As Easy As One, Two, Bree

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.

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

I’ve always established the brands I work on through community marketing. Build and nurture a community. Get feedback from my community and make them part of the brand shaping process. Use new technologies to help grow your community and interact with them. I’ve employed this practice for 10+ years now through an evolving Internet age and an ever changing culture. Yet when I look back on all those campaigns, I have always stuck to the same handful of community and marketing principles. They may seem common sense, but I’ve also seen how easy it is to stray from the principles and what an effect it can have on your campaign.  In fact, I have case studies from both sides of the fence.

That’s what this blog is about. Let’s explore these principles in practical applications and real case studies.

Here are just a few timeless principles to live by.

• Identify existing trends of your consumer (It’s much easier and more powerful than creating new trends)
• Can you identify the incentives for the consumer? (whether it is emotional or tangible)
• Clarify and simplify your message (if you can’t say it in one sentence, then even you, the marketer, aren’t clear on your own message, how do you expect the consumer to be?)
• Identify your hierarchy (who are the influencers, who is the passive audience, etc.?)
• Don’t over “sell” (too much direct marketing will taint your community. Keep your community pure and real.)

We will explore these principles and their connection and application to community marketing.