Working Social Media with Gavin McGarry - JumpWire Media

Obviously, there is a process at work here and most will need smelling salts to revive themselves after following what once was the biblical critical path to success in the music industry. That world is forever gone –except for terrestrial radio, whose influence and ongoing stamp of approval is paramount.

If you are tech driven, curious and not at all overwhelmed by today’s digital world, even adapting quickly doesn’t  guarantee you’ll get a handle on evolution or see the light at the end of this optic transformation.

I doesn’t matter which end of the new platform you stand, you’re being moved and that shift will keep occurring until you’re driven to the limit. That limit extends past one frontier to the next and beyond since we first witnessed those stunning images transmitted through space back to earth from the Hubble telescope. The original question was, “What’s out there?” At present,  the bigger question, “What’s in here?”

This is why it was imperative to sit in on Gavin McGarry of Jump Wire Media’s seminar on managing social media as part of CMW. It’s takes a company to unravel the mystery and help devise an optimum social media plan.

“Here's the process when you work with us:

1) We listen and learn about your community.
2) We analyze your social media data. All of it.
3) We build a strategy from the data analysis.
4) We create content from the data. You approve all of it.
5) We poll your community. We ask questions. We test ideas. We create influencer groups. We respond to everything your community says.
6) We look at the data. Again.
7) We tweak, adjust, and develop new content based on the data.
8) We present insights from the data regularly to you and your team.
9) We slowly build trust with you, your team, and your community.
10) We both feel great and you feel comfortable enough to say, "Can you guys go ahead and never use the word 'data' in a meeting again? Thanks."

We no longer communicate through letter writing – that long form essay recalling events in one’s life. We are immediate, keyboard efficient and demanding.

Just a few months back there were doomsayer’s who prophesized the demise of Facebook – it’s influence and hold on people. “It’s where old people go to share obituaries.” Not the case, according to McGarry – Facebook is the #1 social hub and by all accounts kids have not abandoned it – they frequently visit but post elsewhere – Snapchat etc. The same for radio!

Radio is still a powerful medium – it’s still about validation. On demand streaming is the new entry point and it’s all in the stats. Build an audience and terrestrial radio will listen in.

ESPN stats man Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight) predicted Obama’s current four year term, the Oakland A’s play Billy Ball – a system now adopted through-out baseball all based on detailed performance stats. Athletes document every action, motion and delivery, every cut and acceleration mapped and recorded and analyzed to improve performance – the same applies to music. The hit makers are doing much the same at this moment. They work in teams dissecting every scribbled line, every peak, every corner for a potential emotional response and craft accordingly. They want you jumping up and down in your car seat repeating slogans after them. They are incite, fish and sell.

McGarry plays social media like a science. Twitter belongs to journalism – not to art. News comes fast and circles the planet in 140 characters with links. Facebook is common ground, the place where we communicate and share – not where we sell. Ask yourself, when was the last gig posting seen? Bands have all but given up. Nobody showed for your gig because nobody cares. There are only so many hours in a day and they are sectioned off. You access quickly then move on much like a breaking news cycle.

“At Jump Wire we specialize in building and managing social media communities over 100,000 fans. If you have 100,000 fans we work with you generally – most of our clients have over 1,000,000 fans. We have a long radio history and legacy. We did Virgin Radio in Canada. We currently work with only one radio station but it’s the greatest radio station in the world – MVY Radio on Martha’s Vineyard where I guess a lot of the big bands were broken. We did CBC Music and the other two you should probably check out – and we don’t work with them anymore, Q 107 and Boom. Troy and Blair are really, really experts in the radio place.

I’m based in Los Angeles – I am Canadian. We have offices in New York and a large team here in Toronto. This is my big thing I’m telling my teams and telling a lot of our clients – we are moving away from the interruption economy to the conversation economy. What this means is – all of us who are old school are used to our broadcast being interrupted. We are just going to commercials and then come back. The narrative has always been that way. But now millennials and GenZ don’t want ads. I hate them. I’ve moved away from Instagram and now on Snapchat all the time – and that’s mostly because it has no ads on it.

We doubled down at Jump Wire and don’t do marketing – we don’t think social media should be used for marketing. We believe in community and conversation.

We are in an ocean of content and only have so much time. I’ve actually limited my own screen time. I could binge on tons of things on Netflix but I only have an hour to watch and I chose not to – I have to limit my time wallet. In the U.S. we say the riches are in the niches. The more niches you are the better and you are going to have to monetize that.

If you can post from a mobile device – Facebook wants you to act like a twenty-two year old, they want to know things are original – it has an ip address and can be located and they know it’s coming from a mobile. When you take a picture from a mobile device it actually has an imprint in it and Facebook knows that it’s come from there. We’ve seen if you put up a Facebook post from your desktop with a photo and seven or eight words you’ll get 12.6% through the algorithm. What that means is if you have a thousand fans 126 will see each post you put up.  However, if you post from a mobile device it jumps from  5 – 9%. It’s huge. We’ve done lots of tests where we’ve taken the same thing and post once from our desk top and what that means is Facebook is thinking if it comes from desktop it’s probably being posted by a social media person, not a real person. We’ve started using iPads and mobile phones when we want to get a ton of reach for free.”

McGarry’s thirty minute sell was exhilarating, informative and necessary - the kind of seminar you plan for at these events. Kudos to CMW and do visit - in fact you can hear the presentation in its entirety it’s at bit.ly/cmwradiosocial2016.
gavin.mcgarry@jumpwiremedia.com