Blog: Updating The Socials

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One of the driving IDEAS behind the new album ("The Unearthly Beauty Of MJ Hibbett", available on all streaming services on Friday 14 October, guaranteed delightful) has been doing it ALL myself wherever possible, without consultation or assistance. This has had some GRATE results (e.g. the title) and has been very FREEING, in that I can just DO stuff whenever I fancy, but it has meant that I've ended up with quite a bit of extra work that I have been largely AVOIDING for the past many years.

The area where this has applied most vividly is in THE SOCIALS. Back when I first started in The Krazy World Of Rock And Roll the biggest deal in promotion was finidng an Amusing Picture to put on your posters and, in my case, cutting out the right letters in Leicester Mercury headlines to stick on for the date and location. Yes kids, that's right - this was BEFORE we even had COMPUTERS that could do that sort of thing nicely. IT WAS LONG AGO.

Since then The Interweb has come along and to begin with this made life MUCH easier. You could tell people about gigs and albums and all sorts without having to go anywhere NEAR a photocopier, and you weren't just restricted to the three record shops in your home town that took posters and/or the library. Then we got SOCIAL MEDIA and, again, this was GRATE to start with but now feels like a flipping full time job. All the "How to promote yourself" articles are forever talking about Providing Content and Claiming Artists Profiles and Updating Social Streams and Engaging With Fans and it is FLIPPING EXHAUSTING. There is SO MUCH to do that, to be honest, I have mostly given up on it over the past few years. The MJ Hibbett Instagram is testament to this - it is basically the 21st Century equivalent of a Geocities (ask your grandparents) site with "More News Coming Soon!" at the top and a GIF at the bottom of a stickman digging a hole.

None of this has particularly mattered as there hasn't been an awful lot of ROCK to promote, but that is about to change. When we did Jane And John we got the lovely High Violet PR to do our radio plugging, which was GRATE because a) they did a really good job and b) I didn't need to worry about doing any of it. NOW, however, I am duty bound by THE RULES to do it myself, so I have been revisiting my ancient contacts database to generate a MAILING LIST.

It turns out that a) a surprsingly large number of people who were fiercely enagaged in ROCK when I set the database up are, nearly two decades later, not anymore but also b) quite a few LIFERS are still there. It also turns out that there are LOADS of new people, particularly in the realms of local/internet radio, which seems to be THRIVING. I do like RADIO people - they actually PLAY your music so others can hear it - so this pleases me immensely!

There's also all this NEW (to me) stuff about PLAYLISTS and EXCLUSIVES and BLOGS (which are not like what I think of BLOGS i.e. this) and CHANNELS and goodness knows what, all of which seems to require a PROFILE of some sort, usually slightly different to how it works in other places and ALWAYS with an entirely different specification for banners, profile pictures and all that. It's wearying, but I console myself with the THORT that if I go through and do it all properly THIS time then it won't be ten years out of date when we do the NEXT things... so long as it happens sooner than in ten years!

In summary then: the enormous hassle of doing SOCIALS is probably what keeps bands together these days. "We can't split the Stones Keef, I'll have to update our Myspace and I've lost the passwords."

posted 12/8/2022 by MJ Hibbett

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