Audio4cast

I read a great article about branding on Chris Brogan’s blog the other day which emphasized that branding is not just about how you market your brand, product or service, but also about how you distribute it. Very successful product/brands have established successful channels of distribution for those products/brands.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, social media sites in general are channels of distribution for your messages. Ways that you, your brand or product can connect directly with your audience. Get it?

Here’s a real life great example. Amanda Palmer is a musician. Singer, songwriter, pianist, formerly of a band called The Dresden Dolls and more recently a solo performer. Amanda Palmer is also a masterful promoter of her personal brand. Which is the part I want to tell you about.

Amanda Palmer has over 38000 followers on Twitter. According to a post she wrote recently here, she loves Twitter and tweets whenever she can because it allows her to connect directly with her fans. (She gets it.) So she wrote a post called “How an Indie Musician can make $19000 in 10 Hours using Twitter” in which she describes how she was “hanging out on Twitter” on a friday night with her network of followers, mainly cracking jokes and complaining about losers who have nothing better to do than hang out on Twitter on a friday night. This turned into the number one topic on Twitter, which meant the popularity of the group increased even more.

So Amanda and her friend/web guy put together a quick website and started selling tshirts, then had a webcast auction for which she performed live and sold other stuff signed by her. After that, she offered a Twitter Donation-Only Gig and got donations for that. As she puts it in her post,“TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.”

The post is worth reading (expletives alert) – she’s quite a character. The point is, Amanda Palmer is a masterful marketer of her brand. Her distribution channels allow her to connect with her audience and sell her product – which is her music and her personality.

Standard distribution channels for the music industry are dying. Both the radio industry and record companies are struggling to find new business models. Solutions are found in stories like Amanda Palmer’s. Put the focus on your distribution channels. Give your listeners lots of access to your brand. Love your audience and connect with them often.