“Celebrities That Get Social Media” & Engagement Principles
My social media buddy and all around wonderful person, Charles Porch (you can follow him here: @charlesporch) sent me this great blog post, that wraps up nicely my Twitter engagement post: Joel Mackey of OpenPressWire.com writes “A Celebrity That Gets Social Media, I know shocking”
Joel is talking about celebrities starting to catch on to the trend to return the favor of “following” and following their subscribers back. But he goes on to write, there is still one problem after that… Engagement.
Most of these celebrity accounts still don’t get it. They don’t engage, they don’t talk to their fans, they don’t ask them questions, they don’t take polls, they don’t have contests or even acknowledge the existence of a fan. So one problem remains, while they may follow people, they still don’t communicate with them.
Joel goes on to write about the band Collective Soul who he says is doing it the right way.
What I find so simply amazing about these guys is that they actually respond to fans. They retweet fans tweets. They read blogs by users on Twitter. They make exclusive videos just for their Twitter fans.
Excellent points. Now, what I want to point out though, is that this thinking shouldn’t be exclusive to Twitter. This is a great example though of some community marketing principles.
I often run an exercise with my staff before we start a marketing campaign. I ask them, why does anyone want to be part of an artist community in the first place? Here are a few core reasons:
- Feel closer to the artist
- Get free things
- Be the first to get news
- Express themselves
- Find people with common interests
- Increase their personal status
There a lot more, but these are the main things. We’ll run through them in depth later. Now, go back and look at the things above that Collective Soul is doing. Do they feed into any of those core reasons above? Yep! And that’s exactly what Joel Mackey is picking up on.
But when you see articles like Joel’s at OpenPressWire.com, definitely pay attention to the principles behind the details because it will help you apply it to other mediums. The exercise above is great to run through if you aren’t sure where to start engaging your community and to help you stay on track.
Read the rest of Joel Mackey’s article at OpenPressWire.com