Alright, after many hours spent befuddled about what is good and bad about iLike, I think I finally have my head around what I like about iLike (Tee hee).  Mind you, I will never claim that I know what is best for you, rather I will only share my own experience with these applications in the hopes to point you in the right direction to discover you own best way of doing things.  I’m glad I have a cause like MuseZu to make me actually get on the computer and begin to dissect all these things.

At the San Francisco Music Tech Summit Zoey Keating, a professional cellist, said what I thought was the most eloquent thing regarding promotion strategies:

“Too prevalent is the myth of the break.  At some point you become omnipresent and things start happening.  You have to operate in as many spheres as possible.”

That’s easy for her to say.  Through no effort of her own she was one of the three suggested people to follow that Twitter recommends to you upon signup.  Now that’s lucky, and quite the optimization of one sphere.  At any rate she has quite a point.  The idea that some well heeled record company executive will “discover” you and you’ll rocket up to mega-stardom is an unfortunate illusion; one that has most likely kept a lot of people from ever doing anything.  So, iLike is one sphere we need to operate in.  Here’s what I find useful:

1) It makes your band’s Facebook page look way cool when you like the two, because you can put an awesome looking 955×230 banner.  Check out mine.  I’m no artist so I just put a jpg that says “Incredible looking logo goes here”.  I’ll have that looking incredible before too long!

2) Did you notice the “dedicate” link?  I think that’s cool.  I dedicated a few of my songs to some applicable people yesterday and got some lovely responses.  It’s a quick way to get impression number one with your Facebook friends.  After all, you certainly can’t be regularly giving rides to all 313 people!  (refer to this article if that didn’t register.)  Now you want to be natural about this (genuinely natural – people can see through self promotion if your heart isn’t in the right place) and don’t always dedicate your music to people.  Lead the pack here, dedicating songs to people is cool and I haven’t noticed ANY of my Facebook friends doing it.  Put that in your 5 minutes a day list.  Every day randomly pick a few friends and dedicate a song to each.  Make one out of every 5 your song and it’ll have more weight.  This is advertising, and it’s free.

3) iLike is claiming it’s going to integrate with Myspace in the near future, which is really cool because I HATE logging on to Myspace.  But hey, there are people there so you gotta have a presence in that sphere as well.  It also links with your twitter.  The less effort you have to put forth in order to have more presence in more spheres is good.

4) Lastly, for $195 they will build you an iPhone app.  Pretty cool, but it’s much like having a CD.  If nobody knows about you to download your app or listen to your CD, then it’s essentially worthless.

Well, that’s the good I took from iLike, and I will definitely be incorporating it into my daily input of social media effort.  You always need to keep in mind that iLike is a platform through which you can do things.  It doesn’t do anything for you.  If you set up your iLike account and then don’t interact with the world through it, it’s like making a delicious meal and not inviting anyone over to enjoy it with you.

Next week: ReverbNation!

MuseZu and Be Heard!

Ryan

image courtesty of Michaeldb @ Dreamstime.com

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