After All, Our Parents Taught Us To Share...

I had a status update a couple weeks ago on Facebook about how I was famous in Medford. Here’s the skinny on that:

I was in line at Cold Stone Creamery—a place I visit far too often, but man is that Cake Batter ice cream GOOD! And is it my fault they did away with Cake Batter Light? Exactly.

Anyway, this woman waiting for her ice cream to be mixed was just kind of looking around the joint and caught my eye. I smiled in the neighborly way you do when you’re sharing a human experience like waiting in a line, and she smiled back. We both broke eye contact and stared around at some other fascinating things in our immediate environment, and then she looked at me again and walked over.

“Is your name Kim Davidson?” She asked.

“Yes,” I answered, staring at her quizzically now, trying to place her thoroughly unfamiliar face.

“I saw your videos on Facebook. I love your voice.”

No way! It turns out I absolutely DIDN’T know her, but after a few minutes of name-dropping we figured out who our common link was. And because a friend of hers who knows me posted one of my videos on her home page, she’d gotten to check them out. “I play them for my son all the time when I’m at home with him. He loves them, too.” She told me.

How cool is that?

What is the moral of this story? That word-of-mouth (or word-of-newsfeed) WORKS. A simple click to share a video, a song, an event—whether mine or someone else’s—can make all the difference to an independent artist without a massive PR budget. This woman I would never have found became a fan of my music because of one little click by someone else. THAT is the power of the Internet. So don’t be afraid to use it. J

Thanks to K.Y.B. for sharing my video and gaining me a fan. It was really fun to be recognized completely randomly like that by a total stranger.

So... Hi!

Because all I needed was yet another place to maintain on the web, and all you needed was another place to follow me on the web, here I am. Since I don't have many gigs on the books just now, I am trying to overwhelm Webland with my virtual presence by signing up for every crazy social networking thing that comes my way.

Remember when you could just hop in your pickup truck, drive to some far-out radio station, walk in there with your guitar and your pushy husband, and just BE on the radio? Me neither. But it seems so cool when I see it in "Coal Miner's Daughter."

Nowadays even if you're ON the radio it's hardly enough to keep your name alive in the households of America. And what if you're NOT even on the radio yet? Well, you start production on a CD so you have something to SEND to the radio people. And when you run out of money you start nagging everyone you know, begging them to send you even five bucks so you can finish the damn thing and have something to send to radio stations, and to sell at gigs, and to use as coasters. When they don't send you five bucks (because let's face it, the economy is a nightmare and I don't have five bucks to spare, so I can't expect anybody else to), you start signing up for things like Nimbit and Snocap so that you can sell digital tracks from the upcoming record, because maybe if people are GETTING something for their five bucks it'll make them more likely to part with it. And while you're at it you might as well sign up for all the other places you can embed that online store, and that brings us to now. A place.

And here is the embed...





Assuming it works. You can't embed stuff on Facebook--which is more than a little annoying. I mean, Facebook is annoying enough, with their ever-changing layouts, and other crazy dumb things that work my last nerve, don't get me started--but the lack of HTML freedom is REALLY irksome. I mean, COME ON.

But okay, I just checked it here and it works. Yay! So now here's the beauty of it, and this is where you get to help me further my career for FREE! You heard me right. See where it says "SHARE" in big letters under my picture? If you click on that, you can embed this handy widget (that's the official term for one of these embeddable promo thingies) to whatever website YOU hang at (except Facebook--unless you have "My Stuff" or some other special thing to bridge the gap), and all YOUR friends can check out my music and perhaps buy a digital EP, or whatever. And then they can tell two friends, and they can tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on (name that commercial, children of the 70's)!

So that's the dealio. And that's my blog. Welcome to the next level of Hell. ;-)