Many musicians make the mistake of trying to sale their product without selling themselves first.

1. Don't promote. Participate!
All too often, brands look greedily to social networks as an immediate way to reach significant audiences. Beware the fickle and cynical general public, however. You need to get involved and give something back to the community if you want to get something out of it. Think about building interactive elements into your profile pages, Starbucks has done a nice job of this on MySpace with features such as custom invites you can put together inviting people to meet for coffee. And if you've got great features or cool content, don't keep it walled in; allow it to be easily embedded. Done successfully this "hypersyndication" makes it easy for people to do your marketing work for you. Also, it's these interactive features that can help drive traffic from the social networking sites back to your corporate site, if that's the objective of your campaign.

2. Know your audience and let them get to know you, the person, not the company
People speak to people. So make sure that whoever is managing your social media profiles is both passionate about your product and in tune with the social networking community they are participating in. In our case, we make sure that the responses are seen to come from Chrysi from Spill rather than just "from Spill." If you're just starting out, make sure that before jumping in with your own profile you monitor the networks for at least a couple of weeks to understand the audience and how they interact on the site. After all, the last thing you want is to look like that embarrassing relative on the dance floor at the family wedding by getting your pitch and positioning wrong.

3. Let go
As with all contemporary marketing, you have to accept that you can never fully control messaging. You should use these sites as an opportunity to listen, learn, talk and mould your product according to what your users want.

4. It's a marathon not a sprint
Successful SMM is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix. If your CEO is likely to be concerned that his or her kids have more friends on their profiles than your corporate page does a day after its launch, then a bit of managing expectations will be required. In terms of positioning, SMM should be perceived more along the lines of SEO than above the line advertising or DM.

5. Extending your reach
An if-we-build-it-they-will-come mentality to SMM just isn't going to cut it. You've got to be out in the community and interacting on an ongoing basis to be accepted. Think about features you can develop above and beyond your main profile page. Widgets are undoubtedly the hottest property in this area. iLike, which lets people share their favorite musicians and songs amongst friends, launched a Facebook widget earlier in the year and within a week had more than a million new users as a result. It took the company six months to build the same user base via its own site. As the gold rush for widget-share gathers pace, the key will be to come up with something entertaining and/or useful that people will actually want to use, add to their profiles and send on.

If I were to sum up our learnings in social media in one line?
Listen. Try (talk). Learn. Listen. Try again…and so it goes on.

MySpace for Musicians (Book & CD)