SPAM- It’s a fine line- cross it at your peril !

Confession: we’re still learning about social media, and how to use it appropriately.

 

Yesterday we had an interesting conversation with a couple of good local bloggers, a followed by one of our regular group meetings. All is good, but one thing got us thinking…

“How do we continue to interact with our audience, raise awareness about our existence, and build on the successful listener base we currently have, attract new partners, sponsors, link to more events happening and increase the membership base even further…. but without getting to the point of saturation locally, and dare I say, be considered as sending out spam (in its many forms)?”

One example happened recently. As you know (hopefully) we covered 7 live venues simultaneously at Gigbeth and Drop Beats Not Bombs. Again, all was good and we received good coverage and feedback, not only to the live broadcasts, but the Listen Again features have proved to be winners to (see the Events page). During these events, we had a small “street team” out at the venues, distributing flyers, working hard and physically talking to on-site audiences (yes really, conversations face-to-face with people they’d never met before!) During the mammoth sessions, I took a break and wandered around them all, just to get a feel for the atmosphere at each site, and get some clear-head time. I was amazed at the coverage achieved by the flyering team- they seemed to be everywhere- on every table, at the bars, in the ticket offices, cloakrooms- I even saw people wearing them as additional headgarments. BUT- at what point do you reach saturation, and start to annoy the organisers and participants? Stop now! was the first reaction, but hang on a second…..

We’re trying to raise our profile, get the awareness increased, drive people to the website, and encourage them to listen, interact and enjoy. So how do we do that without physically putting our ‘brand’ under their noses?

There’s also the on-line social media outlets we are part of: this blog, twitter, links to/from other blogs, partner websites, in addition to regular magazine & newspaper features.

Then we start to think about the stage when our ‘branding’ exercises start to become spam. Twitter is a social tool, not an advertising medium. Use it too heavily and in the wrong way, you’re going to really annoy people, so tread very carefully because there is a fine line between interaction, gently raising awareness and spam. One organisation has already tripped up, read here. 

So, what next? How do we continue? We still want to raise awareness of course, but we’re all about community involvement, engagement and promoting the common good of local creative talent. If we’re in everybody’s face all the time, every day- isn’t that going to have a negative effect instead????

Our friends amongst the Twitter community have already posted some worthwhile and positive comments for us to take on board, sincere thanks to them all.

If anyone has the answers, please do get in touch, or even better, post a comment right here.

Thanks for your time.