Our good friend Dave Roye has started posting galleries of his photos from the event. Dave tells me he took over 2,000 photos this year and it’s taken him a while to go through them all. But he’s made it part way and he’s edited a bunch of them and resized them for viewing online.

He currently has photo galleries up from the Business Conference that took place Monday – Wednesday. He’s also got galleries from some of the artist showcases that occurred during the early part of the week. He promises more galleries soon from the Awards Show and Friday and Saturday at Fan Fest.

If you missed the event this year, this is a great way to check out what happened. And if you were there, you might relive a little of the fun and excitement while going through Dave’s photo galleries.

The main point we focused on was the difference between merely having a web presence, and having an effective web presence. Now, effective means that it successfully produces the desired results. That means you must have some desired goals in mind to begin with.

As an artist or event producer or DJ or whatever, we all have the same basic goal for our web presence. We want to make a living at bluegrass music and we intend for our web presence to assist us in doing so. From that point on though, the specific goals will differ considerably. That’s your first task, decide what your goals are. Here are a few suggestions.

• networking
• gathering contact info
• maintaining communication with fans
• finding new fans
• selling merchandise or tickets

You get the idea. Depending on your goals, you go about developing your web presence differently, but some constants remain.

One of the main topics of discussion was MySpace. A point we kept trying to make was that MySpace is not YourSpace, it’s TheirSpace. What I mean is that you should not use MySpace as your primary website. It is a good road sign to direct people out of that network and to your actual site. John made a good point that if you don’t understand MySpace, you should ask one of your children or grandchildren for help. If you are running a business you might look into obtaining an intern from a local college to do your MySpace work for you. These young people will know how to work that network and will enjoy doing so for you.

MySpace can be good for building a network of people that you then direct to you main website to accomplish your other goals, like selling merchandise or festival tickets.

YouTube is another site that can be used for the same purpose. Uploading promotional videos of your band or festival can be a great way to let people get a look at you without having to travel.

A good bit of discussion centered around the idea of branding. Branding simply means that everything you do, from your .com website, your MySpace page, your YouTube clips, your printed material and promotional items, all reinforce your brand. Your brand is your band or festival name, your logo, whatever it is that people remember you by. Brandi was key to this discussion, as the primary mover behind The Dixie Bee Liners effective use of a branding strategy. We took a look at their website, and at some printed material and promo items she brought for show and tell. This is really something you should pay attention to, it’s important.

Another topic was graphic design and usability. We discussed how the average website visit is only 30 seconds. If a site is not pleasing to the eye and easy to get around, the surfer moves on. You should definitely spend some time working on your site to make sure it navigates easily and isn’t distracting visually. Study websites that you find easy to use and pleasant to look at, copy their ideas. Depending on your situation you may want to consult with an professional on the design of your site.

We also discussed the technical aspects of constructing a website. Tools we mentioned were FrontPage (don’t use it) and Dreamweaver (do use it). There are several free ones out there as well. The real decision you are faced with is knowing when you have reached the limits of your knowledge, time, and capability and need to hire a professional. You can teach yourself a great deal about html and building websites by doing online research into the topic. Brandi mentioned a site she used called htmlgoodies.com. This site is just one of many.

You may also want to visit validator.w3.org to check your site and make sure your code is valid html. I just checked The Bluegrass Blog, ouch! we have 152 errors at present. It’s always changing though since we update with new content each day. It’s hard to keep up with.

That brings us to the next topic which is content and updates. We stressed the importance of frequent updates and valuable content. If a visitor comes to your site for a second visit and nothing has changed, it will be a while before they return. Good ways to serve up content include: blogs, contests, giveaways, news, etc.

The most important aspect of all marketing is remark-ability. You need to be remarkable. If you are a band and you are trying to market yourself, you need to make sure you are playing music worth a listener’s time. If you’re not, they won’t visit repeatedly, no matter how cool your site is. The same goes for whatever it is you are trying to market online.

That about sums it up. There was a question and answer time, but I can’t remember all the questions that were asked at this point. IBMA did record the seminar and it will be available for purchase from the organization at some point in the near future. All of the seminars are recorded each year and made available on CD.

GAC describes Edge of Country as:

a great mix of bluegrass, Americana, country rock and traditional styles.

The footage was captured by GAC during the IBMA World of Bluegrass week in Nashville. From what I understand, it consists mainly of interviews conducted backstage during Fan Fest.

Some of the time slots are’t all that fantastic, but at this point it’s just nice to see some coverage of the event making to air.

According to the GAC website, the first segment runs tonight at 11 PM EST and then again at 3 AM EST.

The second segment will air only once at 1 PM EST tomorrow.

Similar times are given for the third and fourth episodes, set to air on October 19-20, 2007.

Here’s a list of the performer to be included in the series.

• Doyle Lawson
• Sam Bush
• Ronnie Bowman
• Jim and Adam of Mountain Heart
• Grascals
• Larry Cordle
• Chris Jones & John Pennell
• Rob Ickes
• Williams and Clark
• Newfound Road
• Cadillac Sky
• Donna Hughes
• Red Stick Ramblers
• Bradley Walker
• Mark Newton & Carl Jackson
• Alecia Nugent
• Cherryholmes
• The Greencards
• Marty Raybon
• J.D. Crowe

UPDATE 9:45 a.m.: GAC will also air the new Randy Kohrs music video, Who’s Goin’ With Me, along with an interview with Randy following the Mountain Heart piece. The new video will then go into regular rotation on Edge Of Country.

If you would like to see all of our coverage of the 2007 IBMA World of Bluegrass and Awards Show, just click the IBMA 2007 tag just under the post title.

        

        

        

John remarked that, given the degree to which bluegrass artists and fans appreciate the subtleties of acoustic instrument tonality, it might be appropriate to consider an award for the best audio recording of the year.

It struck me as a marvelous idea as well, though I suspect that the IBMA Awards Committee may not immediately warm to the notion of new awards.

In any event, we have modified the code to remove the tag that caused this problem, so anyone who had trouble seeing the IBMA images should be able to do so now.

• IBMA: Tony Trischka Keynote
• In the Exhibit Hall
• Tuesday Evening Showcases
• IBMA: Wednesday Night Photos
• IBMA Awards Show Photos
• More Awards Show Photos

We actually have some additional photos which we will post later today or tomorrow, as soon as we recover from last week.

If you would like to follow our live blog coverage of the Awards Show, you can find it arranged in chronological order here.

Here are the results.

Last year we only got 7 out of 17 correct in our poll. This year we got 7 out of 17 right again. It seems we’re establishing a track record.

It’s interesting to see how our readership compares to the voting membership of IBMA. Visit the IBMA website to find out more about IBMA membership.

More updates from IBMA and the World of Bluegrass coming soon.

Dear folks,

I am so honored to have received the 2007 Bass Player of the Year award last night. I just wanted to say thank you! I am overwhelmed.

I wanted very much to take the opportunity to say something that I didn’t get to say last night, and that is, I want to thank Claire Lynch and the Claire Lynch Band for letting me play with them. I want to thank Claire for hiring me almost 10 years ago and giving me the fertile ground and nurturing support to grow as a musician. Claire Lynch, Jim Hurst and Jason Thomas, are 3 of the best musicians in this business, and playing with them is a dream come true. Being on the road with them is so great, we have a lot of fun and they are the consummate professionals. I cherish them and I’ve learned so much from them.

I’ve been on stage a zillion times through the years, and I always get a little nervous, but being on stage for just those few sweet seconds these (unbelieveable) 7 times to accept this great honor have given new meaning to an “out of body” experience. Or should I say, “out of shoes” experience…

Thank You very much.

Sincerely,
Missy Raines

The guys spend some time discussing this past year and how it went for them after winning Emerging Artist in 2006. They also discuss, songwriting, the new CD, the next CD, and more.

The video is approximately 5 minutes in length and should load fairly quickly for most users. Enjoy!

   

We’ll post some more photos in the morning.   Zzzzzz….

You can now read the posts in chronological order starting at the top of the page and following along going down, as if you were at the show. This is reverse the normal blog posting order which places the newest post at the top of the page, but it seemed more logical to order things in this way for the live blog posts. At least after the fact.

Please visit this page, to experience our live blog of the 2007 IBMA Awards Show.

See ya later!

They are throwning down on a lively version of Bringing in the Georgia Mail.

Nobody has a chop like Sam, though his band certainly has some chops of their own!

Oh my… it’s a tie! The award goes to J.D. Crowe & The New South for Lefty’s Old Guitar, and Fork In The Road from The Infamous Stringdusters.

Dwight McCall is singing lead on Just Loving You with Ron Stewart and Ricky Wasson completing the trio.