Alright, so I’m reading a blog I like to read from a master persuasder and marketing maven Dave Lakhani and he posts something about Twitter that makes me think on it for a several days. It has to do with building your audience by letting them tell you what they like as a radio DJ through social media, namely Twitter.

Definitely read the whole post but here’s the parts I was most interested in:

“How Radio Can Use Social Media To Remain Relevant, Win Back … – Here is the big secret about Radio, listeners want to hear what THEY want to hear. That is why the broad channel format on Sirius and XM is so appealing. Pick your genre of music and there it is, commercial free . . . but still you have but still you have to wait to hear the song you want to hear and you rarely know what is coming next.

Enter social media.”

So, I’m not a radio DJ (thank god) but I have been a DJ for about 15 years for events (wedding, barmitzah, ba-mitzfah, frat parties, class re-unions, etc) and swing dances. My alter ego is DJ Slam. I’m the guy in the picture who’s actually DJ-ing and not screwing around. You may not know this but I have a strong passion for Lindy Hop and have been doing it for about 10 years now. Traveling the US taking workshops, teaching workshops, DJ, dancing, etc. Until May, I ran the first succesful 21+ swing dance club in the greater Phoenix area having won local awards and whatnot. Club Red Swing.

Now, if you cared to notice I used past tense in that sentence becasue I’ve since closed it down and now do special events exclusively. Big stuff. Namely, on Sept 16th I have a band coming from London to play the club while I DJ the band breaks. The #1 Swing Band In The UK. The Jive Aces.

I’m going to take Dave’s idea and put it into action. I’ll be tweeting both of my sets as I DJ. If you want to find out what bad-ass jazz & swing from the the 30s & 40s (with some soul on the side) sounds like, tune in by following me on Twitter.  These guys are so crazy they turn on the lights, have sword fights WITH their instruments WHILE they’re playing. I figured, if they’re doing something crazy, so will I!

You can help me DJ…

Also, if you’d like to “hear” a tune, be sure to Twitter me back that particular evening and I’ll do what I can to work it into the set. It’ll be like you’re twitter dj-ing, or twdj-ing, or tweeterdj-ing or something… (let me know if you have a better made up word than that because it’s not coming to me) We’ll use the meme #Slam.

I’ll be interested to see how this little experiment goes and if I piss a bunch of my followers off becasue they don’t like getting updates on awesome swing and soul songs….

At the very least, you have iTunes open and fill out your music collection with stuff you can dance around in your kitchen to.

PS Thanks Dave for the great idea. I have a following already but this really just allows me to take it from club to club or state to state with my iPhone

PPS Incidentally, I pretty much just use my iPod and iPhone these days to DJ. I used to haul around records & tapes, then I moved to laptop and iPod, and now I’m just iPhone & iPod. It’s all fits in my pocket and you can’t beat that!