The Amy Baumann Fan Club: A social media experiment gone very right

February 18, 2010 at 12:36 am · Filed under JRN264 and tagged: Amy Baumann, Facebook, social media, The Amy Baumann Fan Club, Twitter

After years of claiming to be Amy Baumann’s #1 fan, I finally proved it.

I chose Amy as my brand for our social media project. While she’s been my best friend since the age of seven, she’s also an incredible singer. Amy has training in both classical and musical theater performance, and went to college at the Manhattan School of Music.

While my entire hometown knows how amazing Amy is, the woman really needs to start marketing herself – which is where I come in. I asked Amy if she would be alright with me making a Facebook fan page for her and a Twitter account. She was a bit timid about it, but I totally ignored that and bugged her for her résumé, photos and songs. As an artist in a sea of other artists over in New York City, I hope she’ll stick with it to let everyone else discover her at home – not just in auditions.

Here’s the breakdown:

Facebook

The name of the site I made is pretty straight forward; it’s called The Amy Baumann Fan Club. The main photo is a professional headshot and it’s pretty sexy, if I do say so myself. I added one photo album of the other headshots she gave me and asked for other members to add photos of her performing if they wanted.

I have posted ten links/status updates, but I’ll be adding more and more. Besides, I want to encourage Amy to keep the site, and she seemed to look at the site as a motivating factor for going to more auditions and starting new performance projects.

Every time a fan comments on the site, I make sure to comment back. While it’s true that one of the commenters is my mom, I still want people to see that they’ll receive feedback with just a light amount of effort on their part. Also, it’s nice that Amy herself commented, making the site more personal. That way, if someone doesn’t know too much about Amy and stumbles upon the site, they’ll be able to see that she stays close to her fans.

I invited an embarrassing amount of people to be fans of The Amy Baumann Fan Club, and it worked like a charm – after a mere 24 hours, the site has 73 fans, some of whom I’m not friends with on Facebook. Of course, it helps that she’s such an impressive singer.

I filled out the info tab using clips of Amy’s résumé and some quick information she sent me. After I filled that out, I had most of the site finished, I made Amy an administrator and asked her to load some recordings of her singing on the site. I moved the songs to the main Wall instead of another tab to make them more visible.

To get more fans, I’ll keep the fan club in my personal Facebook profile statuses frequently and keep asking people to join. I think I’ll also have Amy ask people to join, since she seems more comfortable with the idea now and sees it as a marketing project, which it is, instead of a popularity contest or something of that nature. She also knows a lot more people in the music world. I’ll also try to find more Facebook groups related to her and try to promote them there.

Twitter

Amy’s Twitter account is also pretty self-explanatory: it’s Amy_Baumann. On the site, I added the same profile picture as the one on the Facebook profile. A short bio lists her school, general location (New York) and the singing styles she studied.

I do think it would make sense for me to tweak the design of the page, but as of now, I’m not sure how to do that. I’d love to design some sort of background for it to make it more visually stunning and perhaps add another picture of her performing.

I have posted 10 messages and plan on adding more. I’ve been sending messages to those that follow, both thanking them and asking them if they’re music fans. I have sought out several people who do not follow the account and am currently following 26 people and have 9 followers.

From here…

As long as Amy is ok with it, I hope the fan club and Twitter account keeps growing. I’ll keep looking up links relevant to Amy and encouraging her to put up videos, audio and anything else she might want someone to see or hear. As she auditions, I’ll put up the audition dates. As she develops concerts, I’ll promote them. She’ll be giving me plenty to work with just by being the artist she is.

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