As Easy As One, Two, Bree

Logged on to Twitter and saw this funny new trend: #unfollowdiddy

Now, I’m not sure what ignited this, but one thing you have to get used to as anybody online is that there will ALWAYS be negative and crazy feedback to whatever you are doing. That’s just life. It’s hard working with celebrities to get them to understand this. You should always be expecting it, so the question is, are you prepared for it? and what do you do?

Sometimes the answer is: Ignore it.

If your community is strong enough, the positive responses and engagement will just drown out the negative. If you bring attention to it, you are the one making it bigger than it is.

#unfollowdiddy

But, if your community isn’t strong enough in the positive, let’s just say for the sake of argument that Diddy’s isn’t, how do you deal with it? It depends, but here are a few ideas:

Engage Your Top Members, The Influencers. OK, so your community isn’t strong enough on it’s own to let the positive drown out the negative, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have a few influencers in your army somewhere. It might only be one or two, but you can start with that. Engage those influencers directly, get them involved about what they want to see from you and what they want to do, and get them talking to your community, not you. Any response from you right now fuels the negativity, so it has to come from someone else. Just keep a handle on your influencers to not get defensive. You have to give those influencers the power to engage your community where they can’t on their own yet. The important part is that it doesn’t come from you right now.

Any Publicity is Good Publicity. This isn’t always true, but a lot of the times it is. I say this a lot to artists who get angry about negative posts from Perez Hilton. I tell them, “trust me, you’re lucky he’s blogging about you at all because that means you are still relevant. Worry the day he doesn’t blog about you because that means you’re not even relevant enough for him to make fun of.” This may be the case now with Diddy. Maybe he should embrace it as a sign that he’s popular enough to ignite this sort of negative attention and because of all the attention, people will actually want to follow him. Personally, I would never blog this much about Diddy if it wasn’t for this, so just ride the ride and see what happens.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. People love self deprecating humor if you really embrace it. It knocks you off your own pedestal and puts you back on the viewer’s level and gets their attention again, and maybe some respect, or at least a few laughs. Address the response, in this case #unfollowdiddy, directly, head on, but not defensively, just join in! Maybe diddy creates a new account and Tweets “Hilarious! I can’t unfollow myself, so I signed up as @whatever and followed myself, just so I could unfollow myself #unfollowdiddy.” Everyone laughs, and they move on.

In the meantime, #unfollowdiddy! lol.

*Update: After talking to a few people in response to #unfollowdiddy I need to add another note to the above list, and that is pay attention to your engagement stats! Pay attention to what people are saying. However that may be, # of responses, using TwitTruth, whatever you need to do. If Diddy noticed that nobody is engaged with his tweets (translation: nobody cares) then he might have been able to preempt the #unfollowdiddy trend.

Great post from Jeremy Welt at jblogg.com entitled 7 Takeaways From The “Reaching Fans” Panel at SF Music Tech.

Some great principles that you can apply to any community.

My favorite: “Many artists think they’re connecting to their Fans but are just pushing info out. There is a difference.”

Jeremy also happens to be my long time mentor and I have learned a lot from him, so take a read.

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

There was an interesting article in last week’s Hollywood Reporter titled “For ad buyers, it’s more than ratings” (subscription necessary to view online).

The article is mainly talking about advertisers views on shows like “Lost” and “Heroes“. Both shows are not super strong in ratings relative to other prime time shows, yet advertisers really like to advertise on these shows. The article then goes on to talk about viewer engagement and Optimedia‘s new Content Power Ratings.

Content Power Ratings is a metrics system that tries to move beyond typical viewership Nielsen Ratings that we’re used to, and actually try to quantify viewer engagement. To do this they look at three things, total cross-platform audience (television, web and mobile), involvement (active Google searches and other search numbers) and advocacy (press mentions and word of mouth buzz).

“Content Power Ratings 2.0 allows us to better understand the total value that a program represents for advertisers and unearth surprise hits that deliver better value than their audience ratings would imply,” said Greg Kahn, Senior Vice President/head of Strategic Insights for Optimedia US.

Shows like “Lost” and “Heroes” rank well under this type of criteria, because both shows foster a lot of participation and communities online and although smaller in size, tend to develop more devoted and engaged fans.

Looking at numbers this way also gives you a deeper sense of what your audience is connecting to with your product, and what those numbers actually mean. Engagement is key.

You can read the Content Power Ratings announcement here.

Taking a quick glance down the Top 100 Followed List on Twitter it’s just your typical who’s who of celebrities, tv shows, corporations and random Internet stars. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But then, I stumbled across this brand new site TwitTruth which breaks down Twitter subscriber numbers even more.

TwitTruth shows a table of various engagement statistics including the account holders Reply rate, Direct Reply rate and, my favorite, % of Tweets that engage a user.

Now, all of a sudden that Top 100 List is starting to look VERY different and light gets shed on the “real” engagers of the site. Here are a few examples:

Diddy (iamdiddy):

- 935,000+ followers
- 1/412 chance of diddy responding to a direct message (eh, doesnt sound great)
- 2.5% of tweets engage a user (wow, bad).

When you have that many subscribers, every single message should engage SOMOENE.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable:

- 661,000+ followers
- 1/667 chance of Pete responding to a direct message
- 1% of tweets engage a user (isn’t he supposed to be the social media guru? This one didn’t surprise me, because his Twitter updates got so annoying to me, I turned it off for myself. They really are just updates that the blog is updated, but you think people would comment about the post he is promoting or something.)

Samantha Ronson:

- 324,000+ followers
- 1/14 chance of Samantha responding to a direct message (great odds!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (now THERE is a number that you want to see).

Starbucks Coffee:

- 183,000+ followers
- 1/5 chance of Starbucks responding to a direct message (go praise that latte!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (love the corporate social media responsibility!)

There’s just a snapshot to give you a taste, but you can see for yourself at TwitTruth.com.

So, what do you take from all this?

If you are going to spend all that time building a gigantic list of people, you better make sure that they are actually paying attention to you. 1 million subscribers? Who cares? Are they listening to you?

It’s the worst thing in the world, to have a subscriber base that large, but you can’t sell your product or do anything with it.

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 5,000 ultra engaged people who pay attention and act on your messages? Or a list of 50,000 with only 1% listening to you? Do the math, that’s only 500 people. Pay attention to the bigger picture of what those follower numbers mean.

Go ahead, go look yourself up on TwitTruth too. I won’t look until you tell me to ;)

While surfing my morning headlines on CNN.com, one grabbed my attention titled “The Smartest Group In Pop Music?”. I rolled my eyes right away, but clicked through anyway and I was right. It was an article about some up and coming band out of Harvard named Chester French. There was an interview with the band and the story is about how Chester French is giving their new album away for free from their website and how now they are getting featured in a ton of magazines. Here’s a quote from the interview: “We’re doing something that’s never been done by a band before,” says lead singer D.A. Wallach.

First off D.A., it has been done before. Lots of times. In fact, here’s a recent one off the top of my head here: Radiohead gave their album away for free from their website, you could donate money for it if you wanted to, or just download it for free. Here’s another I just downloaded myself last week: Del tha Funkee Homosapien (amazing emcee and of Gorillaz fame) has his album in a nice tidy MP3 package available for you to download.

Second, it’s not the smartest move in the world. The Radiohead example above is actually a great example and I’ll show you why. Let’s remember a few principles:

1. People WILL pay for your music if you provide some value for it.

2. By offering it for free, you aren’t doing your fans a favor (unless you are an established band like Radiohead) you almost de-value yourself.

3. You provide value in a few ways:
a) Obviously it starts with the music, it has to be good!
b) Personal connection with fans. If fans feel a personal connection to you, your music or your band, suddenly people want to support you.
c) Add to the music, i.e. special packaging, limited editions, extra trinkets included. At Warner Bros. we did things like include a T-shirt with the package, include a CD of bonus content a la DVD special features, include special items like in the case of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor there was a bound journal and photo book included.

So, let’s get back to Radiohead. They offered their music for free, but they let you put your own price on it, anywhere from $0 to $100.  Although a lot of people chose $0 and get the album for free, the people who DID pay for the music more often than not put a higher value than you would have paid for it at retail price. So, in the end it evened out to earn a similar amount of money as you would at retail.

If you look at this as a social and business test, you can almost put an actual price on what people’s perceived value of your brand and product is. It may surprise you how much higher it is than retail.

And how do you increase that perceived value? Through brand marketing, create a personal connection with your artist.

So, Chester French may be getting some hyper around their album right now, but starting with a perceived a value of $0 isn’t such a great idea. I doubt this will last…. unless their music is good, then it can speak for itself, but then if it IS good, why would you tell everyone it’s worthless?

Once again, I’m not impressed by Harvard trained boys.

In an effort to promote their advertising tools in a tough economy, Google released a case study on how to market a “stick”. Yep. A stick.

Their thinking is that if they can teach you how to use their tools to market and sell a stick, then you can use their tools to sell anything.

Genius!

It’s a great overview and step by step guide to help you through your marketing campaign, and I just love the angle.

Check it out here: http://www.google.com/advertisers/campaigns/petstick.html

Bookmark this page: http://www.facebook.com/marketing

It is Facebook’s Marketing Solutions Fan Page. Lots of ideas and updates on the new things happening in advertising on Facebook. The latest is a case study of Adobe using Facebook to engage customers here.

The first artist I used Facebook to create communities with in early 2006 was Ashley Tisdale. There were no fan pages and they did not make it easy to amass a lot of friends mainly to still distance themselves from the spammy nature that MySpace had become. I even remember having to draw a sort of pyramid diagram to explain the potential of the Friend Feed to the top executives at my company. Luckily, times have changed. Nowadays Ashley does not have her original profile I set up (profiles max out at a certain amount of friends), but she does have a Fan Page which Facebook now has made to look and act almost exactly the same as a user profile. She has 604,592 fans. Facebook gives you a lot of solutions to market to an audience in an effective way. Check out the Marketing page and get a few new ideas and updates.

Being involved with the High School Musical stars from the early days and Ashley Tisdale’s tour with High School Musical, I had the opportunity to watch Zac Efron’s career unfold up close from the early days. He set himself apart from the other cast members making not only smart PR and Movie Role decisions, but smart brand decisions. Every role, every magazine cover, every appearance, even every public outing was extremely strategic and on purpose to set apart Zac as “the guy from High School Musical” and really show the world Zac, the person, the actor, the brand.

Part of making that brand wasn’t just to set him apart from HSM, but also to make strategic steps away from the tween crowd and as a respectable actor, and here’s the key… mainstream. Mainstream meaning, guys and girls of all ages.

Yet, through all his smart movie role choices, etc. He still has NO website or web presence. I’m sure if we spoke to the manager they have some calculated intentional reason as to why, but I’m sorry, I don’t buy any argument against not having a website.

I do not think he should have a teen crazy site so girls can just comment “OMG OMG OMG” on the homepage, because, well that would just defeat the purpose of his mainstream re-branding. And I always hear the argument from celebrities about how it’s part of the plan to stay larger than life, and separated from “regular” people. But no one said it your website or presence had to portray you that way. The whole point of owning your web presence is just that… you own it. You control it. Yes, a community is a living breathing thing, but you have to make calculated steps to lead it the way you like it to go. It just doesn’t make any sense to me to not have one. I also tell all my clients and friends that their e-mail list, or whatever you are keeping it on (twitter, facebook, etc.), is going to be one of your most valuable assets online.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for my business) a lot of actors lean this way. They have never had to build a brand in the past like you have to today. Before, the movie studios did your marketing, and your choice of movie roles did your branding. In my experience, this side of entertainment, the talent marketing side is way behind the times. Although Zac might not need the website for his career, imagine how much more could be happening with it.  It will be interesting to see what Zac finally ends up putting on ZacEfron.com. I’m sure it won’t dissapoint, it will be just a little behind the times.

In the meantime here’s just a sampling of that progression and some of Zac’s key moves (Pictures courtesy of the online destination that IS controlling Zac’s web presence, teen fan site Zefron.com):

promoting HSM in Teen People '07

First big cover opp on Cosmo Girl '07

First big step into re-branding. This cover blasted Zac in front of the eyes of a mainstream (and not just female) audience.

After starring in Hairspray and HSM3, promoting his latest movie 17 Again with the cover of GQ

Photo opp from the GQ spread. So long High School Musical.

Meet Nolan Gerard Funk. He’s been introduced to the teen scene as the star of the Nickelodeon TV movie “Spectacular!”.

Nolan Gerard Funk

This is a fun project for a marketer as you get to work with a blank canvas. He’s talked about in industry circles as the “next Zac Efron”. He could be as big as Zac, but in his own right. He’s got more marketable edge than Zac. He’s a little a older than Zac, so he can play the teen or get the “juicy” roles. And, oh yeah, the girls love him just as much.

Be on the lookout for Nolan. Like I said, he’s working with a blank canvas as Spectacular! kind of burst him on to the scene suddenly. He’s yet to put up a website, Myspace, Youtube, etc. but all of that is in the works, and he’s ready to strike while the iron is hot.

He would benefit a lot from launching his YouTube channel and seeding it by replying to all the videos already posted there from Spectacular fans. The girls love that stuff and would definitely respond and create a buzz that he is on the network. He already has some natural buzz happening on Facebook with a few fan created Fan Pages, one with over 1,500 people on it already.

It will be interesting to see what kind of plan rolls out with him and what movie role he takes up next. I’ll keep an eye on this roll out, watch plans early on like this one as you learn the most when you see the landscape from the very beginning.