At RockDex, we're always looking for new ways to put the social media data we gather to practical use.

Usually, we examine how things like 1200 tweets on the day a track leaks or 800 Facebook fans the day the tour's announced can be used to determine the effectiveness of marketing strategies and the like. But we haven't yet looked at how RockDex could be used by a member of the press whose job is to cover localized events. And in a recent conversation with a friend of ours at a newspaper, we were issued a challenge. As a former music editor at an altweekly, I jumped at it.

The Challenge: Show a midwestern music journalist how RockDex could be used to capture Twitter stats around a concert that happened over the weekend.

The Concert: The Flaming Lips at Sandstone Amphitheatre, Bonner Springs, KS, April 23, 2010.

First, I put on my special RockDex Challenge Gloves (heavy duty long-cuff rubber) , RockDex Challenge Goggles (perscription snorkelers) and RockDex Challenge Cape (a faded pink towel), quaffed a RockDex Power Potion (5-Hour Energy, berry flavor) and got down to work

Looking at the Flaming Lips Twitter Quick Stats, I saw that on April 23, the band got 199 tweets. The following day, they got 123.

Note: When looking for tweets around a specific event, particularly a late-evening concert, it's important to check both the day of and the day after the show, to catch tweets that come in after midnight. (Side note: that spike of 400+ tweets on April 15? Likely due to the Lips being announced to the Glastonbury festival lineup.)

And then drilling down into each day's collected tweets, we can actually pinpoint who said what and when about the Lips -- from the show. A few poetic selections (all times EST):

Did she say they came out of a vagina? Awesome.

Links to those twitpics: 1, 2

Those are just some of the more interesting samples. All in all, I found about two dozen tweets from late 4/23 through early 4/24 containing content from or about the show. If you really wanna rock some data, here's a PDF displaying all the Flaming Lips tweets RockDex captured between right before the Lips went on stage through the wee small hours, when fans were still talking about the mindblowing performance they've just seen. (I manually highlighted the local tweets in gray.)

As a former music journalist myself, I can tell you firsthand this kind of information is invaluable when it comes to covering real-world events. No longer are music reviewers relegated to what they can capture with just their own senses. Now, through tools like Twitter, everyone joins the reporting effort.

Though nothing really surprising happened at this show -- no unexpected fireballs or nudity -- if anything crazy had happened, chances are you would've been able to find first-hand accounts on Twitter.

Now, you could argue that it's possible to get the same data from Twitter search. It is, but only if you do the search manually, sifting back through hours and hours of tweets in real-time. Go to a Friday night show and wait until Sunday to write it, and you've got to dig back through days of tweets. Not fun.

This data also provides a journalist covering music at a newspaper great networking and community-building opportunities. You can find people in the community who, like you, are going to shows and talking about it on social media. Don't they deserve a follow?

Man, I wish I'd had RockDex when I was at the newspaper.

Challenge: Completed.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_putnam/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

What unsigned artist wouldn't kill to have 1.4 million Twitter followers?

As the old channels die out, social media is where music fans are gathering. Yet musical artists who aren't celebrities have little choice but to grow their online fanbases much in the same way that they build audiences on tour: by working hard, being there and showing individual fans that they value their support on a personal level.

Photo by Lane Hartwell

The story is no different for Zoe Keating. The classically trained, experimental cellist even has it a bit tougher, given her chosen medium: one-woman instrumental composition with cello and computerized loops.

Yet here she sits with 1,377,141 Twitter followers and counting. (Interesting fact: She gained around 40,000 followers since I began writing this blog last night.) And that massive follower base was arrived at in large part by luck.

The big questions: Has that follower base made @ZoeCello an Internet celebrity? Kind of. It's gotten her some media attention, at least. Has it made her rich or prompted her to rest on her laurels? Nope and nope.

"I don't like to get wrapped up in the numbers and stuff," Keating tells RockDex over the phone from her house north of San Francisco. "I like to be me and to do things naturally and organically. Ultimately, I'm not a marketer, I'm a musician."

We first got a glimpse of Keating's damn-the-numbers approach to fanbase building last week. Following a blog post in which we crunched some of her social media numbers, Keating set us straight that it's personal interaction, not web traffic, that she cares about more.

First, she shared her feelings on MySpace, which is one of the sites we at RockDex monitor for artists:

Then, she hit us with the one-two punch about fan connections.

Naturally, we wanted to talk to her. Tracking numbers and data is of course a big part of what we do at RockDex, but it's not all we care about, either. Numbers are important, but musicians aren't factories churning out products. They're artists with lives and personalities.

But first, seriously, how does an unsigned classical musician get a million followers on Twitter?

Zoe knows that were it not for the people at Twitter appointing her unbidden to the suggested users list (the list of prominent users that Twitter automatically suggests to anyone who sets up a new account), she wouldn't have gained so many followers so fast.

However, it was her early adoption of the platform that presumably influenced the Twitter-powers-that-be to name her a suggested user.

A former information architect for a tech company in San Francisco during the dotcom boom and then later for the Research Libraries Group, Zoe began using Twitter as a way to track tech news. At first, she says, it had nothing to do with her music. Then, as social networking sites began to prove more useful to musicians, she was among the first to take advantage.

"I've just been doing this for a long time," she explains. "Before Twitter, there was MySpace, and I was one of the first to sign up on MySpace before it started allowing music accounts. … So I've just always been doing this stuff. It was a gradual process. My career has taken years -- that was the secret that wasn't a secret."

Despite the boost of being on the suggested user list, Keating prefers gradual growth over numbers-oriented campaigns.

"I don't believe in the marketing push. For an artist just starting out, having that marketing push to make a big splash won't be very long-lasting. My strategy is to get the person next door interested, and the person next door might get their friends interested. I'm in this for my career, not just a one-off thing."

Still, she's not afraid to try new things.

Earlier this month, mainly as an experiment, Keating offered up a free song from her upcoming album, Into the Trees, to fans in exchange for a tweet.

After researching platforms that would've charged her to build the tweet-for-mp3 mechanism, Zoe plied her tech savvy and did it herself using Twitter OAuth, with help from her friend Jesse von Doom of Cashmusic.org. She even created a custom bit.ly link to track the experiment. As RockDex showed, hundreds of fans responded.

But again, this type of promotion isn't typical of Zoe. Nor are things like charging money for tweets, Kim Kardashian-style.  "I've definitely been approached by people who wanted me to advertise things for them in my tweets, and I've always refused," she says.

"It's a really valuable medium as a way to express myself, and I don't want to mess with that," she continues. "One of things about Twitter that's good for me is it allows people to see me as a three-dimensional person."

She knows that of her 1.4m followers, the percentage of people who go from being casual @ZoeCello followers to true Zoe Keating fans is small, but she's not going to stop tweeting anytime soon.

"I feel like I'm not actively trying to convert people to be my fans. However, I feel like it's an opportunity to have a broader audience. It's up to me to convince them that I'm worth their time. I feel strongly that by being myself, I can make that happen. It's still the chance to have an audience that I wouldn't have had before," she says.

"Instead of shouting into an empty room, I'm shouting at a huge party. If in that huge party, only one person hears, I'll take that one."

At RockDex, we make no bones about our biz: We do track data, sure. But bigger than that is our mission to empower artists like Zoe with the ability to use their social media data to make business decisions. (By the way, Zoe hadn't heard of RockDex until that initial blog and is not currently a customer.) And as we build and improve our platform, we continually strive to marry the quantitative with the qualitative.

Because even if you do have the numbers -- or don't -- it won't do you much good without possessing that element Zoe Keating has consistently defined. Being real.

Leaking new singles to bloggers is one of the most common ways bands try to drum up publicity for a tour or new album release.

But without tools to monitor what kind of traffic the track generates once it's posted by bloggers, how can bands know the precise impact a leaked download or streaming song generates?

Today's RockDex Case Study focuses on New York-based, Minneapolis-bred rock belters The Hold Steady. Down to a quartet following the departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay, the sans-Franz Steady is preparing to release its fifth full-length, Heaven Is Whenever, on May 4.

Photo by Judson Baker

Within the past week, The Hold Steady has released two songs from the album to bloggers. The result: RockDex shows definite increases in social web traffic and online conversation that are directly traceable to both leaks.

Let's start with Twitter. On March 22, THS allowed Pitchfork to premiere the new track "Hurricane J." Word spread instantly and virally, particularly via Pitchfork's own Twitter feed through retweets.

The chart below shows the March 22 spike in mentions of The Hold Steady on Twitter -- 389 tweets, to be precise. It no doubt also helped that the song posting included a tour announcement. As we've shown before, announcing a tour is always a great way to stoke conversation.

And as we drill down into individual tweets, RockDex shows how immediate the viral spread occurred following the inital 'Fork tweet.

Just yesterday, March 29, NY Mag's Vulture Blog (not as influential as P-fork, but still big) got the exclusive to post single no. 2 from Heaven, "Rock Problems." This time, the spike was a bit smaller, at 250 tweets.

And, again, we can see the domino effect that the Vulture blog's initial tweet set off. Note also how many of the fans who retweet the song reshape the message to make it their own, becoming, in effect, individual marketers packaging the band's content for consumption by their friends. You just can't buy that kind of trust-based enthusiasm.

The impact wasn't relegated to Twitter, however.

On March 23, The Hold Steady's MySpace received 1,929 views -- an increase of 125% over the previous day. Traffic remained high but tapered off immediately after, and then rose again on March 30. (Note the day-long delay between when news hits Twitter vs. MySpace.)

As of this writing, the band hasn't posted the second (and, we think, better) song, "Rock Problems," to MySpace, but RockDex's MySpace singles chart shows that "Hurricane J" is a definite hit.

So, the next time your band is considering releasing a song to the blogosphere, how will you measure its impact?

Also, it's important to note that in neither case was the song given away as an MP3 -- both instances were stream only. Do you think that if The Hold Steady had chosen to leak free MP3s, they would've gotten more buzz?

One of the best things about RockDex is that it lets you push aside the punditry, allowing you to examine how real people are reacting to events that are blowing up the media.

A couple of weeks ago, celebrity tunesmith, guitarist and quasi-ladies-man John Mayer said some pretty wack stuff in an interview with Playboy Magazine.

You know. That interview where he compared his male part to a white supremacist and ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson to "sexual napalm." He also used a racial slur. And, rumor has it, he kicked a small child out the window while saluting Hitler. But that bit hasn't been confirmed.

There was so much coverage of the interview's controversial content, we actually never bothered to read the thing. (Who reads Playboy, anyway?) If you want to, though, it's archived at Playboy.com. Due to that site's overall purpose, you'll want to watch who's around when you click it.

So, anyway, the media backlash. It was so fierce, immediate and palpable that the guitar-playin' fool decided to make apologies at a concert and via Twitter on the day the interview came out, February 10.

Despite Mayer's attempts at apology, the s-word-storm continue to swirl, and the man who was before only suspected of being a douchebag was full-on called out by the press, interest groups, your mom and pops, and basically everyone with at least a dial-up connection.

But how were the actual fans reacting? Were they turning their backs? Were they unfriending his ass by the million?

Hardly.

As RockDex shows, Mayer's page gained more fans on Facebook around February 10-11 than any other time in the previous several months except for a spike on February 3, which was the day his Australia/NZ tour was announced. His growth has declined since the big flap. On February 12, 2,615 people became his fans on Facebook. The day before that: 2,521. On Feb. 17, he dipped down to 1,307, but that's still higher than where he was in December and early January, before the world knew the racist nickname of Mayer's Oscar.

That's a sure sign of support, as the act of becoming an artist's fan on Facebook is a more sentimental act than listening to their music on a corresponding site such as MySpace (where, as a side note, Mayer's song plays hovered around 75,000 per day during this time, neither low nor high for him).

Tweets mentioning Mayer skyrocketed during this time as well, surpassing the 5,000-a-day mark on February 11 and climbing in the ensuing days.

RockDex shows us who the most influential Twitter users talking about Mayer are. And one of those happens to be the Hef himself, verified and in the flesh.

Though we'd never suggest Mayer make an encore performance of that Playboy interview, it didn't seem to hurt his social media numbers.