"Holy Crap! You found me!"

That was the latest comment I got when I posted a "thank you" in a fan's Livejournal. She had just finished writing a praise-filled post about how cool my Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers CD was, when I appeared... just two hours after she wrote it!

That's not the first time I have blown away fans by personally responding to a blog that they would never have expected me to respond to. So what's the deal? Am I mind-reader?

Yup! They call me Mind-Reading Marc. Okay, not really. In fact, I found Technorati a long time ago. It allows me to track what people are saying about me and my websites in their blogs.

Any music marketer worth half their weight knows that tracking the results of a campaign are essential to the success of their marketing. Technorati works with blogs or any RSS feed. You enter a word or URL and it scans those feeds. Then it comes back with the results. And it also tells you how long ago they posted the information.

Thanks to this amazing site, I learned that David Meerman Scott posted a thank you to me after finishing his New Rules of Marketing & PR. I learned that Pink Mermaid used the chorus for one of my songs in a list of quotes about forgiveness. And I got a great review and feature by AssociatedContent regarding my latest CD, Irish Drinking Songs: The Cat Lovers Companion.

Of course, I also read how a fan loved my original CD so much that she posted a link to it in her blog and got a HUGE surprise when I commented and said, "thanks!" Guess that is not too bad a tool for helping you to market your music and surprise the hell out of your fans.

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Bard Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards has helped 1000's of musicians save and make money with their musical groups through his monthly newsletter, Bards Crier Music Marketing and Promotion Ezine. Now you can get FREE "how-to" music marketing and promotion advice by visiting www.bardscrier.com. No time to visit the site? Subscribe to the Bards Crier Ezine for Free. Just email subscribe@bardscrier.com

I was reading an article by Seth Godin called "Good Is Not Almost As Good as Great" where he mentions firing half of your sales force of "good" sellers and keeping the "great" ones. That really kinda struck home with me due to a recent experience.

We play at a convention where we have a regular group of sellers. They were good-hearted kind people who don't earn any money by helping us sell. They just get free entrance and some CDs. They love our music, but I'm not sure how great they are as sales people. It's kinda hard to say.

Well coming up soon is that same convention, but this time we will have our DragonCon sales team there. They are fantastic sellers! We'll find out just HOW fantastic at the convention.

I guess maybe if we were paying our sales team, maybe we should consider better sales people. But as we are using fans, who are unpaid, it's hard for me to not hire someone back if they are just "good" instead of "great", because they are fans and we have a history together. They 'may' not be great sellers, but they are great friends and fans. It's more about loyalty

I guess ultimately, that's a different dynamic to consider than when you're paying someone. For that, I think Seth is probably correct. And mayhaps if we wanted to continually improve our sales, we would hire great sales people and make up the sales difference through great help. But for now, I'm happy to have someone who loves our music selling our CDs and doing a "good" job at doing it.