Check out the great read from Jed @ ReverbNation about Creating Real Fans via their Fan Funnel. Lots of great insights on how using your online marketing strategy is critical in creating and nurturing fans (that’s fans — not just people who added you to their friends list).

On top of that, they’ve come up with some cool software to score artists by giving them a Band Equity score. They look at everything from MySpace stats to number of song plays and site visits to come up with a tangible Band Equity score which can be compared to other artists and monitored over time.

ReverbNation does bring up a good point, though, that you can’t account for a band’s success just by the numbers. I’d like to see how they could bring in the nature of comments/reviews, too, and how it correlates to album sales/downloads. Not to mention, how can this Band Equity correlate to offline connections like live shows? What kind of insights can bands get from this score that will help them build deeper connections and increase sales, and not just, for example, boost the number of MySpace friends?

Gonna keep on eye one this one.

If you’ve noticed that the W3 blog has been a bit empty the past few months, blame it on the Brits. Okay, no, don’t do that, but I’ve been enjoying a four month semester in London that’s kept me busy on different fronts. I’ll be back in Atlanta for the summer to work on social media and music projects, and finishing up at the Atlantis Music Conference. The latter should be great fun — think of it as the south’s answer to SXSW (except it’s cheaper and has an urban feel to it).

Since arriving in London, I’ve been interning at the digital consultancy Ryan*MacMillan, dabbling in the social media & politics, travel, television, and seeing an entirely new (and refreshing) look at the social media game. I wrote a piece for R*M’s report for Contagious Magazine on how brands can use free tools to monitor online buzz relevant to their needs. Check out the free extract for some of the insights from the R*M team on social media, conversation monitoring, and identifying audience needs.

While here, I also stopped by the Borough Street Market last month for a uniquely British take on a marketing conference dubbed Under the Influence (put on by our friends at Contagious and Iris Nation). Take five British pubs, 20 speakers from every field, and free-flowing booze, and pack a few hundred people into each and you’ve got part barroom banter, part panel, and part networking event. Topics ranged from Facebook, the infamous boo.com, and “the worst idea you’ve ever had that you convinced a client was the next best thing.” Great fun, I’d highly recommend it to anyone (it’s become an annual thing).

I’m always on the lookout for new projects, so I welcome all emails (even if it’s just to say hi) and hope to see some of you at Atlantis in September. I’ll be spending the summer focusing on a soon-to-be-launched music service, so musicians, keep an eye out.

I’ve been playing around with Muxtape.com, a new site that allows you to make virtual mixtapes. The concept is simple: you upload 12 songs to the site and those stream off your own unique muxtape URL.

You’re not supposed to upload multiple songs from the same album/artist, songs you don’t own, or make multiple mixtapes, but it doesn’t seem like those rules are being enforced.

I like the concept, but it doesn’t offer anything for me at the moment. The muxtapes are hard to browse, though if you find one you like the simple interface makes it a great experience to listen to the music (large fonts, bright colors, simple click on the song to play/pause, and a one click link to buy it).

For more fun, check out the Muxtape Coverflow with Fluid

This Friday, Mariah Carey will be lighting up the Empire State Building in pink, lavender, and white lights in honor of her new CD E=MC² released last Tuesday.

Talk about great promotion. I doubt a single person is going to look up at the building in awe of the pink lights and immediately rush into a CD store. I doubt a lot of people will even know why the New York landmark is lit up in new colors at all.

But this is the kind of partnership — on a much smaller scale of course — that works. No doubt blogs and talk shows will be chattering about this great PR move over the weekend (Mariah’s colors will be lighting the building from Friday-Sunday). Mariah’s a New Yorker — born and raised — and she’s taking advantage of the fact that a lot of her image is a part of this New York icon culture.

It’s also worthwhile to note that E=MC² debuted at #1 on Billboard this week with about 463k copies sold. This is pretty impressive, considering that’s way up from her 2005 blockbuster The Emancipation of Mimi, which sold about 403k in its opening week (and ended up being the biggest selling CD of the year). Mariah outsold herself (by 15%) from her CD 3 years ago in an industry that is overall down 30% in sales and at an all time low. Not to mention, her first week sales account were more than the other CDs in the top ten combined.

So what’s she doing right? Believe it or not, I think this is still proof that the labels and some of what traditionalists in the music industry cling to are still working. A performance on Good Morning America or well-placed Oprah appearance still work their magic on the numbers.

But she’s also embracing the new stuff, too. Her single “Touch My Body” rocketed to #1 due in part to her breaking the iTunes sales record for a female artist in a week. Her official web site was revamped with an interactive widget, an engaging MySpace and Facebook page, and an active street team community. There are banners, icons, and shareable links on her site that make it easy for her fans to spread the word (and they do, in large numbers).

So what do I think all this means? That while the numbers are flailing and the industry is scrambling for new ways to make money, I don’t think labels or the big four are on there way out any time soon. More than anything it’s a balance between the new initiatives mixed with the best branding a label can do for an artist possible. Including lighting up a historical landmark in her honor.