As the music conference season blasts off with South by Southwest just a few weeks away, I thought I’d share a tip that Ryan and I stumbled upon at the last NACA conference we attended in Lancaster, PA.

As you can see we had a hell of a time:

The way it turned out was that I had recently bought a Flip Mino HD camera and was using it to shoot, well, everything. When we returned, we got the bright idea to cut this video together post it on Facebook and tag some of the folks we met on the video. These people turned into Facebook friends, and then eventually Facebook fans. Had we planned the whole thing out we probably could have maximized this technique to gain at least 100 fans for Facebook.

The moral of the story: Most people will be curious to see themselves in your video. Compared to a standard email, it is so much more effective as a context-building tool. As long as the video is decent and not exploitive, they probably won’t get pissed at you for tagging them.

By the way, I created this video for Derek Sivers’ presentation at South by Southwest, which I highly recommend contributing to if you are a musician. Hopefully he will be teaching people our little trick of being mildly obtrusive using video and Facebook!