Online Community Building - The Basics

Building your community takes planning, attention, and patience. Here's three key things artists should keep in mind when making connections:

Do Your Research

The fatal failure of any strategy is to get down to work without understanding the landscape - and that goes for social media as well. The tendency is to think that your potential audience is EVERYONE - in order to make the most of your efforts and resources, you need to focus. And a little research goes a long way.

Your research brief should include:

- which artists do you compare yourself to? Pick ones in similar situations to yourself (local artists, with the same musical profile in a similar stage to your career - don't put yourself in the Lady GaGa league!) Choose five favourites to focus on and dig deep into.

- build a profile of their fanbase. What type of people do they attract? Look across the usual channels - MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook.

- what does this audience care about? Examine how they react to engagement with the artist. Do they like new tracks? Live shows? Videos? Exclusive interviews?

- look at their tastemaker champions - which blogs have written about them? what radio shows support them? 

Putting all this together will give you valuable insight to create a profile of your potential online community.

Construct Your Content

Now that you know the community you could attract, make a plan of the content you to engage them with. This is key - you need to plan this out in advance to be proactive. 

Think about this as you build online tools, like your website or Facebook fan page - and how it links to the other social media channels you could use (like your own blog, SoundCloud page, YouTube channel etc).

Check out this great post about Lady Gaga's social media success - which points out how she used great content strategically across various online channels. 

Start Conversations

Twitter is the best place to keep the engagement going. Remember that your community isn't just an audience - it's bloggers to support you, potential people to collaborate with, and other artists to form connections with.

Find a tone of voice and topics to chat about that relate to your content (and avoid talking about what you ate/what your cat ate!). Follow people, listen to their conversations, and retweet the things you like. And above all, make a contribution. 

This is jus the start. Eventually the community will build, and will become the megaphone of your voice. Communities support each other. It's about being authentic, and getting involved - and about making a quality - not quantity - connection.

Image from Flickr by alles-schlumpf

Mark Zuckerberg vs. Eckhart Tolle

What does the most popular social network on the internet and a spiritual movement have in common?

Yesterday I went to see The Social Network, the movie about the ambition, friendships and betrayal that went in to creating Facebook. This is an absolutely amazing piece of cinema - based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich - that tells the story of how Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billiionaire on the planet. I followed the film by attending a talk by Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now and A New Earth - two must-reads that explore how a shift in human consciousness is possible through awareness of the ego that drives our behaviour.

I was struck by two things:

Its not good enough to just have a great idea

Everyone has great ideas. We are all full of them. And rarely are they original - we combine, mashup and steal from others all the time. Zuckerberg did not invent the first ever social network site - we had Friends Reunited and MySpace long before Facebook. Eckhart Tolle is not the first to explain the ego or champion awareness - the Buddha and many other spirutual thinkers got there centuries before him.

What both of these leaders have done is take great ideas, enhance them and make them relevant. Chris Cox - Facebook's VP of product - stated in The New Yorker that "Getting there first is not what its all about. What matters always is execution." I couldn't agree more - its not what you do, its how and why you do it.

The best executed ideas spread and connect communities

Facebook took very little marketing to make its way across the planet. Eckhart Tolle has sold millions of books without masses of PR and advertising.

A New Earth became a best seller with a bit of help from Oprah Winfrey, but this was simply as a result of her recommendation of the book. Facebook attracts new users via recommendation between friends. In both examples, community is at the heart of the concept. Marketing is based on inspiration, rather than mass manipulation by shouting at a target audience.

Both of these gurus have created change in our world through the way they have developed and delivered their big ideas to us. Something for every artist to consider.

The image is a Friend Wheel of my own inner circle Facebook connections.

The New Public Relations

I noticed a copy of NME sitting on the shelf at Tesco the other day. I was actually quite shocked that it was even still in print. Do music fans still read these magazines?

For the past few decades, the only way to find out about new music was through the radio, tv or newspapers and magazines. Of course there was word of mouth - the most powerful of all mediums - but this was largely unquantifiable - labels couldn't measure effectiveness or spend their budgets on it as easily as they could on the trusty stalwart of PR. As a young pup I was a devout reader of NME, Spin, Melody Maker, Select and Rolling Stone. I consumed the stories in these bibles without fail, every week/month. It was how I kept in touch with artists - the only way I could access information about them. Those stories wouldnt have been there without the industry's PR gurus.

The music industry has always relied heavily on PR. If you didnt have a good PR, you didnt have a career. But what was this magical power that these PR people weilded?

PR as "public relations" is essentially the manipulation of public perception through story telling via media. The PR professional creates the story - sells it to the press by convincing them that the story is worth telling - and voilà, a story appears. The story is used to sell the various media, so the more fantastic the tale, the more likely it is to be spun.

The power of public relations was therefore in the ability of the PR to spin a big hype-filled ball of yarn, alongside the relationship they had with the hack who was responsible for getting the story to press. Labels still spend oodles for this service. The tactic relies on the premise that winning over the press will result in an endorsement of your artist, and the public will follow.

In reality today, the service is media relations, not public relations. The relationship that the public has now with press is quite a different beast. The internet has allowed us to discover music in an entirely different way. Artists can create their own PR and build a community of fans without a journalist ever hearing about them. In fact these days, the journos are most often the last to write about new acts. Magazines and newspapers are struggling to survive. TV no longer has a captivated audience, and radio is being revolutionised by services like Spotify and Last.fm. Media relations has become the ego PR that rarely results in any audience connection.

"Public Relations" - real PR - is now something totally different. It is the relationship that an artist or label has with its audience. It is how an artist tweets back to a fan, or the comments it places on its Facebook group page. It is interacting with bloggers who become tastemakers for the life of a project, rather than just writing a story once to fill column inches. It is speaking directly to the people that are interested in their work, rather than relying on a salesman to force it into a journalists intray. Finally public relations is becoming a genuine interaction between the makers of music and the listener.

You Have No Right To Someone's Attention

Marketing used to be about shouting at the masses. In a music context, this was a blitzkrieg involving above the line advertising and buying oneself to the top of the charts. This is no longer effective - nor is it acceptable. In fact it can be a complete waste of time.

The best communication now involves an invitation to join into a dialogue (with a gentle nudge now and then). Permission is key. Most important of all, to get an audience for your message you need to have one that compells them to listen in the first place.

What we're seeing lately, however, is that just asking for permission to grab someone's attention isn't enough. This is evident in what has happened with MySpace. By sending someone a friend request, bands thought they then had permission to engage them as often as necessary. They also assumed that the "friend" would take some responsibility for keeping the relationship going.

Once MySpace started to take off, a deluge of bands masquerading as wanna-be friends started to bombard music fans. The result was a population of people who just stopped listening. The MySpace principle of quantity of fans over quality seems to still be in place. I wonder now how many "friends" of bands are actually still active users of MySpace - or indeed, have any interaction with the artist once the initial contact has been made?

Three things are required for permission now:

1. What's the glue?

Why should the audience care? What do you have in common? This is the glue that connects you. I personally don't give a toss about Cambodian gabba folk - which is pretty obvious if you took the time to find out a bit about me. Also - I don't live in Texas so I'm probably not interested in your gig. You've just wasted your time and I'm not listening.

2. What's in it for them?

This is crucial - the basic principle of reciprocity. All relationships have give and take. If you want to take up some of their time and attention, what do they get out of it? If you are letting them into your world, make sure you are giving something back. And make those actions visible so new audiences can see that you will respect their attention. I'm not suggesting you give your back catalogue away for free - for starters, a simple thank-you will suffice.

3. What do you want them to do?

What is the ask, and how can they get involved. Passive relationships are pretty dull - how does their attention make a contribution? Facebook groups are great for this, allowing a high level of "fan" interaction. But avoid tokenism - keep it genuine, and respect the time that the fans give you.

We are all bombarded with thousands of brand messages daily. To make an impact you have to do more than just stand out - you have to give the audience a reason to listen in the first place. And if you don't respect the time they are giving you, you might find that they stop listening altogether.