Lets face it; many musicians are some of the last, most uninformed and uninterested people to get themselves on the web. That's because you're too busy making music! But let's face it, the worms are out of the can and not likely to crawl back in... if you're doing business in music, you need a significant presence on the web.

At Monday's Indie Connect meeting in Nashville, tech and computer guru Scott Munc gave a great presentation on social networking for musicians and "broadcasting your station" on the web. Here are a few highlights from his talk:

• Make sure you have a website to which you can point people. You can research top webhosting companies at Web Hosting Geekshttps://webhostinggeeks.com/.

• Get a Gmail account, from which you will have access to services like Blogger, Google Analytics, Picasa, and much more.

• Set up Google alerts for your name, business, interests... to find out what people are saying about you and your interests. For instance, I currently have google alerts set up for "judy rodman", "power, path & performance", "music business", "vocal problems". I get these alerts sent to my email's inbox, from which I can decide to go to the link or not.

• Get a Ping.fm account, from which you can update all your social networking sites with one "ping"! Note... you'll actually have to have or sign up for accounts at the social networks you choose to ping. Twitter and Facebook, along with MySpace, are the least you should do to get yourself findable. Add more when you can... and with Ping, you won't have to go to each site to update!

• Get on Tweetdeck. From the tweetdeck interface, you can monitor and interact with not only twitter, but also many other social network sites. You add multiple accounts if you have them, as well. I actually prefer Hootsuite.

• Get on "Google Reader". Subscribe to some blogs (including this one) and newspapers, etc, for a fast way to keep up with what's happening.

•  I would add that you should join Indie Connect for physical and virtual meetings, newsletter, magazine and all kinds of music business information. You don't have to be in Nashville for this, it's going global.

As you monitor and interact with people, you will form your own community, within which you give and receive. What a great way to not only do business, but find friends and like-minded people! By the way... thank you for being a part of mine:)

Labels: "judy rodman", social networking