by: Carlo Ople
A few weeks ago I met up with one of the members of the band Up Dharma Down to just exchange ideas about social media marketing. I was completely blown away with what they’ve accomplished so far on Facebook and I think it would be a crime for me not to recognize them here at New Media Philippines. They’ve done an excellent job on building a strong community online and I think they just have to leverage it some more and they’ll definitely book more corporate gigs without any effort. As of this writing, the Up Dharma Down Facebook Page has 73,600+ “likes”.
Appropriate Landing Page
Up Dharma Down’s landing page is a Facebook app called Band Page which is just perfect for musicians. It allows them to stream selected songs that they want their fans to listen to. There’s also a tab at the bottom which allows the visitor to check out the Facebook Wall, Twitter Stream, or Tumblr posts of the band. This is a pretty awesome app! Here’s a screenshot:
I wasn’t really a fan of Up Dharma Down when I first met with one of their band mates. However when I checked out their Facebook page when I got home that day and listened to some of their songs on this page I was hooked. I asked my assistant to buy a copy of their album immediately.
It’s also very easy to spot the schedule of their gigs. You can find it just under the profile picture. This is always updated so kudos to whoever is handling this.
Vibrant and Active Community
Another amazing thing you’ll notice is that they have a pretty solid and active community on Facebook. They get a lot of reactions each time they post updates and photos. This is a good indication that they’ve built social capital over the months that they’ve maintained and updated the page.
To connect further with Up Dharma Down, there’s a box on the left side with links to other channels you can find the band on like Vimeo, Twitter, MySpace, and Youtube.
How to Leverage
In this day where social marketing is such a huge thing, the band can easily get more corporate gigs by packaging online PR through their Facebook and Twitter profiles. They can link to the pages of the companies or brands that they’re playing for to drive their community to like their pages as well. Same goes for Twitter. The company gets more bang for their buck because other than getting a band to perform, they also get to advertise their products to the band’s online fan base (which is huge right now at 70,000+).
I have several suggestions to make the page better and to make it more interactive but I’ll just e-mail that to my contact on Up Dharma Down. I’m happy to see that local bands are seeing the potential of building their tribes on social media. I’m pretty confident that they’ll continue to be successful as long as they continue to take care of their community and constantly interact with them to raise social capital.
To Up Dharma Down — You guys rock! ^_^
