2012 February

Attracting and Engaging True Music Fans In the Digital Era

February 29, 2012 By Steve Leave a Comment

TechCrunch David Hazan (Mobile Backstage) Video Interview

Click to head over to the video interview

The remit to attract new fans of music is a ball that is now almost completely in the court of the artists themselves.

After a decade of digital disruption, even those artists on whom major record labels decide to take a chance, need to have built a significant base of excited, engaged fans following their every move.

The key question in the emerging digital music industry is this:

Where and how do you as an artist attract and engage these fans?

Watch the interview linked from the image above (or start here and watch for just a few minutes, if you want to avoid the awkward interviewer’s preamble).

It features David Hazan of musician-to-fan community service Mobile Backstage and covers some potential solutions to the question above. Although the platform itself is rather new and still to prove itself sustainable as a business, there is a trend towards these types of ‘true fan’ platforms. The reason being that musicians need to connect regularly and deeply with their most passionate core of fans, in order to drive longer term sales of merchandise, concert tickets, and perhaps even (shock) recorded music.

Wide Open Spaces

The intention of this post is not to glorify one specific service in this realm. Rather, I want to focus your attention on the potential online spaces in which you can best attract and engage fans.

Consider questions such as:

Which platforms (social networks, websites, blogs etc) attract the most new fans to your music?
Where do you find your fans becoming most passionate?
How could you combine platforms to deliver a more coherent, interactive space for your fans to gather and interact?
How could you utilize mobile content to connect with your fans more closely?
What other media have you not yet tapped to connect with fans? (e.g. video, podcasts, text messaging, crowd funding)

Photo Credit: Ian Balcombe

Fan Clubs for the Digital Era

Whatever your answers to the questions above, the overall objective is to find either one highly productive space, or a fusion of many, that in effect becomes the digital fan club for your music and the content, products, and events that surround it.

As outmoded as the notion of a fan club may sound, is it not where the core of your most ardent supporters will gather? Through a combination of interaction with the main event (you!), community with other equally engaged fans, and that intangible ‘inner circle’ feeling that comes of investing oneself in an artist’s work. Furthermore, the excitement that is generated when impassioned fans gather together around a shared interest only furthers the attachment that they feel towards that common denominator. Fans breed further fanaticism.

From this base of hardcore support you can launch all of your future projects, from new music to international tours and other artistic pursuits. And it’s a purer connection in the digital era, as it has been built by you the artist directly, rather than through a convoluted chain of marketing departments and physical retail chains.

Your Two Cents?

Where do you stand on this?

Is it a crucial consideration that needs to now be fully taken up by musicians themselves, or simply another distraction from the true pursuit of making music?

Where do you make the truest connections with your fans?

Filed Under: Concepts, Web Presence Development Tagged With: david hazan, digital music, fan clubs, fan engagement, mobile backstage, music, music industry, musicians, techcrunch, tools, true fans

Socially Disconnected: Where the Grammys & Oscars Fell Short

February 27, 2012 By Steve Leave a Comment

February has been a month packed full of television events that attracted much of North America, perhaps the world. From the Superbowl, to the Grammys and, last night, the Oscars, ratings smashing broadcasts have come thick and fast.

Records have been broken, talent celebrated, winners heralded….

So why do I feel that something is amiss?

Disconnect the Dots

We’ve established that there is a desire for fans to use social media to engage with television events.

From the trending topics on Twitter being dominated by TV shows on any given evening, to Facebook beginning to aggregate status updates into “## people talked about (insert event here)” style summaries, we can see that enthusiastic fans are utilizing social media to share their views on what is being broadcast. The conversation is rampant and swirling like a raging storm around the big events.

So why does the broadcast itself reflect none of this?

Why does watching the show on network television feel like the eye of the storm, so eerily quiet and removed from the passion circling around it?

To my mind, it represents the substantial disconnect between traditional standards of broadcast media and the emerging concept of social media, of involving your audience in as many ways as possible. The tools and platforms now exist. The channels to your audience are ever-widening. Yet the will to travel up and down, making the show a two-way street is still found wanting.

The Connection Is Made

To give the Oscars due credit, their web presence offer fans plenty to dig their teeth into. From preview blogs to after-show video, Facebook fan questions to live tweeting the winners, the content is undoubtedly present to lure fans in deeper. The integration is what’s under scrutiny here. The curious relegation of fan passion to a side show, as the restricted Big Top basks in its own glory.

The Grammys made some effort towards this integration with separate performance areas for sets by Foo Fighters, David Guetta, Deadmau5 and the like, but it still amounted to a select few. The floodgates weren’t opened to the enthusiastic masses tweeting and sharing around the event in cyberspace. Even the live television broadcast was restricted in certain markets, leaving certain sections of music fans left out and frustrated.

The challenge to broadcasters is now to integrate as many of these media, as seamlessly as possible, for a diverse and two-way fan experience.

Transmedia Momentum

This may seem like a pedantic moan, based on the fact that both broadcast and social media elements of these events were booming. Though I agree that progress is being made, is it not the remit of leading broadcast events like the Oscars and Grammys to push boundaries, to lead the way in engaging their enormous fan base and show other industries what can be achieved?

Shows like Bravo’s Last Chance Kitchen show what can be achieved when social media are smartly weaved into the fabric of a television program. Fans feel more connected, invested in the developments of the show, and return value is increased as a result of this investment. This trend towards transmedia – telling your story across multiple platforms, involving those who gather along the way – is gathering momentum among more niche programming and holds a lucrative future for those broadcaster that begin to explore and experiment with it in these early stages.

The passion of fans around the entertainment industry – or, at least, the creative talent that it supports – already exists. It is the envy of many other industries who find it much harder to fire up their audiences. Let’s use that to challenge the traditional one-way thinking of artist to fan, instead focusing on a more inclusive model in which fan passion fuels creativity in real time and their involvement breeds an ever-greater connection.

Photo Credit: T. Buchtele

Takeaways:

- Your fans are having a conversation with or without you. Jump in and be a part of it!

- Lasting connections and greater fan loyalty are built when you involve your audience in the creative process.

- Use the strengths of individual platforms to build an integrated experience across all channels.

What are YOUR feelings on the Oscars and Grammys as an inclusive fan experience? Am I way off the mark here or do they need to involve fans to put on a better show?

How can you improve your web presence for fans through blending in more media?

Filed Under: Concepts, Fail Files, Opinion Tagged With: academy awards, fan engagement, fans, film, grammys, movies, music, oscars, social media, social TV, television, transmedia

Conquering the Smaller Screen: Twitter’s Impact on Television

February 20, 2012 By Steve 1 Comment

This is a re-post of a guest article from Minni Kemp, originally published on a previous incarnation of this site. Having attended a Social Media Week panel on Social TV last week, I thought it about time to resurrect her observations on the rise of social media and its integration with our television experience.

Minni Kemp is a Midwest freelance editor and writer. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, running, and reading cheesy romance novels. You can check out her writing at Professional Intern.

I admit that I’m addicted to Twitter.

It’s like the world’s largest custom-built chat room—and as long as you cultivate a good list of people to follow, Twitter can be loads of fun. For me, it’s the easiest way to keep up on what’s going on in the world; my timeline is a busy flow of tweets from friends, coworkers, journalists, and almost all of my favorite TV shows.

Even though I rely on my DVR for about half the TV shows I watch on a regular basis, there are a few shows I insist on watching live, just so I can watch with the other folks in my Twitter feed. The real-time conversations about certain shows are often just as good as the show itself.

Now that Twitter is becoming a part of mainstream media, television shows of all types are using Twitter as another way to interact with hardcore fans and to attract new ones.

The Vanishing Fourth Wall

For some shows, Twitter can carry the action and drama beyond the small screen. Twitter accounts often do more than just offer information about the show.

There are feed for a show’s fictional characters (like Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother and his @broslife account), for its actors (Neil Patrick Harris’s @ActuallyNPH), or even for a show’s production staff (@HIMYM_CBS). Giving fans a chance to interact with each other—as well as stars or show producers—can create an interactive and personalized television experience.

Absence Makes the Viewer Grow Fonder

Waiting for True Blood to return to HBO sucked, but in a good way. With @truebloodhbo, the folks behind the show keep viewers hooked with contests and sneak peeks of the upcoming fourth season.

They’ve also used Twitter to build anticipation for the new season among diehard fans and Trubie newbies. For fans of the show, it’s become part of the True Blood experience—and it eases the pain until the show comes back on the air.

Community Service

Twittizens have created online communities to tweet about their TV shows in real time. And networks have taken notice: now, several shows offer Twitter feeds for their shows, featuring some of their favorite tweets onscreen during a first-run or rerun broadcast of a show. Using tweets written by real fans is a great form of advertising for a TV show, and is sure to be cheap and more effective than network commercials or e-mail marketing. The line between interaction and advertising continues to blur, but both fans and TV shows benefit.

For a genre that was once threatened by the rise of online entertainment, television has been quick to adapt and to use the Internet to its advantage.

With social media platforms like Twitter, television has become a collaborative experience. What the future of Twitter holds for more interactive television is still up in the air, but with tweeting becoming an integral part of watching TV, the future of entertainment could become more hands-on for viewers.

Your Two Cents:

Do you combine your television watching with tweeting? What does it add to your experience?

How do you see social media further developing and integrating with traditional broadcast media?

Your insights are what make the difference, so please weigh in below in the comments or over on Facebook.

Expect more on the social TV phenomenon as I delve deeper into the subjects of last week’s panel.

Filed Under: Web Presence Development Tagged With: broadcast media, conversations, fan engagement, HBO, how i met your mother, second screen, social media, social TV, television, traditional media, true blood, true fans, twitter, web presence development

The 3 C’s of Web Presence Engagement & Interaction

February 14, 2012 By Steve Leave a Comment

Recently I posted more in depth explanations of the first points 1,2 and point 3 on my original 12 point check list for developing your web presence.

Today, we’ll look more at the fourth and fifth points on the list: the touch points of your platforms and using them to form two way conversation with your fans.

Photo Credit: David JW Bailey

These considerations follow on logically from the previous task of selecting your key platforms. Knowing where you’re going to be expending most of your efforts, you can now decide the ways in which you’ll communicate with fans on those platforms, as well as how to involve them in the process.

In short, this is engagement and interaction time!

Compelling. Concise. Content.

There are always a few memory aids to guide your work in any field. Social media is no exception and you will see these 3 C’s crop up time and again as you read further into the effective use of platforms. As overall way points, they will serve you well.

Content is anything from a sub-140 character tweet to an in-depth blog post on your site. To start on the long road to fan engagement, each piece of content needs to be of interest to your target audience. Be it informative, amusing, or something that stirs their passion, hitting the mark consistently (another ‘C’!) is where your content becomes compelling.

Content lies at the core of your web presence. It is the factor that decides whether visitors keep coming back for more, or are uninterested and leave, never to return. The other adjectives really only serve to emphasize key factors in making sure your content achieves the return value that you’re looking for.

Although a given platform will determine the depth of your content (try getting complex in a tweet….ouch!), conciseness will serve you well in almost every piece you post. By all means, explore the intricacies of a topic beyond 500 words in a blog post. Just don’t use a paragraph when a sentence would suffice. Attention spans are short on the web and the average visitor decides in under ten seconds whether or not they will stay.

Having eye catching headlines and visuals to draw people in, followed by the quality content that will keep them interested, is a sure fire way to keep your visitors engaged and coming back for more.

Join The Conversation?

The cacophony encouraging us to “join the conversation” grows ever louder by the day. In reality, this is a catch all phrase that wants a more general response from us: interaction.

Once engaged by your content and creations, the next objective is to draw a visitor deeper into your creative world. This extends beyond mere discussion, delving into the realms of building emotional connections to your art, gathering feedback, involving visitors in the creative process, adding game mechanics to content, or any number of new and emerging techniques to develop a stronger bond. A bond that, as it builds, turns uncommitted visitors into excited fans of your work.

Although the application of these concepts has the potential to become quite complex, the core idea is simple: offer your fans a compelling, two-way experience with your art, in addition to the traditonal one-way consumption.

How to do this?

Think about what your most passionate fans say about your creations. What do they love about what you do?

For a writer, it could be the characters of your stories that pulls readers into the world you’ve created. How can you give those characters a new lease of life across social media? Furthermore, how can you weave your readers into the story, so that their experience moves from passive to interactive?

For a musician, perhaps your listeners have certain songs that really speak to them. Ask for their interpretations, or comparisons to other artists. Bring to the fore their thoughts and opinions about the subjects of your songs, valuing their additions to the discussion. Fans now create videos and other spin-0ff art in response to their favorite music, so embrace these creations and encourage visitors to pursue their own answers to the questions posed by your songs.

The more that your fans become involved and invested in what you create, the more they’ll support you for the long haul. Sharing as they go, the power of social networks can begin to work for you as your creations are spread far and wide, offering opportunities to repeat the process of engaging and interacting with new fans.

Over To You…

How have you geared your web presence to keep new visitors interested?

Once you have their interest, what steps have you taken to interact with people and turn them into fans of your work?

Your insights are the truly valuable element here. The real world examples are where we really gain an idea of how to put all this into practice, so please feel free to share your own brilliant successes here in the comments or on Facebook.

Leave links so I can visit and put your fan-making process to the test!

Filed Under: Web Presence Development Tagged With: artists, authors, books, content, engage, fan engagement, ideas, interaction, interactivity, music, musicians, points of contact, raving fans, social media, social networks, web presence, web presence development, writers

7 Ways to Amplify Your Creative Reach on Twitter

February 3, 2012 By Steve 3 Comments

Twitter is now firmly established as a valuable social network in its own niche. For anyone wanting to connect quickly and freely with a wide range of folks, its 140 character limits and open follow model make it the platform of choice.

Despite all of this, I still see many dismissive attitudes towards Twitter from artists. Be it the simplicity or perceived echo chamber effect of the platform, a lot of creators are missing out on a channel that offers an outstanding way to connect with new fans from all walks of life. Even those that do take the plunge tend to simply feed through updates from other social networks, creating a very robotic profile with little chance of winning new fans.

So what can be done?

Photo Credit: The Paradigm Shifter

First Impressions

Get over the first impression of Twitter, for a start. Yes, indeed, it starts out a pretty lonely place. Few followers, and uncertainty of how to start conversations to build a following, both contribute to the early drop out factor that can plague the network. But persevere, get over that hurdle, and really start conversing with friends, fans, and followers will flock to you in a relatively short period.

Once you get going, you’ll be eager to amplify your tweets, spreading them farther than your own core following by connecting with other groups. Here are 7 pointers to get you sharing your messages far and wide:

1. Use hashtags: In tweets you want to emphasize & share more widely, research relevant hashtags that others are already monitoring and tailor your tweet to fit that tag.

2. Spread tweets & repeats: It’s okay (and indeed important) to repeat your key tweets at different times though the day, as people are online at different times and tweets are fleeting. Tweak wording and delivery to maintain variety, but be sure your core message gets acoss.

3. Ask for help: If something is truly important, don’t hesitate to ask for a retweet or for your followers to recommend to their own following. Don’t ask too often, but don’t be scared to ask, either.

4. Retweet others. Often: When you’re asking for help from others, it helps if you’ve already done the same for them in the past. Sharing the work of others that you enjoy not only adds variety to your Twitter stream, it builds goodwill for others to do the same for you.

5. Strategic @’ing: The @ mention has a more ‘personal inbox’ feel to it for most of us, so it can be used to get the attention of someone you’d ideally like to read and share your tweet. Use it sparingly and with subtlety for promotional tweets, though, as it’s easy to cross the line into spam. This is also 10x more true if you barely know the person to whom you’re tweeting.

6. Join communities: …or build your own! Again, hashtags tend to lend themselves to communities – #oTable, #UsGuys, #TweetDiner, to name just a few – as do chats and trending topics sometimes. Find the areas that others gather and begin to participate. If the crowd gathered there is a good fit and it feels comfortable to do so, you can begin to recommend your art or content to members of these communities. In addition, you can explore tools such as Triberr, which joins you to other like-minded content producers and their followers.

7. Interact and influence: The first and last tenet of Twitter being that the more you tweet in, the more you’ll get out. Participate on a wide range of subjects, in a wide variety of ways, to both build your following and amplify your reach in the longer term. Join in with other established influencers in fields that interest you to boost your message still further.

Start Building

Twitter amplification is a strange beast.

In theory, it takes a slow and steady build up of relationships and reciprocation to have a significant audience sharing your messages. In practice, the serendipity of just one well placed tweet, attached to a valuable message or content, can take off like a bottle rocket and explode into all the results you desired.

Your best bet is to follow the tips above, tweet quality regularly, and enjoy the relationships that you build…all the while anticipating that one explosive tweet that shares your glorious creativity to the world!

What ways have you found to extend the reach of your tweets?

Filed Under: Web Presence Development Tagged With: amplification, community, engagement, influencers, social media marketing, social networking, tweeting, twitter, web presence development

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