Every video game hero starts their journey with the most basic provisions and skills.  Link begins with a wooden sword and shield and later collects various artifacts and legendary weapons to aid him in his increasingly-difficult quest.  MegaMan has a meager pea-shooter and must commit 8 robot murders to learn new abilities and ultimately defeat Dr. Wily.  The humble video game music composer will often start their career with similarly limiting resources and skills.  We may not have every tool you’ll need in your utility belt at first, but over time we can grow and expand our arsenal until we’re armed to the teeth for whatever comes our way.

Today, we’re going to talk specifically about our networking arsenals.  “Networking,” is an extremely vague word, so we’re going to dig in a bit and break down the basics of what belongs in your networking toolbox.  Keep in mind that you do not need to have every single thing on this list to be successful, but they can be very helpful in projecting a professional image to your clients – and to yourself.

Remember, when you’re a freelancer you’re still a business and a brand.  The business, brand, and product are you and your music.

Here are the basic provisions that I’d recommend to any freelancer who’s serious about building a career for themselves:

A Portfolio/Demo Reel of Your Work

Obviously, this one is pretty important.  I would never hire a creative professional without seeing/hearing their work first, and you should expect that same level of scrutiny when you get out there to meet people.  Your demo reel may not be your first impression if you’re meeting someone and referring them back to your website later, but it’s your music’s first impression and you want to make it a good one.  Remember that the average internet denizen has the attention span of a gold fish, so get right to the point with the goods.  Don’t list every single completed track you’ve ever written (unless you’re JUST starting out).  Instead, lead with your best work that represents your strengths, style, and the kind of projects you’d like to work on.  You have seconds to grab someone’s attention, so make it count.

Keep in mind that the visitors to your portfolio/demo are *ideally* game developers who are NOT musicians, and they’re shopping for something that they may not entirely understand.  Overly-witty titles or descriptions that go too far over their heads won’t serve your goal.  Neither will an overabundance of options to choose from.  If I’ve got a sci-fi platformer that needs a score, I want to see if your stuff fits the bill and my musical vocabulary might be limited to descriptions like “sounds like Daft Punk.”  Help game developers figure out what to listen to – quickly – and what to do next.

A Well-Designed Business Card

This one I can tell you, from personal experience, is critical.  If you’re planning on ever networking in person (which you should be planning to do), you need a well-designed business card to hand people after you’ve charmed them with your whimsical humor and dashing looks.  Why?  A business card provides 3 major values:

1. Business cards remind people about who you are and what you do after a day of meeting new people and (respectfully) forgetting some names.  When you reach out to your new connection after meeting them, your card reminds them of that witty remark you made about current events.
2. Business cards can be a call-to-action for eager prospects.  For example, if I collect 10 business cards from game developers that I meet at an event, I have 10 phone calls or e-mails to make to cultivate those relationships.  Each card is a call-to-action, an invitation, to build a relationship beyond the first meeting.
3. Finally, business cards create reciprocity (most of the time).  On Twitter, when you follow someone, there’s a decent chance they’ll follow you back.  It’s good etiquette.  Same goes for handing out business cards: If you want someone’s card, handing them one of yours is a great way to get one of theirs – it’s good etiquette to reciprocate when someone hands you a card!

It’s true that many business cards are handed out and forgotten or tossed, but that can often be avoided by handing them to the right people at the right time.  I’ve been offered business cards from bank teller, and I politely decline because – to be frank – I don’t need or want a personal relationship with my bank teller.  I WILL, however, take a card from my new Doctor to put all of their important information in my phone.  If we’ve been talking for 15 minutes and you ask to trade business cards, I’ll be way more inclined than if you hand one to me within the first minute.  That’s barely enough time to decide whether or not I totally hate you.  (KIDDING!!!!  …Because that’s plenty of time for me to decide whether or not I hate you.)  Be smart about handing them out, and make sure you never run out when you’re at a conference.  That’s a total newb move.

Note: Get a business card designed, or customize a template so that it’s less recognizable.  I once went to an event with two stacks of business cards – one that I designed myself, and one created from a Vistaprint.com template.  The first time I handed someone a template version of my business card, they responded with “Vistaprint?”.  Womp womp.

An Effective Personal Website

In my humble opinion, this is one of the places where the game audio industry struggles the most.  Even some of the biggest names in the industry seem to drop the ball when it comes to presenting a professional-looking, effective website.  Now, when you’re a big name it may not be as important to have a nice website to represent yourself, but other freelancers want every edge when people consider whether or not to give them their money.  I could write pages on why this is so important, but I’ll condense it to a few lines here for you.  Your website should be a place that you control (a SoundCloud or Bandcamp page does not count) that allows people to quickly listen to your music, and take the next step if they like what they hear.

If my bold words didn’t drive it home for you, it’s all about getting people to take the next step.  Bandcamp wants you to buy music directly, Soundcloud wants you to stay on their site and discover new music, and you want people to enter into a meaningful conversation with you about their next game project.  Those goals are not aligned, which is why you should strike out on your own with a personal website if you haven’t already.

Not sure how to set up a website?  In a video post, I show you how to get one up-and-running in less than 10 minutes (sans design and content).  If building websites just isn’t your thing, hire someone to do it for you or barter with a developer.  The person/people who do all the coding for an indie game are often the same people who create the game’s website, so trading some music for your own website may be a good deal if you’re just starting out.  Never work for free, but exchanging value doesn’t always have to mean money.

A Complete, Respectable Social Media Profile

When it comes to social media, I consider it very important for anyone serious about joining the gaming industry.  I’m especially fond of Twitter for this purpose, but assuming that the world will continue to spin and change the internet will evolve as well.  Regardless of which social networks are out there, it’s important for you to be present and active on at least one of them – preferably the one that your prospective clients use most.  You should be there, and you should look the part: Are you a professional composer who can command respectable fees, or are you the college student who’s still scrambling to look like they’re showered and wearing clean clothing?  I’ve seen pros look like scrubs and students look like pros, and it’s all about what you’re putting out there.  Get yourself set up on LinkedIn or Twitter or Google+ or whatever people are using when you read this article.

In my Strategy Guide: How to Meet Game Developers on Twitter, I share a few examples of highly-effective Twitter profiles so you can see what I mean, but the basics are this:

• Have a good profile picture;
• Have a meaningful banner image;
• Don’t leave important things blank;
• If you’re trying to find clients, be professional about it all.

Social media really isn’t optional if you’re serious, unless you like playing games with the difficulty setting cranked all the way up on the first play-through or you’ve already established yourself as a big name in the business.  Go, Tweet, and be prosperous.

A Grown-Up E-mail Address

Ok, ok.  We all remember our early years on the internet.  My family first got the internet in the house back in the days of AOL.  I remember when AOL 3.0 came out and blew my little mind, and I remember that one of the most fun parts about signing on was choosing my Username: my online identity.  Search within yourself and bask in the embarrassing glory of your first AOL, AIM, or e-mail address handles.  Unless you were a sophisticated internet denizen from the start, your first stab at an online identity may have been a little silly – which is OK.  Just make sure that you’ve left every shred of that silliness behind you.

I used to work in an Apple Store, helping people with their broken Apple things on an appointment basis.  Those appointments (booked in advance) contained the customer’s email address so that I could send them directions or receipts or whatever afterwards, but I could see the email addresses ahead of time and – with a reasonable degree of certainty – predict what kind of day I was going to have by the hour.  Email addresses were very reliable clues about the kinds of people I would soon encounter.  Nine times out of ten, I knew a person’s age, level of technical sophistication, and sometimes a general idea of their social prowess based purely on their e-mail address.

SoxFan69@hotmail.com?  I’m not going to explain what’s going on with your iPhone, because you probably don’t care or may not understand that dropping your iPhone in a beer is a no-no.  I can guess this because you still think that the number 69 is funny, strongly identify as a Sox fan (more often than not a native Bostonian), and you use a sub-par email provider so you either don’t know or don’t care that there’s something better out there – so I’m just going to help you get set up on your new phone and not bother educating you on the inner workings of your iPhone.  BookWorm44@aol.com?  You’re probably older and have trouble with abstract concepts like “the cloud,” where files are actually stored on your computer, or how to set up a new email account due to less experience with internet things.  You’ll need some education on how to use your tech so that the same problem doesn’t happen again tomorrow, which is totally fine.  Yourname@mit.edu is either a college student or MIT employee, and yourname@gmail.com is a reasonable indicator that you’re a millennial who trusts Google, expects technology to just work, and understands that your email address is part of your social identity.  If I were still using my AOL username from my early internet days, I would be rocking MrSpy64@aol.com as my email address.  The 64 is a clue that I thought Nintendo64 was a big enough deal to throw it into my username, “MrSpy” should be a loud-and-clear indicator of my youthful disposition at the time, and if I were still using an @aol.com domain all these years later it would tell you that I’m not technically savvy enough to migrate to a new email account.  What does your email address say about you?

The bottom line: it’s easy to get a free email address, and to forward mail from your old one to a new one.  If you have a bunch of numbers or some weird nickname from your teenie-bopper years in there, it’s time to move along.  If you’re uncertain, use your first initial + last name @gmail.com, or – if you really want to be a pro – use your own domain name that was included with the purchase of your website URL.

Closing Thoughts: Take These Things Seriously

Now, you may have read some of this article and thought to yourself that you don’t care what someone’s email address looks like, so why should they care about yours?  Do I really need a business card?  What if I hate social media?  My response is this: All people, even the less-judgey people, make snap judgements that they may or may not even be aware of.  While they may intellectually care more about results than your email handle, a part of them knows that people with their own domain are taking themselves more seriously than people with a free/personal email account.  Some people aren’t going to care, but every little credibility indicator you can muster adds up to your brand – your professional image – which will echo throughout every conversation you have as a working composer.

How do you measure up?  Do you have 5 out of 5 of these tools ready to go?