When NOT to Link it All Together
First, take this Musical Accompaniment Pop Quiz. Why did I select Carnaval in Rio by the incredible Brazilian composer/guitarist/vocalist Djavan? It’s a two-part answer that you can find at the end of the post. Hit the play button to listen. eMail subscribers, visit the blog to hear the tune.
Awhile back, via a tweet by Derek Peplau (@peplau), a member of my Twitter community who is passionate about indie music, I learned about blip.fm. In short, this is the music version of Twitter.
All members become ‘dj’s’ and can upload, search for and share – i.e. blip, or re-blip — tunes and DVD’s in just about every music category – along with a few words about each selection. You can follow your favorite dj’s and hopefully build your own group of listeners. If you’re reading this blog, then you can imagine that I made a beeline over to blip.fm and searched for the jazz devotees and some favorite tunes to blip.
First, I watched the action of some of the more experienced dj’s. I saw that when they were on blip, they shared an almost constant stream of terrific music. Really impressive, the musical knowledge and taste of this group! Prolific!!
Now, when I opened my blip.fm account, I had the option to link my blips to my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I held off until I got the lay of the land. Once I did, my decision was NOT to link up these accounts.
The reason was simple: My Twitter and Facebook communities are about other things — Inbound Marketing/Social Media and Family/Friends respectively. Even though the people who know me in all of my communities are aware that I am a huge music lover and that I ride on the back of a Harley with Jeff, the love of my life, they have their own passions and time is precious. I’m not about to fill up their Twitter streams or Facebook walls with 10 or 20 blips in an evening of music they may not necessarily want to hear.
In fact, as I thought about it, it occurred to me that although I enjoy his occasional tweet about something he’s listening to over at blip.fm and have discovered some cool new musicians and bands as a result, Derek isn’t tweeting his whole playlist either.
Although this follows a post that talks about how to link up and use an array of options to leverage your website hub in other online places frequented by your diverse constituents, this advice represents the other side of the coin. Here’s the take-away: we need to resist the temptation to link up all of our social networks. Just because it may be easy to accomplish with a click or two, there’s a thought process to go through to determine that whatever we share with a particular group will be welcome and add value.
If you’d like to, you can follow me or Derek on blip.fm! @elliebecker @peplau
Answers to Musical Accompaniment Pop Quiz:
- Carnaval in Rio is in full swing as I write this. So I’m in the mood. It ends tomorrow, Feb. 16, 2010.
- Djavan starts with DJ – a tribute to all of my fellow blip.fm dj’s! ;-}
New PR Words - and Music! 
Great post, Ellie and thanks for the mention. Yes, I do have blip.fm linked to Twitter & Facebook, but only rarely do I actually opt to push my blips to the larger stream. It’d become annoying very quickly (as I discovered one time when I inadvertently left the Facebook sharing on and 20+ songs effectively spammed my Facebook friends.
I try to keep Twitter mostly professional with the exception of nights and weekends, and crossposting my DJ stylings isn’t value-add for the most part. I’m all for connecting as many social media services as possible in theory, but in practice, you need to be sure that your default settings for the way they interact with one another are for sharing less not more, so you can selectively push content to the larger stream only when appropriate.
Some people make it a practice to cross-post and share every single thing including check-ins on location-based services such as FourSquare. In general, I find this annoying and contributing to the overwhelming noise which already exists. More often than not, less is more, and while you should link these services to make your social media life easier, you need to be judicious about when you enable those linkages.
Derek Peplau
February 15, 2010
Derek, thanks so much for your comment. I’m beelining to my blip.fm settings to see what I missed in set-up. Glad to know that there’s more control than I thought! I really enjoy the value I get from what you share of the blip experience. The community teaches!
Ellie Becker
February 15, 2010