Controlling your online image?

Sheena Metal offers tips for musicians about how to prevent your inappropriate after-party behavior from spoiling your image. Among them is this:

Monitor Your Websites And Web Communities—Again, better safe than sorry. It’s always a good idea to visit your forums, message boards, photo galleries, fan clubs, blogs and online communities to see what the latest scoop on your band is. It’s also wise to retain approval privilege on anything posted on each of your band sites. Let people post all of the drunken, naked pictures they want, and then pick and choose which images you want to represent your band. The same applies to comments and posts. Remember fans are important and priceless but it’s ultimately your image to preserve to the industry and the world and your web presence is how you represent yourself to everyone interested in you from fans to labels and everything in between.

Of course, monitoring is important but excuse me while I burst into gales of laughter at the idea that any artist is going to get to control the images of them that appear on the web. Sure, they can manage what gets posted on their official sites, but with all the cameras fans have and all the fan sites and flickrs out there, people are living in dream worlds if they think they get to choose which pictures of them appear online.

Simple fact: if you don’t want drunken womanizing idiot pictures of yourself on the web, don’t get drunk, womanize, and act like an idiot. After-the-fact erasure isn’t an option.

Comments (2) to “Controlling your online image?”

  1. Hi Ms. Baym.

    I found your website through a google search on fandom website shutdowns, and I found that it was so informative and useful in helping my boyfriend out with his cultural studies paper on fan and musician interaction.

    So I just wanted to say thanks! I think that he is going to be referencing some of your articles in his paper. :)

    Stefanie, Windsor, ON

  2. Thanks for the feedback Stefani. But please, in the cozy little livingroom that is Online Fandom, call me Nancy!