chronic insomniac

So I’ve started rolling out the items that are being auctioned for my Whizz Kidz fundraising. Please get involved and bid on any of these items if you are interested.

One Direction Signed Goodies

Billy Bragg Signed Test Pressing of Tooth & Nail

Reading FC Signed Programme

Gaslight Anthem American Slang Signed Vinyl

I’ve got plenty more things going online soon. Please keep donating, thank you a million times. Whizz Kidz do amazing work and in turn you are helping them!

A couple weeks back I got a email from BBC Introducing asking if I’d like to come on board for the BBC Masterclass 2013 to talk to aspiring musicians about how best to present yourself online. I was genuinely delighted to be asked to be a part of this. Not just to meet new artists but one thing that I do enjoy a lot in this industry is hearing the opinion of fellow professionals within the field. Alongside Jen Long and Ally McCrae the panel included Rob MacAllister from Musically, Cath Hurley from Charm Factory & Laura-May Coope from BBC Radio One.

The session was a useful insight for the crowd on areas ranging from good ways of engaging with your audience via your main networks, brand and self awareness and starting to monetize your content on YouTube. One thing I felt like we all missed out on was a quick run through of the basics that a lot of us fall guilty of when using our social networks and engaging with our fanbase.

Last month I wrote a small blog for Soundcloud called Zero to Hero : Building Your Followers. In the blog a number of people within our field discussed ideas on how an artist can build your presence within Soundcloud. The points I made I reiterate 

• Make sure your profile is named correctly
• Use a good profile picture, clear, true to your brand and ideally one that stands out from the crowd
• Make sure you have clear links to your other networks, be it your website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & Songkick accounts.
• In the interest of continual engagement look into spacing out your content & continue to engage with your fanbase with responses within conversations.
• Make sure that you tag your content with relevant information ie your bands name, band members names, any common misspellings, artists you’ve covered, artists you’re influenced by etc

One other point that wasn’t really relevant to the blog was avoid automatically posting your sounds across your networks. When you want to share your sounds communicate individually with your own message, you’ll find engagement to your post and sounds are going to be much higher if you take the time to do it this way.

This is a point that works across the board. I have a real issue with artists who for example link their Twitter to their Facebook so that their Facebook wall is flooded by tweets not relevant for a Facebook audience. Not only does this drive your fanbase away from a hugely important network it, in turn, will damage your Facebook EdgeRank rating meaning your posts will seen by less and less of your audience. It’s widely acknowledged that pages that post quality and engaging content on a fairly regular level will achieve a higher level of reach with their posts. Link photos or videos to your updates if you can, ask fans to respond and in turn respond to your fans.

It’s important to see the merits of each of your social networks and how to communicate with your audience over each of these. It’s also important to work out what networks you feel comfortable communicating on. If you feel you have nothing interesting to say on Twitter, maybe this isn’t the network for you. 

As Rob MacAllister quite rightly pointed out your most important social network (you may not see it as one, but it is) is YouTube. Done well YouTube can not only build your fanbase but earn you money via signing up to Google AdSense. The tools that YouTube offers are immense. They have also built a document called the YouTube Playbook guiding you through the process of building your channel, communicating with your fanbase, annotating your videos, monetizing your content and building your brand. 

There was a very insightful post this week on Music Think Tank, by Simon Tam, entitled How To Be A Rockstar At Social Media : What Every Band Should Be Doing. I thoroughly recommend looking at this. Alongside information of how you can find out what noise is being made about your band you are reminded of this very important piece of information.

Have you noticed that it’s easier to keep your house clean if you work on it a little each day rather than waiting until it gets really bad and needs an overhaul? It’s the same with social media and any kind of listening tool. Take time each day to check what is being said about you online, just as you would check your email or test messages. In the world of social media, any response that isn’t immediate is too late.

Remember this.

Hi There!

So yes, chances are this is boring yeah? Hear me out……

You’ll all know I like my running now. Since February 2012 I’ve now run 8 Half Marathons and 1 (2ish) Full Marathons. In April of 2013 I’m taking on a bit of a challenge, running both Paris and London Marathons within 15 days of each other. 

Why am I doing this? Well, primarily it’s about getting healthy, challenging myself in ways I’ve not done before last year and trying to do the thing that eluded me most of my life, beat my brother at something. But there is a decent reason to do all this too. Last year I raised over £3,000  (£3071.46 to be precise) for Whizz Kidz. They’re an incredible charity that help mobilise children and change the lives of the child and the child’s family in the process. My cousin Stevie suffers from Cerebral Palsy. Whizz Kidz have been a big part of training her to become more independent. She’s the little cutie on the bottom left of the photo below.

Anyway check out this little video Whizz Kidz posted…..

To cut to the chase there are 2 things that I’m asking of you. 

1. Do you have anything that you’d be happy for me to auction off to help raise money for Whizz Kidz. 

I’m asking friends across the board if they have anything that they could donate. Some of you very very kindly donated a lot of money last year and it’s unfair to be canvassing money off you again but if you have things you don’t need then feel free to help. So far I’ve received a variety of things for this including…….

A PACKAGE OF SIGNED ITEMS FROM ONE DIRECTION. A T-SHIRT (small), TOUR PROGRAMME & CD

A SIGNED TEST PRESSING OF BILLY BRAGG’S NEW ALBUM ‘TOOTH & NAIL (there are only 10 test pressings in existence. None are signed except this one)A SIGNED MINI CRICKET BACK FROM ANDREW FLINTOFF

I have also been kindly donated a signed football programme from the Reading FC team (thank you Clare Bassett)

& signed CDs from The View & Plan B amongst others.

All these kind donations will be going up on an eBay store especially set up for this auction only. 100% of all money will go to Whizz Kidz. The auction will begin at the end of March / start of April dependent on the amount of donations I have.

Please drop me an email at alitant@gmail.com if you can help.

If you don’t have anything you can donate but you’d still like to help then….

2. Visit my JustGiving page and help me raise money by donating.

You can visit my page here - http://www.justgiving.com/aligoesrunningagain or you can even text TANT 80 + your donation (eg £10) to 70070.

Thank you for reading through all this waffle.

Love you.

xx

As a lot of you know last year I ran a heap of races for Whizz Kidz, a charity that helps disabled children gain mobility. It’s a charity close to my heart as they look after my cousin, Stevie, who suffers from Cerebral Palsy. I raised over £3,000 by asking friends to donate to my JustGiving page which was incredible and I was utterly humbled by the generosity of everyone. 

I’m running the London Marathon again this year (alongside the Paris Marathon and 3 other half marathons before hand) and although I’m not under pressure to raise the same amount I would like to certainly push toward the £1,000 mark. 

I really really don’t want to ask friends for money again so at the end of March / start of April I’m going to host an auction on eBay. This is where my cheekiness comes in. 

Do you have any of the following items knocking about that you could donate….

- Signed Albums / Singles etc

- Test Pressings

- Rarities

- Artwork Prints

- Boxsets

- Drum Skins

- Tickets / Guestlist

- Anything else that you feel could help

100% of the money raised will go to Whizz Kidz & if something doesn’t happen to sell I’m more than happy to return the item back to you.

I’ve set up a stand alone eBay account to auction everything off (alistairtantcharity) so all is transparent.

If you happen to have items that you can donate that are released later then I will of course hold off on putting these items up until you give permission.

Please email me at alitant@gmail.com if you can help.

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