Musician’s Notebook

It’s been quite a while since we last discussed the topic of band blogging. We’ve talked about the software you should use to set up your blog and how to plan for releases of music through your blog.

We’ve also talked about emailing the people who leave comments on your blog.

This post is about a related practice, keeping comment threads active. We email those who comment on our blogs to develop loyalty and relationships, but we keep comments active for another reason:

Social proof is formed by perception.

A glaring “0 Comments” on every blog post is very bad. See, there’s something called social proof and in essence this means that, since people are generally scared of the unknown, they wait for others to get involved before taking an interest of their own.

In other words: if nobody else is commenting, people assume you suck. Then, they leave.

If you keep comments active, your social proof is proof indeed.

People start to take an interest; if others are getting so actively involved, it must be good, right? So they download your tunes, leave their own comment of gratification, and then happily hand over their email address for your mailing list.

Well, that is, if you have all the other elements of your site - such as eye tracking - in place.

Keeping the conversation going

Social proof for marketing purposes isn’t the only reason for getting involved in the comments and replying to your listeners. Developing relationships with your listeners also builds strong loyalty, especially as they begin to perceive that relationship as friendship.

This builds an extremely loyal Core Audience, which is absolutely vital to getting your music out there. Word of mouth is the most effective may of building your brand, and Core Audience is the group of people that starts that word of mouth motor.

To summarize, what you need to start doing on your band blog:

• Encourage people to comment
• Reply to comments, whether they are positive or negative
• Don’t censor, but do keep spam and abusive content in the bin - keep the environment pleasant
• Don’t dominate the comments - if you’re the only one commenting on your own posts, it actually has the opposite effect on your social proof

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’m more than happy to read and reply to them.

See what I did just there?