Power Tools wiki for artists to build their online personas

Scott Kirsner proves once again he’s one of the smartest guys in any particular room by creating Power Tools, a wiki that he has created as a repository for links to and information on some online tools and resources artists of all stripes can use to build out their online presence and gain a fan following.

Here is the goal of this wiki: to collect some of the best tools that successful artists rely on to build and connect with their online fan base – and earn a living doing it. (Let’s not include tools for content creation, from ProTools to FinalCutPro to InDesign.) Feel free to add tools that you’ve found useful in marketing, promoting, and making money from your creative work, but don’t remove tools that someone else has added. If you’ve had a negative experience using one of these sites or services, just add a note to that effect. Feel free to add a new category/page if you think there are tools that don’t fit neatly into one of the categories that already exist.

The wiki is an extension of a section of his recent book Fans, Friends and Followers. You can read my review of the book here.

I’m going to use this an excuse to launch into a little bit of opining here.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to creating social media marketing, with people roughly divided on the point of whether social media is expensive or inexpensive. Allow me to clarify the point a bit based on my experience.

If you’re looking to create a social media campaign – including building a fanbase in much the way Scott has in mind – many of the tools and resources available are cheap. You can setup a WordPress.com or Blogger blog or Twitter profile or Facebook page for nothing. Hosted versions of WordPress blogs and some other software will cost you a little bit of money, but still you’re talking less than $1,000 a year to build a pretty decent online footprint.

What isn’t cheap is the time involved in doing it right. You need to be committed to writing a blog entry, responding to fan emails that come in through Facebook, finding people on Twitter, doing outreach to media and other activities that make your profile active and vibrant, something people are going to want to interact with and support.

That goes for the independent artist doing their own thing online or for the biggest Fortune 500 companies doing in-house work or partnering with an agency.

The wiki Scott has created can cut the amount of time spent in the “How should I do this?” phase significantly, though. But you should go into this with a few expectations about the time you’ll still have to commit to trying things out, seeing what works, making adjustments, doing outreach and in basic maintenance and those aren’t to be underestimated.