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The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office reached a decision on March 25, regarding a body-shape appeal involving Fender Musical Instruments vs.Stuart Spector Designs, U.S. Music Corporation, ESP Guitars, Sadowsky Guitars, Lakland Musical Instruments, Peavey Electronics, Warmoth Guitar Products, Schecter Guitar Research, Michael Tobias, and others.

The Board stated that, “Fender refers to the ‘iconic’ status of these [instrument] outlines in American popular culture; however, we must resolve a narrow issue: Do consumers associate these two-dimensional outlines, depicted in the drawings, as indicators of source? …We conclude that applicant [Fender] has not established acquired distinctiveness such that these two-dimensional outlines of guitar bodies, standing alone, serve to indicate source.”

After five years of hard-fought litigation, which included over twenty thousand pages of evidence demonstrating countless companies who have manufactured, marketed and sold guitars that use the body shapes that Fender sought to trademark, the TTAB concluded, “The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that these configurations are so common in the industry that they cannot identify source. In fact, in the case of the [Stratocaster] body outline, this configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary.” The entire decision can be read at: http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91161403&pty=OPP&eno=246.

You can use it to get people to your website to listen to your music; get audience members to your next show; build a fan base, use it to sell your next mp3 download, or maybe ultimately get connected to the people in the industry who can take you to the next level in your career.

Below are a few simple tips about getting started using Twitter to find followers and a few suggestions for useful tools that are easy to access and are free.

1. What are you ultimately trying to accomplish?

Do you want to build a fan base? Do you want to get people to listen to your music? Do you want to market your newest mp3 release or your new video? Having a clear objective of why you are on twitter in the first place will keep you focused and will help you send a clear message to the people who will eventually follow you.

2. If you want to be known, you have to tell people how to know you.

Use your band name or your name for your twitter account. Simple rule.

SteveJobs, Obama, and David_Lynch are examples that best practice is to tell others who you are so that when your fan base or friends try to find you using Twitter Search, they are going to easily be able to do this.

3. Find Followers by Being A Follower First.

Joining Twitter feels like you just got word about a party where there are about a billion people in attendance but the room is 100% blinding dark and you cannot see anyone.

So how do you get them to follow you and how do you find them?

One of my favorite tools is an application called TweetGrid.

Via their own words: “TweetGrid is a powerful Twitter Search Dashboard that allows you to search for up to 9 different topics, events, converstations, hashtags, phrases, people, groups, etc in real-time. As new tweets are created, they are automatically updated in the grid.”

I usually use the 1 X 2 Grid. This way I can put two different phrases into the two grids and get a pretty good dose of conversations taking place in real time. This exposes the people that we want to follow us, and who we can follow in the meantime.

for instance, let’s say that “Crunchy Music” is a buzz word in your circle. Type in, “Crunchy Music.” People who are using “Crunchy Music” as a part of their 140 character thoughts or observations show up.

Visit their site. Read their description. Read their most recent posts. If they are consistently tweeting about similar interests “Follow” them.

Depending how quickly you want to have followers, I would suggest doing this every day for a period of time. This way you get in on current conversations from people who will have similar interests.

A small minority of the people that you follow will begin to follow you.

4. Talk To Nobody, but pretend someone is there.

Talking to yourself is not very fun and over a long period of time, it is a little trippy, but in the beginning you are going to have to do just this.

Be prepared for those who will begin to visit your page to see who you are and what you are all about. Nobody wants to follow someone who only has a few tweets or none at all.

5. Engage in the Conversations with Strangers.

You can publicly tweet others who are not following you. You do this by adding a “@” in front of their twitter name. For instance, let’s say that the hottest producer in the industry is commenting on a show that they spent backstage at last night and you were at the same show (in the nose-bleed section), you could tweet,
“@bigproducer I got the birds-eye vantage point last night and I agree this show was awesome no matter where you sat.”

This now becomes your post history, shows you are engaged in the community, and might even get a response back from bigproducer, and maybe another follower.

6. Be a Multi-Dimensional Tweeter

It is great to talk about your music and your band, but try to put some other information about yourself into your tweets so that others get a broader idea about who you are and what you are all about. This is best done by putting links to web pages that contain interesting information that you want to share.

Let’s say for instance that you were double billed last last with a band that you think is really worth hearing by others. Go to their site, or MySpace and grab their link. Say something that makes others want to follow the link and then post it.

Here is another tool that everyone should know about: http://www.tinyurl.com

If the link that you are going to share is over 25 characters, use this to condense it down to 25 characters which is very important because you are already trying to say something meaningful with the remaining 115 characters that you are allowed. These shortened links are permanent.

Don’t Expect That Every One Will Want to Follow You

Don’t base your self-esteem on the amount of followers that you have. It is always great to have genuine followers, but this is going to take time. Like the above mentions, it is all going to be about your interaction with others which means that you have to be a follower, you have to find people, and your are going to have to engage in conversations and micro-blog your interests to others.

We will post more about Twitter in future posts. In the meantime, here are some interesting marketing for artists blog posts found in our search today:

27 Engaging Twitter Tips for Musicians: How to Network Successfully via Twitter

Twitter for Musicians and Bands: The How To Guide


Musicians Twitter Roadmap

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Disclaimer: The above content is for a full conversation and does not disclose the opinion of Core One Creative.