you so much for your time. I might be sending you a couple questions via e-mail. If you don’t mind, I might want to include this in my new book that I’m doing.
Laura: That would be fantastic. Quick little plug for most musicians starting out, just do this on your own. If you have a lot of success and a lot of traction and you just don’t have time to go figure this out, this is exactly the kind of thing my business does now, is help people understand it, help set them up, help teach them how. We don’t do it for you. We will not outsource it and sort of write your blog for you. But we can make it really easy and fun and show you ways to actually make money off doing it, not just do it for fun and general feel-good audience building.
Thank you so much.
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The Indie Maximum Exposure List is Ariel Hyatt’s manifesto on how indie musicians can realistically profit from Web 2.0 & social media. 