Ghosts & Shadows – She Makes War Music, ramblings and recommendations

Press : She Makes War on the BBC (with Neil Gaiman) – How Did That Happen?

So, last Wednesday my face was on the BBC news homepage all day, as part of an interview I did a couple of months ago with Tim Masters from the BBC. Next to my face was the face of famous (and brilliant) writer Neil Gaiman, who also took part in the interview about Twitter.

How did this happen? I've made it clear that I'm working on all this music stuff myself, so how did the girl who refuses to pay a monthly fee to a PR company and has to cross fingers her unsolicited press releases and mailouts get opened get her face on the Beeb next to a famous and massively credible person? Why, the magic of Twitter, of course!

I recently gave a lecture on portfolio working at Leicester University (through another Twitter contact, naturally) and one of the areas I discussed with the group of music students was authenticity. It's something that drives everything I do, and I stressed the importance of being the purest version of yourself as you can, because that's what people pick up on. I also talked about treating people well no matter who they are - the real life example I gave was meeting Hal Ritson from The Young Punx in his studio a couple of years ago. I was there recording a topline for a couple of dance producers who were hiring Hal for the day as an engineer. Now, as the singer I could have swanned in there, given all my face time to the guys I was singing for, ignored the engineer and gone home, but because I'm not like that I got chatting to Hal afterwards, and that led to us working together, eventually performing together in front of 15,000 people at Yokohama Arena last summer. Crazy stuff.

Similarly, on Twitter I don't spend my time looking for "important" or "useful" people to add to my stream. For me Twitter is a curious cross section of characters and experiences and I like watching that bubbling away. It's not a place for aggressive marketing tactics - it's all about authenticity. Tim Masters, the lovely man who interviewed me for the BBC article, had been following me for quite a while on Twitter and we'd exchanged tweets about this and that but I had no idea who he worked for because his profile didn't say anything about work. One day I saw he'd tweeted about an actress he'd just interviewed and I shot a message over saying I'd love to send him some music some time to see if he'd like it. It was a completely off the cuff tweet which opened up an email conversation between us about setting up an interview to go on the BBC. We met at one of my favourite veggie cafes in Soho for a chat and that was that.

So, how did last week's day of BBC fame affect me? As a result of the coverage my Twitter stream was deluged with messages from new people, retweets of the article and thumbs ups from existing followers and friends, and I gained about 200 new followers in the space of a day and a half. I replied to everyone, as is my way, so it was a pretty busy day all told.

The day after the article there were a few more messages and a whole bunch of people retweeting a key quote of mine where I said Twitter is "a bit like Facebook - but with people who actually care about you". It's interesting that only one person asked me what I meant by that and told me their experience was opposite to mine when I explained myself, most others seemed to concur.

The quotes Tim picked out for the article were a lot pithier than my full answers, as I tend to ramble (this is rather a long blog post...), but my point about Facebook versus Twitter is that of my 300-odd Facebook friends, all of whom I know personally, a pretty small percentage are likely to be actively supportive of my musical project and possibly less would actually choose to listen to it themselves. That's because I'm not just friends with people who like the same music as me, plus there are a lot of old schoolfriends on there plus some family members. That's why when I post about band stuff, or share links to my videos or microsites, I get hardly any "likes" or comments back.

When I post a link to something of mine on Twitter the response is astonishing. The Let This Be video had over 1000 views in four days largely due to people clicking on links from Twitter, and my followers always have something to say back to me. It's great. For me Facebook is a place to keep up with what my friends and family are up to, and Twitter is where I meet cool new people and share experiences. People who use Twitter tend to be more chatty in general because of the nature of the medium. Whatever - I think it's a great place to hang out.

The flurry of tweets has died down now and normal service is resumed, albeit with a chunk of extra people participating, hopefully, rather than just watching. That's what it's all about, after all.