It all started out quite innocently. Yesterday afternoon Krassy Halatchev of the Montreal duo CHIWAWA sent out a press release that began like this:
“Hello,Hope by now you have had the chance to review Chiwawa's latest release, "Watermark" - Chiwawa's fifth studio album.”
But by the end of the day this little email somehow got sent out nearly 200 times due to some technological mailing list glitch. And the recipients – radio djs and programmers from all over the world – did not take it well. As can be imagined, unsolicited band pitches come pretty thick and fast for most people in this business.
Putting out this tech fire would have been enough for CHIWAWA, but if you can imagine, it got worse. Within a half hour a Seattle radio music director had created a facebook group called “People Against CHIWAWA” and the membership quickly shot to 151 by the end of the day.
This being Missing Links day with R3’s blog editor John Paolozzi, I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about the joys and pitfalls of self marketing in our social networking age.
First up though, it’s Krassy himself and his thoughts. The facebook page is coming down today and people seemed to actually have a lot of fun in the end…not to suggest this as a marketing plan.