Agile DIY for marketing musicians

 

As part of my continuing series of posts on Agile going beyond the software development industry, I like to mention this article I ran into talking about how Agile principles were appropriated from the software development community and leveraged for marketing musicians.  As this article from Solveig Whittle states:

Of course, it didn’t take long before product managers and other marketing types realized that the same concepts which were helping their brethren across the cubicle pods over in developer-land could also be applied to the world of marketing. As a former software marketer, the idea of Agile Marketing fascinates me, as does the idea of applying it to the world of indie music marketing. This article outlines how Agile Marketing values can be used by indie musicians to guide and prioritize their online and social media marketing activities….

We struggle with finding time for both artistic creativity and promotion, we sift through unending and various advice on how to promote our music best on our websites and via social media, and we suffer insomnia as we attempt to master our social media content creation process – should we blog? YouTube? Vine? Pay for ads on Facebook or promoted posts?

The more interesting portion of the article is how the principles from the Agile Manifesto were modified to resonate with their marketing initiatives:

• Responding to change over following a plan
• Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns
• Testing and data over opinions and conventions
• Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
• Individuals and interactions over target markets
• Collaboration over silos and hierarchy

As I have mention before in a discussion on the Project Management Central discussion board, that much of the success in Agile is the frame of mind one adopts rather than following some specific process or tool which goes against the very philosophy of Agile anyway.

This interesting article is another example of how transferable that mindset is.