107: Ariel Hyatt Interview Part 2

welcome to key conversations where you get to connect with the best of the music business unlocking the secrets to exploding your music career presented by in the key of success I'm your host Cheryl B inglehart the conversations you're about to hear are between our special guest and participants of my mx4 course the marketing and branding money-making mentorship Mastermind for musicians they are singers songwriters composers producers and artists just like you asking their burning questions of our experts while transforming their careers over 6 weeks if you think this could be you check out mx4 course.com to schedule a free half-hour coaching call with me to see if we'd be a good fit so let's get [Music] started we are back with Ariel Hyatt talking about all things PR and marketing and we're just going to pick it up with a question from mx4 particip Pamela can you describe the different content um categories that we're supposed to cover I mean and and also well also I tend to be political is being political positive negative how would you what's your approach there oh being politicals to be like okay so let's talk about content um a lot of studies show and and a lot of I read a lot of nerdy stuff online so I'll say this to to jump off when you have vanilla content people care so the idea with your social media strategy is do not be neutral because neutrality like too many choices make people not respond at all so being political is fabulous it is wonderful I highly encourage it now what you will have to sort of understand when you do take a position is that unfortunately in the world we live in every day so people are getting more polarized so if you are going to take a stand and be political and talk about stuff you have to get that there's going to be unfortunately two camps of people people that are going to agree and people that are going to disagree and that's okay and I think when we're going to promote our music and ourselves and this I suffer from this like what if they don't like me or like you know the one person that doesn't like what I do or I get some negative feedback it like it can be really really hard to take if you're going to take a stand and have a a strong voice and a strong opinion there's going to be people that don't like it so you have to sort of keep that in mind before you start your strategy and and that's okay I mean it's just pause for the course do does your p is your are you a writer or you're a performer or what uh I always say singer songwriter musician I perform with a women's drum group and I want to do some expand that into contemporary kind of soft rock Native American okay would you say that your music has a polit political themes or or you just tend to be more a political person I tend to be more of a political P person just being active in the native Community makes you political kind of it does just you do yeah you have to take stands so oh oh and then how do you handle how do you handle someone who doesn't like your stand because I I think I'm handling it badly so how do you handle so okay someone says oh you're full of it what do you do you just leave the comment there you say thank you for your comment what do you do you know Steph Goden has a really good attitude about this and um this is a little um crass but I'll I'll say what he said which is my blog and my brand is my swimming pool and I took a lot of time to build my swimming pool and I don't want to anyone to come and PE so if you have someone who I mean look it's fine if people disagree right that's what the world is about and I think sadly um we have lost this genal discourse that we used to have about like it's actually okay to have a Democrat and Republican sit together at a dinner table and you could still actually enjoy each other that's like my parents are 80 I think it's dying with their generation right so people will be polarized if they do say something that is inappropriate or rude or really disparaging it is within your right on your socials to block them delete them and remove their comments from your blog if they're just a big bag of hot air and they're spouting off because they love hearing the voice voice of their own sounds um you can comment back but what you're probably doing there is inviting a two-way conversation that might not get you anywhere I've never seen on Facebook two massively differing opinions and then people at the end going you're right I should vaccinate my children like that's just not that's not where it ends up right it's just it's not that's not how it happens or you're right I'm to toally gonna vote for Sarah Palin how how silly of me you know like so so we do have that as a thing so when people say things that are like really inappropriate and disparaging I think it's within your right to block them and and and let them lovingly let them out of your um Aura and then um the people that maybe just don't agree with you I mean look I I post about marketing and people often will say well that's not how I market and I mean I led a really spirited conversation at CMW just two weeks ago and my panel was people that did and didn't agree about certain things and that's okay because it was a really good conversation so I think you have to judge what is a good conversation and healthy feedback versus what is just someone sort of just being a flamer and it's in your right to block it I do really want to present this I've been writing about this in my new book which is about crowdfunding and we are programmed to listen to the negative and take that in and feel that a lot more than the positive and I've been really interested in that because I see this with a lot of my artists getting really taken down by negative viws or bad things this goes hearkens back to literally the the caveman times so when we were evolving as Humanity we had to focus on the saber-tooth tiger that was going to come and eat us or the lion or the really bad scary thing so it's actually in our Reptilian Brain for our survival to focus on the negative as opposed to say the apple tree or the fruit Orchard because it the people that focused on that got eaten by the saber-tooth tiger and we wouldn't be here today so very unfortunately we have this program and so you have to often remind yourself that that one jerk that leaves the negative thing is not the popular opinion of most of the people and I think that will probably make you understand that you're probably not handling it poorly you're probably just internalizing someone else's garbage that's not yours that's awesome cool thanks Pam GRE great question there yeah we've got like I don't know 10 minutes leftish here and I want to I wanted to do a quick laser laser round with you Ariel so top five someone just came out with a record top five things social media wise that they should prioritize over everything else what would those be number one make sure you have a website make sure it's in your control and that you can update it when you want not when Craig your web designer wants because Craig always seems to go on a vacation to Indonesia or his girlriend breaks up with him and then you can't find him don't use Craig use yourself so number one website love that number two I know this isn't social media and you're probably going well why isn't she talking about Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and I want the secret sauce number two newsletter newsletter newsletter newsletter newsletter build your newsletter list use MailChimp use Constant Contact use banzal use host baby I don't care what you use but use something set it up and be diligent about building your newsletter figure out when you perform how you going to get people on it when you post on socials how are you going to get people on it what are you going to give away but not only getting people on it how are you going to get people to care about it what are you going to say in it that's going to be 10 times more awesome than what everyone else says because Lord knows we all have enough email to open number three choose one social site that you like do not listen to people that say oh no one's on that site or oh that's whatever choose one it can be Facebook it can be Instagram it can be Twitter it can be Snapchat if you're under the age of 12 I don't even know how that thing works it can be it can be LinkedIn if you're looking for business it can be any of those it can be even the ones I didn't mention it can be um Mercat whatever it is choose the one you like the most and start there because you'll get so overwhelmed so fast with feeling like you have to update everything if you like to blog blog if soundcloud's your jam do SoundCloud use one well and once you get really really good at one at one and you understand the best practices on that one YouTube whatever it is then add the second one I think we get totally frozen when we get terrified of oh gosh there's so many and I have to use them all and then I just read an article and I'm no good if I don't have that don't do that number are we on three or four four four num four I haven't had enough cofy yet um number four identify in your social channel the one that you are rocking first who the people are who are your super fans on that channel who is the person that's commenting and liking and leaving feedback and saying hello and really engaging with you and make sure that you start a spreadsheet and write their names down these are the relationships that turn into the people that will contribute to your crowdfunding campaign when you launch it the people that will come to your show the people that will buy your stuff it is more important to have a spreadsheet with a hundred names on it than it is to have a million billion trillion views and likes and people because there's a massive difference I'm going to quote quote Seth Goen again between friends and friendlies so number four differentiate who your super fans are and begin to track them begin to know them begin to follow them across other social channels begin to be mindful of who they are leave them comments they will become your greatest Champions number five understand that to do social media takes consistency be consistent and this is challenging in especially when you're just beginning and you're like oh I don't even know how to tweet I don't even know what to say don't worry so much about being perfect worry about being consistent it's more important that you force a blog post up once a week or that you tweet a couple of times a day or that you create four or five status updates in Facebook a week or that you post a new video at least once a month all of those things are easy the science of social media there's about a million articles about what are the right things and the best things and how many times but the thing that I've seen over and over and over consistency wins how did Amanda Palmer get $1.2 million the woman was consistent from day one with her social communication so I hope those five things were helpful that's awesome that's a big number I'm like oh maybe I should have said three um I'm glad I said five though thank you um another laser question and I'm only going to say three what are the top three tools that you use and when I say tools like like my favorites are like canva for making new headers online hoot Suite I schedule like I um some posts that I know need to go out so I don't need to think about it through the week I I take some time Sunday night that's something I'm encouraging everyone to do even if it's just on like one or two social sites um so those are a couple those are two of my like big ones I use toggle to sort of track myself when I'm really busy and I want to make sure I'm staying on track these are all like free online apps but do you have do you have certain tools that are your go-to like helping to manage the overwhelm of all this stuff to do or just anything that helps in that social media World anything that comes to mind yeah well you just you just basically uh said my favorites I do love hot sweet it's great for scheduling and it's also great if you have a team that's helping you because they can log in and schedule I will let you know one thing do not schedule your Facebook post on ho twet Facebook actually punishes you for that um so one of the tools that we actually use here at Cyber PR for all of our clients it's very basic is the Facebook schedu right so you know you can actually go into Facebook and program we set up our Throwback Thursdays and our and our you know whatever freaky Fridays or whatever themes we're coming up with um we schedule those a month in advance you can schedule four Throwback Thursdays in one sitting and then you don't have to go own no it's Thursday I need to go find a photo and scan it and deal with it and find it and post it and so I highly recommend just using the Facebook schedule cool another tool that we love and it's not even super like secret but we love it is Google do um my entire team uses Google Docs we share a lot of um we share documents we share writings we share spreadsheets um it's a great way to collaboratively work um and so I highly recommend if you don't have a Google account to definitely use that for collaborative working awesome all right um I will give you two more yes for Instagram I love regram or repost it's the same um it actually allows you to repost other people's Instagram photos and so uh that can be a really fun tool and then there is a tool on Instagram that I just started playing with called and you can write on your photographs and post like fun images and and do overlays on Instagram what what's it called you you like it like fuzzed out you're like it's called and then it was like sh open open it's called open okay that's awesome another one that I discovered and love is uh word swap have you seen that app you can you can it has all these gorgeous fonts and you can put a quote of a lyric or something and it goes to Instagram you could use your Instagram photos and put it on like if you have an ocean photo and you know quote of the day sort of thing and it just like makes the fonts it looks it makes you look like a professional designer and it's free and I love that app too so I'm throw that out there word swap word swap yeah I only have it on my phone I don't know if it's a desktop online thing but yeah I use it I use it a lot if I'm you know you know I'm doing a a campaign for people to post photos what does the word inevitably mean to you and then tag inevitably the record which is the name of my new record and so I made a little thing that says what does inevitably be mean to you and I don't I'm not great with fonts but you use word Swap and it does it for you makes it all pretty and cool and you can choose colors and blah blah blah so yeah I love that nice yeah well this has been awesome Ariel I can't thank you enough for your time and your insights and giving us so many recipes for sauces secret sauces I feel like and thank you for all the mx4 participants and your questions and you're listening and the space to you know let me do my thing and Ariel do her thing and and sort of the the conversation's been great and I think this has been really helpful um it's been really helpful for me which is why I bring in the experts here so uh any last words from from anyone Ariel anyone that needs to say anything everyone's good please come follow me on Twitter I'd love to see your shining faces there as you get up and running that'd be great cyber PR cyber PR and cyber pr.com you can get the social media pyramid for 2015 the updated one which I'm totally going to go grab right now and print out and replace this one and yeah and we're looking forward to the new book I mean Ariel's got books and courses and all sorts of other fun stuff so definitely go explore that website and her Twitter and all that jazz so um you guys thank you so much for your time and have a great rest of your day thanks everyone bye thank you thank you all right stay tuned for next week we are going to talk with Joey a of Bloom Productions he is a compos composer and a record producer and he just has the it sound and he's going to share all of his insights with you please don't forget to rate and comment on iTunes and Stitcher radio if you like this podcast it's the best way to keep it going get more subscribers and continue to share this awesome information with the Indie music Community thank you and we'll see you next time [Applause] [Music] all of the music on this podcast has been created by Yours Truly the theme song is called inevitably written with Cameron Ernst and produced by Joey a you can find all the songs plus more information on my music career at Cheryl be.com if you want to be one of the reasons I can keep this podcast and my blog living on gigging going then head to patreon.com CBE music there you can contribute a doar $2 $5 for the creation of each of these free musician resources together we can keep them coming and Inspire other creative people to do what they love and do it well again that's patreon.com CBE music key conversations is sponsored in part by bzal they make it easy to build a beautiful website for your music their step-by-step system gets you online in minutes and you can choose from hundreds of mobile friendly themes and customize them with their easy point-and-click editor all the features you could possibly imagine for a professional website are built in so because you are a key conversations podcast listener you get a special 3month free trial just for you go to www. inthey of success.com resources and click on the banzal logo to access your free extended trial [Music]