This Quarter, Spriending Will Be Down

I have tried to coin this term through my own blog but Feedburner stats show it’s not getting much traffic these days, so perhaps it will catch on from here.

In my quest for power and glory I have tried many things to promote my music and among those things is what many consider a must have: presence on Myspace. When I started my first Myspace music page, I wasn’t thinking about marketing in the technical sense but recognized that I could achieve a better reach through its communities.

Once my first page was gaining momentum and I had begun to finish more of my vocal work, I decided to re-brand some songs as done by Jeremy Glenn rather than my other moniker MakeShift and give JG his own Myspace page.

One would have thought it easy then to draw all of the same fans for JG as for MS. But it was not the case. What I began to realize was that :

1. The fans of MS music wouldn’t necessarily like the JG music; and
2. By this time the rest of the world had caught on to Myspace and were flooding its servers with more pages, more media and more text.

JG just seemed to get lost in the white noise of Myspace. My attack plan therefore became what I call spriending: spamming for friends on Myspace. I did the math to determine how I could get 500 in a month and went at it. The results, however, have been less than positive and I still feel that JG is lost in the Great White Noise of Myspace.

So how do I combat this problem? My good friend and musical ally Todd “Rod Skimmins” Simmons (listen to MSM shows 5&6) gave me what I consider the best advice (and something that was mentioned in one of my marketing resources, Self-Promotion for the Creative Person): building a relationship.

Todd has found the best results promoting his DJ duo Gang of Two and their Bang the Party night by sending personalized messages to each “new friend” and being sure that their musical tastes fall in line with what Gang of Two play on their night. He says this way he fosters a relationship instead of coming off as just another “friend” with a personal interest. He says he is much more likely to see those people at the party and have them coming back again and again. Next Step, trying it out with my own site.