I’m nearing the end of my year-plus sabbatical from corporate consulting, as the shadows lengthen and the Oct. 21 – 24 FAR-West Conference draws near. I’m looking forward to jumping back into corporate blogging and social media, but I’ve really enjoyed working with my fellow musicians, counseling them on some marketing basics that I’ve taken for granted for twenty years.

I’m teaming up with new media guru (and children’s music performer) Gigi Johnson to present an Internet marketing workshop at the conference – we’ve only got an hour, so we tossed around some ideas on the phone yesterday about where to put our focus. So many of these music conference sessions are just as overwhelming for artists as social media itself. These musicians rush to sign up for every new social networking site becuase someone told them if they didn’t they’d be losing potential fans. Then they realize it all takes so much time, that they link their social networking sites together so they can look like they’re everywhere at once.

What’s usually missing is the plan. In corporate marketing we live by the plan… most musicians would rather die than spend time on the plan.

We figure the best thing we can do with our hour is show examples of how a little advanced planning and research to find out who their current fans are can pave the way toward building a strong fan base. The plan will be clearer, the road smoother and the blogging and social media tools will start to make a whole lot more sense.

Or so we hope.