In the spirit of International Women’s Day, we wanted to pay a homage to women who are pushing the innovation needle in the Music Industry. They are ahead of the curve and use new media and multi-channel marketing to build their brands. Follow these forward thinking women to pick up some great advice on how to best integrate social, mobile, sites, and email.

Lauren Kufta- New Media Direct Marketing Manager, Roadrunner Records- Lauren and Roadrunner have done an amazing job on all their touchpoints. They have compelling and different content for their fans and for each artist they represent. What makes them highly successful is how they leverage their online community to get full profile information on their email subscribers. From this data she segments based on location, favorite artist(s) & preferences and builds emails catering to the individual interests of her subscribers. Her drive for relevancy makes her program highly successful.

Joyce Szudzik- VP Digital Marketing, AEG Live- Joyce leads a team of designers, developers, editors, database managers, social community specialists, and promotional experts to maximize ticket sales and achieve branding goals. Promoting shows across every major market and tours everywhere, like Bon Jovi, is not an easy job and she does it extremely well. She drives ticket sales with innovative online marketing strategies & email sophistiation and relevance, treating each subscriber like an individual fan. @JoyceSays

SuzAnn Brantner- Department Head of Physical and Digital Distribution of Content, William Morris Endeavor- SuzAnn works with clients including Steve Martin, Metric and Ice Cube. She runs the ‘Self Serve’ division within the agency where she works with clients to provide new ways to distribute their content while maximizing profits and maintaining control of their rights. She is very knowledgeable in digital marketing and her influence has shown very fruitful for my bands.

Katie Fox-Marketing Technologist & PR Strategist/Co-Founder, Blooming Footprint- Katie is the Co-Founder of the Denver Marketing and PR consultancy firm Blooming Footprint. Her innovative ideas help “brands grow” on and offline. She is forward thinking and uses social media, web,  pr and great design to help bands, artists and labels to grow, engage and monitor their brand presence. @BloomgFootprint

Marisol Segal-Partner & Business Development at Rdi0 & Co-founder/Head of Marketing at Flux Summit-  Marisol Segal is a digital strategist and marketing maven with more than 20 years experience in the music industry. She is a savvy, email marketer and has been a big innovater in new media. @rdio

Madalyn Sklar- Founder of GoGirlsMusic.com- Madalyn has been helping independent bands for over 15 years. She is very forward thinking and has helped many bands improve their branding and reach. She is a social media consultant, music business coach, blogger and author who works with a wide range of businesses helping them grasp the social media phenomenon and use it to their advantage. I started GoGirls 15+ years ago and I would prefer you link my @madalynsklar or @gogirlsmusic

Corey Denis- Founder at Not Shocking, LLC- Cory has been pioneering digital music marketing for twelve years using everything from early ListServs & phpbb forums to social networks and MMORPGs. In the past, she worked for IODA  where she helped create and market IODA Promonet™, a promotional distribution platform that allows a member base of thousands of blogs, podcasts and online media outlets to access pre-cleared MP3s and marketing assets with the goal of generating hype and driving sales. @coreythrace

Ariel Hyatt- President at Ariel Publicity & Cyber PR-Ariel has spoken at SXSW (Interactive and Music), CMJ, ASCAP’s I Create Music, The Future of Music, Canadian Music Week, APRA’s Song Summit (Sydney), You Are In Control (Reykjavik), The ECMAs, NARAS, and The Taxi Road Rally. She sits on the board of Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, SoundCtrl, and The New Music Seminar and has helped over 1,500 bands find publicity. She is a marketing guru and her publicity success is outstanding. @cyberpr

Also, keep up with me, Lauren Kaplan-Reed, @lmeanslauren and our company @fancentric. Lots of good tips and tricks for interactive marketing and the music industry.

It is 2011 and we love social! We love to be social and we love to interact with our favorite brands, bands and companies. As marketers, we love all the data and brand-stewardship that social media provides to help better segment our target users and provide more insights to their behavior, but social alone isn’t a strategy. Here are some important things to remember when marketing to your fans:

1. Email is not Dead:

In fact, email is still king and is fueled by social sites. Name one social site that you can sign up for without an email address, I dare you. In fact, 95% of consumers use email and 93% opt-in and receive atleast one permission-based email a day.** We love freebies and marketers love to market to us so, email is a match made in heaven. If you only market to your social sites, you are missing a huge deomgraphic! A huge money spending demographic.

2. Social alone isn’t a strategy aka The Myspace Rule:

Remember when Myspace first became popular? Companies invested precious man hours into acquiring friends and making their page look nice. Two things happened:  First, Myspace became over saturated and messages to friends were quickly pushed down the post screen and out of people’s viewership.  Second, shiny new Facebook came along and people stopped using myspace and the brand-consumer relationships were abandoned.  Companies put so much time into approving friends, creating posts and design and with the blink of an eye the relationship ended when people stopped signing into Myspace.

2.a. Who owns the relationship? Is it your company or the social site? Convert your subscribers, fans and followers and make sure that you have something intriguing to offer at each marketing touch point and channel. Convert, convert, convert. I am surprised at how many companies do not incentivize their social fans and followers to convert to email. This is huge!

3. Create a well thought out multi-channel marketing campaign.

Creating successful multi-channel marketing campaigns that increase brand awareness, put fans in venues, sell merch and increase your ROI can be as easy as respecting your fans and providing them with something that improves their lives. Convert your web traffic to email subscribers and your email subscribers to Twitter followers & Facebook fans  and vis versa. Provide compelling content at each of your touchpoints and different incentives because some people only use email and others only use twitter. After conversion, grow the relationship with your subscribers, fans and followers. Here at FanMail we teach and use the Subscribers Rule Philosophy: Serve, Honor and Deliver. This simple philosophy has big results.

Serve the Individual- They are not numbers, they are individuals. Make sure your content speaks to the individual and piques their individual interests.

Honor their unique preferences in communication, content, frequency and channel – Let your subscribers tell you how they want to receive your communications and honor their request. There are a ton of ways to communication with your subscribers: email, facebook, twitter, text, text-only email, phone. Know how they want to communicate with you, what content they desire (ask them!) and how often they want to be contacted by you.

Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives.

**ExactTarget 2011 Subscribers, Fans and Followers part 8

Our clients every now and again ask what the industry standards are for open rates, click rates and industry standards. We forward the details over, show off our fancy benchmark report and I usually give the following spiel: There are a ton of metrics, or even a metric ton of tools to evaluate your online marketing efforts. Save your self some time and create an accurate dashboard of your online marketing by excluding these metrics. These metrics simply do not matter.

1. Open Rates: This metric is really incomplete. Yes, you can see who opened it well, unless they are in a mail client like outlook or on a phone or they have images turned off. Get what I am saying? And when it comes down to it, who cares who opened what you sent? To have a successful marketing program, you should care about who readn, engaged with you email and who converted.  Did they click? Did they buy? Did they share the information?

The metrics you should use instead: click rate, conversion rate, $$ amount acquired from an email send

2. Industry Standards: While industry standards can be nice to evaluate the general vicinity of where your program stands, they are not really accurate. Let’s break it down into how they are calculated: They are simply averages that a specific company or research agency compiles of open rates, click rates, etc. The problem here is what content were they sharing? What time of day did they send their emails? What kind of list do they have? etc. For example, The Beatles and the band down the street are both in the music industry. I bet if the Beatles release something exclusive to their list in a notification, it is going to get way more clicks than the chick’s band down the street’s tour date update.

The metrics you should use instead: Compile a benchmark for your company and become aware of your averages. Then develop a strategy and plan how to improve them. Use a/b testing to see what works and forget about “standards”.

3. Number of Fans and Followers: It won’t matter how big your list is if nobody is listening to what you say. I know I have filtered out some of my “like” pages and buzz right over people I follow. Why? What they talk about doesn’t engage or interest me. A company whom actively engages its 63  fans and followers is more likely to have more influence and conversions than a company who has 95,000 fans and followers who could care less about what they are saying.

The metrics you should use instead: How connected you are with your community: @replies and retweets, sharing and page recommendations.

4. Number of blog views: It is great to know how many people visit your site, but it is far more accurate to find out who actually reads your blog.

The metrics you should use instead: Level of engagement: track backs to your blog, Re-tweets, sharing and most importantly commenting and quoting

5. Email List Size: Its not the size of the boat, its the motion in the ocean. Is your list making waves? As music marketers, a lot of us get into the old promoter trap: The more fliers that we put up, the more people that will go to our shows. Well, email is about quality not quantity. Put the fliers in the right place and more people will fill up your venue. Make sure your program speaks to individual preferences in content, channel and interest.

The metrics to you should use instead: How many engaged subscribers does our list have based on conversions, $$ and sharing?

So, what does matter? Sales, WOM, social buzz and conversions! Make sure you model your company’s metrics based on individual goals and measurable metrics based on behaviors and not weightless numbers.

Need help evaluating your statistics and improving your program, reporting and ROI? We offer strategy engagements, consulting and marketing audits. Check out our year long, results-driven strategy and coaching program using our Acquire, Retain and Grow Philosophy: FM BOOST. Get a boost to your program when we create a “BLUEPRINT” specific to your company that will propel successful and efficient direct-to-fan marketing with strategy and real time analytic checkpoints throughout the year. For more information, hit us up.

So, what does that mean to you as a direct-to-fan marketer? Well, hold tight, social forward will be fixed soon, but also keep in mind these new wall features that can really impact how you communicate with your fan base. Jay Baer wrote a blog on Facebook news feed changes called, “Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?”.  The blog offers a great marketing perspective reminding marketers and company social media users that Facebook  decides what actually shows up on one’s news feed. This is based on what you’ve “liked” and commented upon in the past, and what your friends have “liked” and commented upon, according to Jay Baer that can mean that, “only 2 out of every 1000 Facebook updates will show up in your news feed”. Which means , that you are competing with every “friend’s” mom, brother, husband, wife, friends and co-workers for feed space.

So, make every message count and involve your “friends”.  Ask questions, encourage interaction. Jay Baer notes that one can now easily  use one-click the share functionality for facebook updates, but only updates with links, videos or photos. So, make your updates include these– It will help weed out unnecessary posts as well.

Another great idea is to incentivize the friendship.  Many marketers use this tactic to get people to opt-in to their email, sms or voice campaigns. We suggest offering a free download for becoming our friend or a social contest where the winner gets merchandise. Check out what the indie-rock/ soul band Dr. Dog did to interact with their fans: They posted on their Facebook Page,  “Get us to 20,000 fans on Facebook, and we’ll let you hear the first track off the new album”.

This simple, incentivized call-to-action took their fan list from 7,000 fans to 17,493 just two weeks after posting. So, be creative, include your fans and keep an eye on Jay Baer’s awesome blog on social media.