So you wanna be a... New Media Manager

09 November 2009

New Media Manager: Carney Nir, Secret Service / Dew Process

You work for Secret Service and Dew Process, and ostensibly all the artists they represent and release. Can you quickly explain where your time goes?

It’s probably about 90% Secret Service/Dew Process stuff and then I take on a few select artists throughout the year. On the artist side, it depends on where they are in their cycle. We do a lot of work with artist’s social networking sites, which is a mammoth job in itself and takes up about 40% of my time. Dew Process has got five or six high priority releases at the moment and I’m probably spending a couple of hours on each just working through their sites.

How much time do you spend cultivating artist’s online presence?

It depends on the artist. The Grates, for example, do everything themselves because they just do it so well and they like that direct contact with their fans. It just depends on what the promotion is. If it’s something quite in depth – like we’re setting up a Whitley remix competition – I’ll do a lot of it because there’s a lot to set up with clearances etc., whereas Whitely manages his own Myspace, but I have access to it and can update it and stuff.

For artist looking to promote themselves online, do you believe in saturation or concentration? Breadth or depth?

I think it’s good to have a presence in a bunch of different areas just because fans have preferences as to where they spend their time. We do encourage bands to have a presence on all networks, but only if they’re going to keep sites maintained. If not, we tell them to just pick one or two that they’re comfortable with and keep that updated.

What’s the measure of your success as a New Media Manager? Are digital sales one of the main markers or just increasing the band’s profile?

For us, it’s more about developing a band’s database. You can measure your success by data captured, presales for shows, tour performance, comments on Facebook and Twitter – that sort of thing. The results are quite visible. A lot of artists have fans that aren’t used to buying online so I’d be quite depressed if I measured it on digital sales!

What do you recommend to those interested in pursuing digital music marketing?

Read lots of blogs, keep up to date with developments in technology, make sure you’re joined up to as many social networks as possible and stay active on them. The most important thing is to know the band’s audience. If you really like the bands you’re working on, as I’m very fortunate to be doing, you’ll naturally have a good idea of who their audience is, what blogs they read, what social networking sites they use etc. You can build a strategy around that.