Feature Your Audience

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

You don’t have to do the work all by yourself. The best source of original, authentic content may be your audience, and you can feature and promote their photos, videos, and blog posts.

Highlighting brilliant fan-generated content is effective because it:

• keeps your website and its content fresh, authentic and interesting
• recognizes your most active and loyal fans
• shows off the diverse talents of your audience
• encourages others to participate in hopes of gaining recognition
• serves as content creation, lessening the amount of work you have to do

This is a strategy we use often when working with our clients. We find and feature compelling fan-generated content, often creating campaigns to promote the most active and artistic fans and their content. Spotting these photos, videos, and blog posts takes time and a good plan on how and when to use them.

Featuring your audience’s creations on your website recognizes your fans, and makes it clear that you welcome and value their participation, input and loyalty. It places importance on their role in the success of your website and, by extension, you. The fans whose content you feature will return to your website and participate often, and they’ll tell their friends that their content was showcased. Further, others in your audience will want to be recognized as well and they’ll be more likely to come back and contribute.

Recognizing fans for amazing work encourages more participation and creativity on your website, and it’s the starting point to creating an active and engaged community that creates content for itself.

Photo Credit: Metallica at Rock Wertcher 2009 by crsan

Don’t Just Sell: Create a Relationship

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

A brand’s online interactions should be first and foremost focused on creating relationships and engaging with the audience, and only about a quarter of those interactions should be aimed at selling to fans.

Creating relationships and engaging with your audience means you can:

• Start conversations and give people value
• Build a more loyal fanbase
• Understand your audience, where they are and what they want more of
• Balance targeted selling to eventually sell more to your audience

When one of the goals of your online presence is to sell more, it’s tempting to center your online efforts on promoting and selling your albums and books. We see it all the time, and it’s one of the biggest mistakes a brand can make online: websites plastered with ads and promotions, and very little focus on hearing from the fans.

Too much focus on selling makes people feel like they’re only there to transact with you and if they aren’t buying, they’re useless. It can cause even the most loyal fans to lose interest in your website.

The more engaging, interesting, valuable content you can provide people online – from posting exclusive content to starting conversations about your shared interests to running contests – the more likely they are to become fans, spread the word about your website, convert new fans and eventually buy more from you. And when you get to know your audience, you’ll better understand what they want and how to provide it.

We work closely with our clients to engage with fans on their websites. The majority of the interactions between our clients and their fans are aimed at starting conversations– both about our clients and their interests and their audience’s passions. This helps create relationships and build up fan loyalty. There’s a fine line between pushing too hard to sell and not pushing hard enough, and we know how to find this balance.

Photo Credit: Recession Art by World of Good

The Importance of Eye Candy

Friday, July 30th, 2010

You have a small window to make an impression on your audience. People will be interested from the get go if your website is visually engaging, and visual elements help to quickly express important concepts or beliefs so your audience can get to know you better.

The main page of your website should include eye candy. Any visual element that is big, beautiful, and compelling is eye candy on your website, like photos, drawings, paintings and videos.

Put eye candy front and center on the main page to:

• Engage your audience right away
• Visually express your brand or personality to your audience
• Keep your audience’s attention for longer

People love people (as well as their photos)
Incorporating photos into the main page of your website is a great way to add eye candy, and photos are the number one most used feature on social networks. According to research done by the Harvard Business School, 70% of all actions online are related to viewing photos or other people’s profiles. People love to look at pictures, especially when they’re of other people.

Video eye candy
We also help our clients come up with and create original videos to post on their websites. On LinkinPark.com, the band frequently posts videos to communicate with their fans, from information on new contests to what the band is up to. The latest videos are posted prominently on the main page of LinkinPark.com, which helps the band drive hundreds of fan comments, thousands of views per video and increase overall fan engagement.

Photo Credit: Candy by Yomi955

Getting to Know Your Audience

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

When creating an online presence, it’s important to think about how you can better connect with your audience. Having an effective social website and direct-to-fan channel relies on getting to know the makeup of your fanbase and being able to contact them.

Why It Matters

You should regularly check out your membership data including email addresses and other demographic information to:

• communicate with and sell directly to your audience
• plan tours based on the geographic makeup of your audience
• get in touch with your fans by location
• sell projects by proving who and where your audience is

The more you know about who your audience is and where they are located, the easier it will be to engage with them based on location or interest. Targeted selling always does better than generic email blasts: you won’t have to work as hard at selling and you’ll have a bigger return on your efforts.

In addition to helping you market to your fans based on their location, geographic information about your fans can be used to plan future tours. You might not realize that you have a huge following – big enough to warrant a tour stop – in Omaha, Nebraska until you can gather the locations of your fans.

Limitations of Some Third Party Services

A lot of services will not provide external contact info of your fans or followers, like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Your only option for contacting your fans is through that service. We think all of these services are great, but it’s hard to justify using one of them as your main online presence if you cannot directly communicate with your fans by email. If you’re sticking to a Facebook Fan Page for your brand, you will not have automatic access to the email addresses of your fans. You can target fans of your Page based on location, but there’s no way for you to email them off of Facebook unless you integrate a third-party application that asks for your Fans’ email address such as a Wildfire contest app.

Gathering Membership Data

If you are planning to email your fans, it’s very important that they know this when they provide their email address so they’re not surprised. Ideally, they’re providing their email address to get on your email list or receive your weekly newsletter. It’s equally important that they can unsubscribe easily. We’ll be posting best practices of creating engaging emails and managing your email list soon.

We usually work with our clients to use a service that allows them to gather email addresses of their fans and other demographic information. Services like  Ning and Topspin have built-in capabilities. Blog platforms such as WordPress usually allow you to require commenters to leave their email addresses, and most social network platforms include the ability to see and download member email addresses. Further, by adding Google Analytics to your site you can analyze your traffic and learn more about where your audience is. Finally, you can easily add a Mail Chimp widget for people to get on your email list to your blog or website.

Photo Credit: Your Fans by Sara Lafleur-Vetter on Flickr, licensed using Creative Commons

Create an Editorial Calendar

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Magazines, newspapers, TV broadcasters and other traditional media companies all have a bible: their editorial calendar. Your blog, branded social network or profiles on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook should be no different.

You need an editorial calendar, a plan to tell the story of your brand on a consistent basis online. You can and should still improvise, respond to people in real-time and diverge from your plan at times, but having an editorial calendar gives you a good foundation to start from.

The Basics
An editorial calendar describes the blog posts, videos, or photos you’ll add to your website on which days. The best editorial calendars are consistent, doable, and specific: a breakdown of exactly what topic you’ll blog about, which video you’ll post, or which photos you’ll upload to your website on which day or week. We work closely with our clients to create an editorial calendar that makes sense for them, taking into account each client’s goals, target audience, and availability.

Creating an Editorial Calendar
We start by collaborating on a list of ideas for possible content, each piece of which fits with the client’s goals and helps them say what’s on their mind. Having a backlog of ideas upfront helps us create a schedule that is doable within the client’s time constraints. We then regularly meet with clients to learn about upcoming events or launches and we integrate those into the overall plan.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks are a great way to find and build the audience for your website, and an editorial calendar allows you to create an effective summary message that can be virally spread on your social media profiles.

How Tedx Silicon Valley Used an Editorial Calendar
When I volunteered on the Leadership Team for Tedx Silicon Valley, I suggested that the Social Media team create an editorial calendar of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook updates. Each day everyone on their team knew what to publish on the Tedx blog, what to tweet about, and what to post on Facebook. In less than three weeks, thanks to not only the editorial calendar, a bunch of smart tweets and a remarkable team effort, the team was able to achieve remarkable results.

• More than 100,000 people watched Tedx Silicon Valley’s UStream live video
• More than 45 countries around the world participated in Tedx Silicon Valley’s UStream and Twitter channels

Thanks to all of the tweets about Tedx Silicon Valley, we generated over 11.8 million social media impressions throughout the world

In fact, the idea for this blog post was part of an editorial calendar we created with the goal of posting new digital and social media strategies every Tuesday and Thursday. Next Tuesday we’ll post about the importance of knowing who and where your audience is.

Photo Credit: Calendar Card by Joe Lanman on Flickr, licensed using Creative Commons

The Importance of Content Programming

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

The brands with the most successful online presences use their websites to showcase new and interesting content, and they also program featured content on a regular basis. Content programming is an effective way to engage your fans and build fan loyalty and make your website part of your audience’s daily or weekly browsing habits.

Your Own Cable Channel
Think of your website as your own cable channel: you can add photos, HD videos, tell people more about your interests, and sell your music or books. In the same way a cable television channel airs the same shows at the same time each week, content programming involves posting the same type of content on the same day each week.

Building Relationships
Content programming is an important part of building relationships and fan loyalty. In our experience, websites that program their content are much more likely to become a part of the weekly or daily browsing habits of their audiences. If a band’s website consistently posts video updates on Tuesdays, visitors will know what to expect and will come to look forward to each Tuesday’s update. They’ll come back each week to view the video, if not more often.

A website’s content program doesn’t have to be complicated; above all it should simply be consistent. We work with our clients to create content programming plans that incorporate their interests, help them achieve their digital media goals, and spur discussions with their audiences.

How 50 Cent Does It
50 Cent’s social network, ThisIs50.com, has integrated content programming into their digital strategy with a feature they call White Girl Wednesday (we’re not even joking). Each Wednesday, a different model is featured.

ThisIs50.com has become a part of the weekly browsing habits of many fans who are eager to see who will be featured each Wednesday, and the blog post spotlighting each week’s white girl prompts tons of responses from members. It’s a great example of content programming that fits 50 Cent’s online goals and speaks to his audience.

Photo Credit: Old TV by tomislavmedak on Flickr

The Hub & Spoke Model

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

When creating your online presence, should you go where your audience is – Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks – or have your audience come to you – on your own website or social network – where you can control the conversation? This is a question we hear a lot.

Enter the Hub and Spoke Model, a digital strategy that balances reaching the most people and having the strongest interactions with and influence over those relationships. We strongly believe in this model and use it with many clients, because it helps brands and artists connect with and deepen relationships with their audience and reach the most potential fans.

Your Online Hub
At the center of the Hub and Spoke Model is an Artist or brand’s website or other online homebase, the hub of all of their communications with their audience. The goal is to get people to visit the website and return to it often, and once they’re there, to build relationships with them and deepen fan loyalty.

The online hubs we help our clients create have some form of two-way communication with their fans to deepen connections. Depending on the client’s goals and the makeup of their audience, this can range from a blog that invites reader comments up to a full-fledged social network around their brand.

Costs of Building Exclusively on 3rd Party Platforms
The other benefit of having your own online hub is that you often can control your membership data and your Terms of Service. When you build your web presence on another platform you are tied to both the administrative and popularity of a third party service. For example, recently Facebook upset many people with changes to their privacy policy. MySpace, a service that was wildly popular a few years ago, has experienced a major decrease in traffic. By creating your online hub you are much more in control of your own destiny. Also many third-party services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do not provide the membership data (email addresses and zip codes of your fans and members). When you have your own site you can easily have access to your membership data.

Using Your Spokes
Profiles on other social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, are the spokes used to spread the word and send people to the hub. Updating these profiles and engaging with the community there broadens your fanbase and gets more people to visit your website. You should choose which spokes you’ll be active on based on the types of engagement that comes naturally to you and where your audience is. In our diagram above, we show several spokes to evaluate when making this decision.

Putting It All Together: How Linkin Park Uses the Hub & Spoke Model
We work with our clients to post regular updates to their social media profiles highlighting and linking to content on their website and sending people to that content. For example with Linkin Park, their hub is a social network that allows fans to engage with the band and each other and upload videos and photos, post blogs, and chat. The band also has fans on other sites like Facebook (over 5 million to be exact) where they also engage and post original content and links back to their hub. We’ll be posting more examples of driving your audience from spokes to your hub in the next few months.