While we spend so much time talking about content and “feeding the beast”, it’s also important to remember that your life and career won’t end if you simply take some time away from the computer and don’t post anything.

As I’ve said many times before, there are no rules when it comes to social media. A strategy that works for one person may not work for another. So if you’re feeling a little burnt out and really don’t have anything to say…. don’t. Your fans, friends and followers will still be there when you get back.

Content is of course the key to social media interaction. And one way to have a constant stream of new content is to create a specific type of post that you become known for, kind of like your own “thing”.

When I was in radio we always used to call these “benchmark” features. These were regularly scheduled features that happened at a specific time each day (or perhaps each week). It could be the bad joke of the day; it could be the school lunch menus; or maybe even some type of Hollywood news. You can create a benchmark feature for your social media connections, too.

One of my social media friends has become known for sharing quotes from famous people. They’re usually positive in nature, and I know that I can usually expect 2 or 3 from him in my Twitter feed each day. Like all good benchmark features, I look forward to seeing them.

Another one of my Facebook friends likes to share “Today In Country Music History” information. He may share the #1 song from that day in a previous year, or mention a famous country music performer’s birthday. Again, like all good benchmark features, I have come to expect this every morning in my Facebook feed.

My “thing” is actually pretty silly, but I’ve found that I get a great response from posting that today is “National _________________ Day”. Usually each day is associated with some type of food. For example, tomorrow is National Almond Buttercrunch Day (who knew?!) or July 1st is National Ginger Snap Day. When I post these facts, I also attach a link to a good recipe for that day’s food item.

It takes a little bit of effort to research these obscure national holidays and to find a good recipe to go along with it, but knowing that my social media friends enjoy these tidbits and come to expect them is well worth the time and effort. Plus, if they share them with their friends it can help grow my online visibility.

So what’s your thing? It may take some trial and error to find your online benchmark, but once you’ve found the right “thing” your friends, followers and fans will look forward to seeing your posts every day.

I was reminded of this fact by a recent Facebook post from a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless). This person wanted to share the news with all of their friends that they had just gotten a new job. As expected, the replies from people were incredible. I offered my congratulations as well.

Once I did, as I have my Facebook set up to do, it started sending emails to me with all of the other comments that were coming in. As the day wore on, I noticed that the person sharing the news never came back to acknowledge all of the well wishes. Now to be fair, perhaps they sent personal messages to everyone (but me) offering their thanks. But I really doubt it. You see, this isn’t an isolated incident. I witness this exact same thing all of the time.

Sadly, many of us in both music and media are more comfortable with talking AT people instead of talking WITH people. We’re used to working with microphones, where we control the communications…. Sure, there is some back and forth, but for the most part we do the talking and you do the listening.

And while that does work for some people in the social media world, it doesn’t work for many. Social media is about the interaction, the give and take, it’s about two-way communication. And the people who do a good job of both talking (okay, typing) AND listening will reap the rewards of their online activity.

So, don’t forget to acknowledge those who are paying attention. You’ll find out that a simple “thank you” can go a long way!

As I’ve delved deeper and deeper into social media over the last few years I can honestly say that I’ve come to rely on Ping.fm the most. Most people won’t ever find the need for a service like Ping.fm, but if you find yourself active on more than 1 or 2 sites you’ll find Ping.fm to be an incredible asset.

The folks who created Ping.fm back in 2008 probably had the same frustrations that I did around that time. They found it took a lot of time to post the same status update or micro-blog post to multiple sites. While I could handle posting the same status update individually to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, as I started building connections on sites like Plurk, Jaiku, Bebo and Identi.ca it became even more time consuming. As I continued to explore other additional sites, posting updates became a nightmare.

Now I know you may be saying what the $%#@ are Plurk, Jaiku, Bebo and Identi.ca, and that’s a valid question. But I’ve always felt it important to know about other options in social media, so I’ve been using sites like Plurk, Jaiku, Bebo and Identi.ca in addition to the Big Four. You may not be concerned with those additional sites right now, but it’s truly amazing just how fast the social media world can change. Today, Facebook has the most social media traffic of any site, but less than 2 years ago MySpace ruled social networking. And before that, a site called Friendster was the leader. Who knows; Facebook’s privacy problems might cause a true revolt and Identi.ca could become the next big social media favorite. Or perhaps Bebo, or maybe Brightkite! But that’s another discussion for another day…..

The needs of people in the media and the music business are somewhat unique. While most “normal” people social media to stay connected with friends, we use social media for building fan bases. For us, we’re in the business of relationship building. Yes, there are varying levels for these connections, but for those in the media and music business adding to the network is extremely important. And when you use a social media aggregation site like Ping.fm (and yes there are a few more that we might discuss down the road) you’ll find that social networking becomes a whole lot easier, and becomes less of a chore.

Ping.fm currently integrates with about 40 different social networks, and with the ability to add social content to custom URL’s the opportunities are truly amazing. Ping.fm is free, and is pretty self explanatory. And of course, you can use Ping.fm with your favorite smartphone, too.

Back in January, Ping.fm was acquired by Seesmic a company that creates social media programs for the web, mobile devices, and your desktop. With that acquisition, Ping.fm has been integrated in the Seesmic app for phones like the Droid, iPhone and Blackberry. That has allowed the one-way dialogue aspect of Ping.fm to finally become more of a two-way discussion.

If you’ve been looking for a way to streamline your social media activities yet still be able to maintain your visibility on multiple networking websites, then Ping.fm might just be able to give you more time on the fairways.

Now if you’re like me and you post the same content to multiple social media sites, posting pictures can sometimes become a royal pain. Depending on how many sites you work with, posting the same picture on multiple sites can become quite tedious, and if you’re posting multiple pictures all at one time the task can quickly consume hours of your time.

For most people there are essentially two ways to address posting pictures to your social networking sites, First, you can simply pick one or two of your favorite (i.e. most active) social sites and post the pictures on each site. Or second, you can plan on spending an entire day (or perhaps night) in front of the computer uploading your pictures to each and every site that is part of your social media mix.

If you spend the majority of your time building relationships on the BIG Four (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube), it shouldn’t take too much time posting your pictures by hand. But as you get more involved in social networking, you’ll find that you tend to keep adding networks because a friend has told you that “such and such” ingoing be the next big thing. After awhile you’ll find that even though you don’t spend a lot of time on some of these secondary social media sites, you do have enough people that you’ve made connections with, that you look for things (like pictures) to help you stay involved.

Fortunately when you reach this point, there are a few specialty sites that you can utilize to handle simplifying the task of posting pictures to multiple sites for you. These sites are called social aggregators and they can become a great asset for social media overachievers (I’m guilty!). While they’re not perfect, each of these sites can help you save a lot of time if you’re constantly posting pictures to multiple social media sites,

While there may be new social aggregator sites for pictures popping up, I’m going to focus on three of the sites that I am most familiar with; Mobypicture, Pikchur, and Pixelpipe. If you have a site that you’ve used and would like to share, please make sure to leave a comment.

Each of these sites has their own positives and negatives, and your best bet is to sign up (they’re free) and try them out. As I’ve said before the site that is right for me, may not be right for you.

Mobypicture uses the slogan “shoot and share”. And that sums it up in a nutshell. Mobyshare can post pictures and video directly to 12 different sites and services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Brightkite. But to some people, the one surprising site that you can’t post pictures to is MySpace. If you have an iPhone, Droid or Nokia smartphone you can also download the Mobypicture app and load pictures directly from your phone.

While similar to Mobypicture, Pikchur offers the ability to post pictures and video to 14 different social sites (once again excluding MySpace) and also offers the opportunity to upload using smartphones. The big difference between the two sites is that Pikchur offers both a free service and a pro service. The pro service costs $11.95 per year, and includes such perks as an expanded profile, statistical information, plus the ability to send higher quality images among other features.

The third and final service that we’ll look at is Pixelpipe. Again, like Mobypicture and Pikchur, Pixelpipe allows you to post pictures and video to a wide variety of social media sites. The biggest difference you’ll notice with Pixelpipe, is that it is truly aimed at the heavy social media user, as Pixelpipe offers the opportunity to post to nearly 120 different social sites. Like the other two aggregators, Pixelpipe has apps for most smartphones and is equally as easy to use.

No matter which picture aggregator you feel works best for you, you’ll find it easier than ever to share pictures with your social network. I’d love to hear which solution you find works best for you!

As you know, I spend most of my day (and night) in front of the computer. And that includes weekends and holidays too. And the one thing that I notice is that most of my music and media friends disconnect from their social media outlets most weekends and holidays. I get that! For folks in music and media, social networking….is work! And we want to spend our weekends and holidays away from the computer.

But one thing that many people in the business forget is that our friends, fans, and followers use social media differently than we do. They enjoy social media when they’re away from work… on weekends and holidays! So when we want to be away from the computer, it’s a time when many of connections are actually spending time online.

Well a simple way to stay connected socially, but still be away from your computer is through pictures. Almost every cell phone now has a camera, and with many social networking sites you can post a picture via text message. If you have a smart phone (like an iPhone or a Droid) it’s even easier, as you can post your pictures right from the camera or from an app!

Pictures are a great way to bring your connections along with you when you are spending time with your family and offline friends!
In next week’s Music and Media Monday column, I’ll talk about some of the online picture sites you can use for your social networking!

Since this week’s post is about pictures, I thought I would share a quick one with you…Every patriotic holiday the church near my office puts these flags out to remind us of what the holiday means. I hope you have a great Memorial Day!

Today reminded me of one of those days like when I worked in radio. You know the one, where you feel like a fireman running around trying to put out fires everywhere, but never really get around to doing what you planned on doing that day. But in the end, even though it took me in a different direction than what I was planning, I’m glad it did.

Now, if you’ll indulge me for a moment. Almost every evening as I wrap up my nightly work, I watch an hour of the old (okay not so old) TV show “My Name Is Earl” on TBS. It’s always been one of my favorites. It’s silly and funny, but yet has a good message if you really pay attention. I love the whole karma thing, where karma sometimes takes Earl is a direction different than the one he thinks he’s going in. I really felt like Earl today, when I realized that all of the emails and phone calls were perhaps trying to tell me something. In a way, it was my version of karma today. And it was telling me that I needed to write about something different than I had planned this week.

You see, there was one theme that seemed to run through almost all of my interactions today, and it was about “being social”, or more importantly how to successfully be social. It seems like an odd concept if you really think about it, but when we try to quantify how we’re doing with our social media strategies, we inevitably resort to numbers to justify our success. How many new friends/followers/fans have we added this month, or this week, or even… today? And while the number of people in our list is an important stat, it’s still really should be about connecting. And that got me to thinking….

So, I spent a few minutes this evening going through my Facebook friends list, which for the most part consists of people in the music business or in the media. And I realized that with many of these people the only time that they show up in my timeline is when they’ve accepted someone as a friend or have become a fan of some page. Sadly, there’s no real interaction.

And with so many of my friends scattered all over the country we don’t get to see each other more than once or twice a year, if even that much, and I missing hearing from them. So if that’s the way I feel, how do you think all of your friends, fans or followers are feeling? If you haven’t posted anything in awhile, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, too.

Have you watched anything on TV that made you laugh? Seen any good movies recently? How’s the family? Has your pet done anything cute? How about your children… your spouse… your friends?

Don’t forget to reach out every now and then to strengthen your bond with your social media connections. I promise you, it’s good for your karma.

Over the next couple weeks we’ll be addressing a few sites that you might want to include as part of your social media mix. The first sight that I wanted to touch on is LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/).

LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site that boasts over 65 million users worldwide. And while most people were first introduced to social media through MySpace (long before the term social media was coined), LinkedIn actually predates the launch of MySpace by a few months.

At first glance, LinkedIn may seem to serve as an online résumé, but it truly offers much, much more. LinkedIn allows you to build a contact list of people that you know and trust in your business relationships, or as they prefer to refer to them; connections. LinkedIn is much more formal than sites like Facebook and MySpace, and actually has three levels of connections; your direct (first degree) connections, the connections of your direct connections (second degree connections) and logically, the connections of your second degree connections (third degree connections). This tiered network of connections is a good way for you to solicit introductions to people that you’d like to know professionally through a trusted mutual business contact.

LinkedIn is often used to find employment, create business opportunities, and gather information about potential business connections. Plus, the ability to explore the background of people you encounter in your business exchanges is incredibly useful. You’ll also want to look through the LinkedIn “Answers” section to learn from experts on any topic imaginable.

While you probably won’t spend a great deal of time maintaining your profile on LinkedIn, you’ll want to keep it updated when you have any changes in your professional status.

LinkedIn may not be in the BIG Four for many music business or media professionals, but it does offer unique interaction opportunities outside the social media sites that we normally focus on. Check out LinkedIn, and let’s connect. http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmasonmusic

Whenever I sit down with one of my artists to discuss social media strategies, the topic quickly turns to privacy. I can honestly say that the concern for privacy is one of the main reasons that many performers (or media members for that matter) are hesitant to even entertain the idea of using social media to build their online connections. I fully understand these concerns and have a simple way to address them.

Instead of sharing what you’re going to do, tell me what you’ve just done. While running into a fan in public can be very flattering, it can also sometimes be very uncomfortable. The possibility of encountering an overzealous follower is greatly increased if you share with your social media contacts what you plan on doing. But if you share with them what you’ve just done, you still have the ability to interact online instead of in person.

By sharing with your fans a movie that you just watched, a dinner you just ate, or a show that you just attended you still offer them the chance to be a part of your world and your career… on your terms. There are many ways to be social and still maintain your privacy. Don’t let your concerns for privacy overshadow the opportunity to connect with your audience. It’s not what you do… it’s what you’ve done.