Posted by Ann Bernard

Yesterday I mentioned that using third party applications (sites and communities) are better than using the ones built into MySpace.  Now, I’m going to explain why I made that statement.

You have five basic kinds of communities on the internet.  You have: 

1. Landing Points/End Points
2. Your Extensions
3. Your Hubs
4. Your Aggregators/Promoters
5. Traditional Communities
   

We’re going to be to talking about what’s more relevant to you: your landing/end points and extensions.

Your Landing/End Points on the Web
A quick refresher – three days ago in the More Chatting About Social Media post I mentioned that people communicate on the web in five ways:

1. Words (blogs, microblogging, and through comments)
2. Audio (podcasts, internet radio)
3. Video (from 12seconds.tv, Seesmic to YouTube, Viddler and Internet TV shows)
4. Pictures (Flickr)
5. Presentations (mixtures of the above - Slideshare)

Your landing points/end points are sites on the web that have the capabilities of  combining all 5 methods of communication.  Another important characteristic of a good landing point is a large and relevant community.  Sites become landing points because a large mass of people have made it a habit of visiting those sites once, twice, multiple times a day or at least every week.

Lets narrow that down further – in a nutshell, good landing points for you as an entertainer are MySpace, to some extent Facebook and your own website.  I’m going to keep pushing the importance of having your own website.  It’s an excellent landing point and place to aggregate your extensions.

Other Landing Points for Entertainers

MySpace isn’t the only community focused on music or entertainers. There certainly are quite a few others out there.  I need to explore them more, but from what I’ve seen of them; they are more like traditional communities with limited abilities to combine all your communication means.

Would love to hear from you about you think of that statement.  Do you have other landing points?

Your Extensions
Your extensions are sites and communities where you produce a specific type of content and take part in participating in that community.  The content is exposed to the community within that site but the site is designed for you to extend your content to your landing points. 

Video and Picture Sites
Video and Picture Sites are excellent extension sites.  They are fun places to create and post content and are, depending on the site, relatively light on the workload for the community side.

Driving the point home from yesterday’s post – the reason it makes more sense to have an account and post your videos on YouTube rather than just on MySpace is for the extra exposure in a different community.

Microblogging Platfroms
Microblogging platforms (Twitter, Jaiku, Pluck, Pownce, Tumblr, etc.) require a great deal more involvement to create valuable, interesting content and become part of the respective communities.  The effort ought to be made though, in at least one of them, because of exposure to different audiences and another form of content.

Internet Radio, Podcast, Internet TV
This is a whole new level of involvement in creating content.  I definitely don’t want to get into what it takes to be successful in running an internet radio show, podcast or internet TV program.  But know that those platform and communities also exist as another source of content.

Instead of producing your own – I recommend looking at what show(s) you could be a guest on.

Wrap-up
Hopefully you’re starting to get the idea of what’s out there and you’re starting to see how it’s suppose to come together.

Knowing the difference between your landing/end points and your extensions is important because it’s how you’ll judge where your time is best spent.

The other sites, your hubs and your aggregators/promoters are also important but we can hold off talking about them.

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