Social Media for Legacy Recordings Broken Down
Social Media for Legacy Recordings Broken Down
Legacy Recordings is the catalog Record Label of Sony Music Entertainment. Their job is to maintain and produce reissues of hit albums from a variety of genres of artists such as popular, rock, jazz, blues, r&b, folk, country, gospel, Broadway musicals, movie soundtracks, ethnic, world music, classical, comedy and more. In recent years they have been releasing new albums from artists like Willie Nelson and Earth Wind and Fire. Some of their top artists consist of Michael Jackson, Paul Simon, Tony Bennett, Celine Dion, Jimi Hendrix and many more.
How Legacy Uses Images and Videos
Whenever Legacy creates a content schedule (daily posts) they always try to include an amazing photo. When you scroll down your Facebook newsfeed, what grabs your attention the most? Of course a photo will have a higher chance of you stopping to see what it is rather than just plain text. Legacy believes it’s the same situation with using videos. Chances of a fan stopping on their newsfeed and seeing a video link for their favorite artist’s music video and playing the video, is higher than just having a post with just words.
"1964, ELVIS PRESLEY’s 16th movie, Roustabout is released by Paramount.” - Legacy Recordings Facebook Page
I Spoke with Brian Wong, Legacy Recordings Social Media Specialists who informed me on Legacy’s daily process of how they receive their content and their strategies as a company.
“We have a team member that does a lot of research for us and helps us create the content schedules,” Wong said. “Once the content schedule is created, our team usually goes over the facts to make sure the posts make sense and then we can schedule them out.”
Wong goes over the main profiles that he controls to see what kind of posts are scheduled for the day and makes sure there are no errors. Whenever he sees a profile with an empty spot, he usually creates a generic post using an image or a music video. He runs anywhere between 15-20 Facebook and Twitter pages a day including Michael Jacksons.
How Fans Interact with Legacy Recordings
The best way Legacy feels to get fans to interact is just asking them to. They believe fans love homework. “LIKE” if you are a fan of this album! “COMMENT” if you were at the concert! “SHARE” this post to your best friend!
Paul Simon- Live Q&A- Twitter
One way Legacy likes to have fans involved is by doing live question and answer events via their social media accounts. Music legend Paul Simon sat down with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon for a live social media Q&A at the New Yorker Festival this past October. During the 90 minute Q&A session, the two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, didn’t leave any questions unanswered. Fans used the hashtag #AskPaulSimon to get their voices heard, than Muldoon chose which questions would be answered live by Simon.
Many fans revealed that he is a hero to them, while Simon unveiled a few heroes of his own in the intimate setting.
“I’ve had four heroes in my life- Mickey Mantle, Elvis Presley, JFK and Lenny Bruce,” said Simon. “After that there were people who I was impressed with, but I wasn’t in awe of, they weren’t heroes to me.”
The Grammy Award winning artist played his new song, “The Riverbank” to his die-hard fans and explained the inspiration behind it.
“I live in Connecticut, not too far from Newtown and there was something about that communal coming together that very strongly affected me. Also I visited Walter Reed hospital, so this song comes from a blending of those two things,” said Simon.
By the event being live with an audience and Simon being interactive with fans via social media, this is a great outlook for artist to be more personal with their fans.
Like Paul Simon, Legacy created a slightly different event for Tony Bennett that included him having fans use the hashtag #TonyDigitalDay and ask him questions. Legacy received 55+ Million impressions on Huffington Post, Reddit, Twitter & Facebook combined. Online chatter around Tony Bennett as well spiked massively during the live tweeting event. Events that Legacy sets up with artists tend to drive more traffic to their social media accounts but the only downside is they don’t do events often.
How Legacy can you expanding their following on Social Media
I just finished up my Journalism Certification at NYU and for one of my classes I interviewed Aliza Licht, the SVP Global Communications for Donna Karan International. She decided she wanted to directly connect with the fans be creating a twitter account with a twitter handle of, “DKNY PR GIRL.” By connecting the company name to a person, the followers have related more to her opposed to just the company name. She said since she has created this DKNY PR GIRL character, DKNY has gained even more publicity and she was even named the top 50 most influential people in the fashion industry of the 2013. She said this has taken their publicity to another level on top of the everyday press related events. I listed her sites where she uses the DKNY PR GIRL name to further the DKNY product.
http://www.twitter.com/dkny
http://www.dknyprgirl.com
http://www.pinterest.com/dknyprgirl
http://www.whosay.com/dknyprgirl
Legacy Records twitter followers are currently at 17,458, GQ magazine who also added a face to the brand has 351,456 and DKNY PR GIRL has 479,856. If Legacy could add a person behind the Legacy brand, the goal would be to gain more followers, which would create more re-tweets, sharing of the Legacy brand. It’s just a different view point to get the information out there.
https://twitter.com/SonyLegacyRecs- Legacy twitter
https://twitter.com/GQMagazine - GQ twitter
Legacy Recordings News Correspondent
It’s very rare to go to a major news website and not see a video associated with a news story. It’s important to make short videos, one to two minutes that go along with the stories. People most likely are reading/watching from their phones or browsing the internet at work during the day, where they can watch a quick video. By adding short videos to the Legacy website that goes along with the news posted, it gives the fans the ability to also “share” them via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, e-mail ect. This is just another way to further publicity in a cost efficient way by using the equipment they already have. By having a Legacy News Correspondent you can send this person to all different artists events and have them interview artists. Legacy then will have exclusive interviews uploaded to Legacy’s website and social media accounts which could go viral.
It is difficult to develop a personal relationship with a company when there isn’t a person’s name attached to it. By making someone, “The Face” of Legacy, it will help fans contact on a personal level with the Legacy News Correspondent but also with Legacy as a brand.
Examples of News articles associated with videos
Cnn.com does a video segment called, “iReporter” where fans ask the questions to the artists. It’s a way to get fans involved and you can play the interviews back on the website by tweeting out the link, putting it on Facebook, and have the link direct them to the Legacy website. This would be an extension of have fans be involved like Legacy’s Q&A events.
Cnn.com iReporter questions Example:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2012/05/01/iri-katharine-mcphee.cnn
Different articles with news and videos
http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/30/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/willie-nelson-birthday/index.html
http://entertainment.time.com/2013/04/30/happy-birthday-willie-nelson-rare-photos-from-the-70s-and-80s/
http://popwatch.ew.com/2013/04/30/willie-nelson-80th-birthday/
It isn’t often that Legacy posts informative videos on their social media accounts with brief news update. Yes, a lot of the artists have passed away but there are always news events going on that involved theses artists that need to be promoted better. Also, 18 months after an artist’s music is released from their front line record label, ex. RCA or Epic at Sony, their album becomes Legacy’s responsibility to promote. There are a lot of relevant artists that they could team up with to promote the Legacy brand better.
Britney Spears has been signed to Sony’s record labels Jive and now RCA since her first album was released, “Baby One More Time” in 1999. She has a new album coming out December 3rd of this year and Legacy has done nothing to promote her past hits. Legacy could team up with her to talk about her past music experiences with all her albums, reveal personal information about recording, touring and possibly even release some unreleased tracks that she recorded over the years.
Legacy Records as a Brand
Overall Brian Wong believes, “Legacy as a whole is probably the largest social media reach than any single brand. So knowing that, we are able to combine all our resources (profiles) to make Legacy as a whole one of the strongest in social media.” Wong continued, “Maintaining a following is as easy as creating amazing content. Whether it is a rare photo of the artist or a new track that has never been heard before!”
I believe by adding a few of my suggestions to their social media strategy, they could take the Legacy brand to another level of continued success. I will continue to work with the Legacy team to have more artist’s events and have more videos posted on their social media outlets to have better interaction with fans on a regular bases.
http://www.legacyrecordings.com/
https://twitter.com/SonyLegacyRecs
https://www.facebook.com/LegacyRecordings
Kara Schultz- Final Project
