Chapter FIVE

"Step" 1 – Listen

"The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people." Woodrow Wilson

Listening is the first step to the “Fan Experience” strategy in fact; listening is the heart of all strategy be it business, military or simply bettering communication. In the Fan Experience strategy “listening” acts as a guide through the ever-changing and fascinating minds of the fans. If we want to engage, build rapport and identify opportunities in fan communities - we must listen. It is important to know the difference between a passing mention of the music or a deeper experience with it because this makes it easier to determine which strategy to use. It is also critical to understand sentiment meaning whether any conversations are positive, negative or neutral. In addition, it is valuable to listen to peer to peer feedback, in other words what the fans are saying about each other. When we listen we can listen online via social media this includes everything from networks to blogs and forums, we can listen via fan mail and we can also listen in person at concerts for example.



Fans are becoming more and more empowered when it comes to their personal world of music. Advancing technology through the internet allows fans to share their experiences leading them to have richer connections with others. Fans have become more educated regarding the music creation and business process and therefore more confident when it comes to understanding it. As the technology companies hand over the control of information to the fans, other music business organisations may feel that they are losing control of their own. This doesn’t have to be the case with a good listening strategy.

There are many advantages to employing a listening strategy one of these is artist brand management. Listening to the fans can help you identify opportunities to strengthen an artist’s reputation such as addressing fan concerns. You can also measure where an artist stands in relation to any competition in the opinions of the fans. Another aspect is the overall tone of the fans’ conversations in relation to the artist and her music which can be influenced positively through your artist’s presence when done correctly. You may find that an artist doesn’t have a significant presence which is an opportunity in itself and is presents the chance to establish one on your terms with the fans that matter the most thereby strengthening ties with fan groups.

Conversations on social media are in real time and many fans take no prisoners in how they express themselves. What is said can sometimes do massive if not irreparable damage to an artist’s reputation, especially in the event of a crisis or any kind of controversy. No one wants to face a crisis however listening in on the chatter around any kind of crisis can be the one strategy that helps stop the bleeding through clarifying facts and reputation management. By taking a pro-active approach to listening music business organisations from major label groups to small independents can make it part of their marketing and fan management plans rather than a last minute tactic. Listening in this instance is significant to risk assessment and will help anticipate and prevent any catastrophes. Another advantage is identifying influencers be they positive or negative. Ascertaining your top ambassadors and critics can give you instant critical insights into how an artist and her music is perceived. By being proactive in this area you have the chance to strengthen relations with ambassadors and potentially convert critics into fans or at least neutralise any negativity coming your way.

Part of the Fan Experience listening strategy is to monitor your competition. With social media you can easily find out what fans are saying about your competitors and what their fans are saying about them too. There are numerous opportunities in discovering what fans like and dislike about any opposing teams. One thing you might be able to do is capitalise on any gaps between the competing artists and their fans. Another way to capitalise on listening to the fans is to recognise timely sales opportunities. You can gain incredible insight as to where sales leads exist. In addition to this your influencers can provide effective leverage within the fan community to help drive sales.

The internet is primarily where we go to listen and the rise in social media has given fans louder voices – they now cannot fail to be heard and it is now more important than ever to stay ahead of online fan conversations. Fans will often take to social media in order to get the attention of artists and their supporting music business organisations. As social networks expand so does the chatter and the noise that fans produce. It can be overwhelming so how do you prioritise all this information? The first thing that can be done is to find out where any conversations are taking place – are they happening on blogs, forums, video streaming platforms, short form messaging services or image-based social networks? It is much easier to participate on a conversation than create a completely new one.

The next thing to note is when conversations are taking place. Theoretically, conversations are taking place all the time in real-time so the listening strategy also takes place simultaneously ad infinitum however there will be spikes in chatter that will prove to be of significant interest. Some conversations might be event driven for example performances at awards ceremonies, sneak peaks of videos and audio, news stories or tour announcements. Another trend to look out for is cycles in chatter such as seasonal conversations or could you take advantage of back – to – school season? The most fundamental thing to note however, is “who” is doing the talking. It is beneficial to understand how much influence they have on others for example can this person sway the purchasing habits of other fans? If this ambassador were to post a comment would they have hundreds of others fans validate their point of view. Keeping an eye on ambassadors and critics can help you gather priceless input that you can use as design criteria around the artist, music and the experiences you plan to facilitate.

I am reviewing a section of my book "The Fan Experience" and a sentence in there prompted a memory about a project I worked on a few years ago and a lesson around the concept of "quality not quantity."

As a consultant specialising in music digital marketing and PR I found myself working on a project where the client decided to use software more commonly know as "bots" to boost his artist's Facebook and Twitter numbers. This was against my clear and firm recommendations. However, this client went ahead with this cheat of a tactic anyway.

What he didn't fully understand is that artificially pulled accounts may as well be artificial accounts as the person the account is attached to didn't not personally approve the "like or "follow."

Any following spam in their newsfeed will be ignored, unliked or unfollowed. He also didn't take into account that Facebook users can report this activity as spam. Some accounts get banned from Facebook for these actions.

Neverthless, I was so disgusted at the lack of ethics regarding this practice that I dropped them as a client and distanced myself from the agency providing the service. I should probably mention this agency had met with me and I had been very clear on best practice in this area. The Director there still decided to go ahead and source someone who used this type of software.

Ridiculously, the manager following this artificial campaign decided to pitch the newly added accounts for funding via a crowdfunding platform. Of course, it didn't work out and not much money was raised leaving the manager and the agency to pick up the shortfall in funds.

Put it this way - if someone on the street shoved a flyer into your bag and then asked you for a cheque - would you write it?

No, I didn't think so.

It may feel good to say you have 5000 fans on your Facebook page but when it comes to getting cold hard cash out of those "fans" - you'll find that you're speaking to pixels. And pixels don't have purses to open.

In the end - this particular artist fired her longtime manager and it would seem that not much consistent progress or set up has been made by any of the parties. This is what happens when people spend 20-30 years of their lives looking for a quick fix.

You are better off taking the time to nurture 1000 true fans than cheating your way to 5000 fans and still finding that you can't pay your rent.

Just sayin'

"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down." Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)


Here are the 7 basic mistakes that people make in Fan Experience. I will explain this later in report that I will give away, in the mean time here they are for you to consider.




#1 Not Listening

#2 Not Knowing How They Got To Be A Fan In The First Place

#3 Not Knowing How They Interact With Music

#4 Not Understanding The Many Different Relationships You Have With The Fans

#5 Not Creating With The Fans

#6 Too Little Innovation With The Fans

#7 Forgetting To Measure Your Efforts Towards The Fans

My book "The Fan Experience" will have activities and some fun cartoons which are being created now. So here is one of the exercises.

www.thefanexperience.co.uk

Chapter 4 extract called "What Is Fan Experience?"

"Up until this point we have discussed a few ideas to provide you with perspective and a framework for your thinking. So here we ask an important question: what is fan experience? The term “fan experience” is becoming more commonly used throughout the music business. The music business is also starting to see fan experience as a crucial factor when competing with other forms of entertainment. However, we are finding it tricky to define. Most of the times we don’t really know who the fans are, let alone what their experience of the music is. We think that fan experience is obtained through digital platforms so we build fancy experiential websites. Sometimes we look to new technologies such as the latest smart phone and attempt to leverage the experience built into these devices – with little success. Sometimes we think that fan experience is the live event or encounters at retail online or offline. The reality is the fan experience is all these things and much more. The fan experience is the entire sum of how fans engage with music. It is not a marketing campaign and the fan is not a market segment. It is the complete journey of being a fan and this can span a fan’s entire lifetime. So here we will look at what it covers a fan experience, how to think about it, how to construct it, and how to enhance it. 

Fan experience is not simply about the rational experience of dealing with a music product or service for example how quickly it takes for an mp3 to download, how gig tickets are bought or how long the queues are to a live show. Much of the fan experience is subconscious. This is about how the fan feels. The fan experience is the subjective reaction to any form of direct or indirect contact with the music in question and this includes everything from the music itself to a stray flyer on a car park floor. Direct contact with the music would be an online purchase, interaction with an artist website, watching a music video, seeing a poster, hearing the music in a TV advert, soundtrack, TV show or video game. Indirect contact is unplanned by the fan and involves the sharing of a video on a social network from a friend, the gifting of a CD, music heard in shops, bars and elevators. It is important to understand that the value of the music resides in the mind of the fan. This means that value in music is different for each fan based on their own set of emotions towards the music and what the music means to them for example music played at a wedding or christening might have more value to a listener over and above stray unrecognised music heard in a bar. The secret to good fan experience is to ensure that all these features work in harmony to provide one seamless positive experience that meets the needs of the fans in an elegant manner. If we can address this well we will ease fan acquisition, promote fan loyalty and improve retention. 

Every music business organisation whether they are an independent artist or large multinational that thinks they don’t deal with fans has a fan experience. It doesn’t matter whether you think you have deliberately put it together or not. Your fans’ experience may be good, bad or indifferent, but the fact that you interact with fans on any level directly or indirectly and provide them with music means that they have an experience with you. It is up to you whether that fan experience is good, bad or indifferent. Now we have already understood that we cannot control people and we especially cannot control the fans in this case this is because fans own their experiences. Experiences involve changeable perceptions, conflicting emotions, unpredictable behaviours and unforeseen psychological filters. We cannot control people and no matter how careful we attempt to craft an experience it will not be perceived exactly the way we intend it to be as each fan’s filter of the world as in they way they personally view the world is somewhat different to our own. There will always be some random variable; a spanner in the wheel if you will that will upset the machinery of the experience. This is exactly why fan experience is not a marketing campaign and fans are not a market segment. You plan for the best and prepare for the worst. The best fan experience is when you simply facilitate and provide the tools for the fans to create their own experiences around the points of contact for example websites, social networks, gigs, street teams - which you have with them that you can control. Fan experience will separate the men from the boys."

This is a short extract from Chapter 3 called "The Music Belongs To The Fans"

"Fans not only consume they contribute and produce. Fans create all types of media and publish it via the internet. Fans creatively respond to all kinds of material in ways that astonish their creators and they find meaning in the works that weren’t there originally. The consumer is not passive and never has been it is simply that the consumer has more opportunity now to voice their opinion and vote with their feet. The power is in their hands. The internet plays an integral part in the empowerment of this participation rather than consumer culture increasingly enabling people to collaborate, generate and disseminate news, ideas and creative words and content with similar and/or complimentary goals and interests. Participatory culture has low barriers of artistic expression and civic engagement. It has strong support for creating and sharing ones creations with others. It supports informal mentorship where the experienced share their knowledge with novices. Fans believe that their contributions matter. They feel a connection with each other or care what one another think.

We have to remember that this type of activity has precedes the internet. In the 19th Century it was not uncommon for amateur writers to write articles that would then be posted via a “social network” using the mail system. We have always experienced this activity from fan art, the passing on of mix tapes, the creation and sale of fanzines and fan newsletters. This is mirrored in blogs, ezines, podcasts and wikis. This shift from consumption to production where the fan is part of the creative process is profound and will affect the core of our music business culture and economy. Fans are developing their participatory skills and fully understand their buying power. The technology available makes it easier and easier to create content and to spread it to a global audience. Now with smart phones fans are interactive, mobile and have a strong identity. Smart phones are a technology unrestricted by time and space and fans can easily manipulate the context of any existing content even their own identities. As technology develops it becomes more user driven the technology firms seem to want to give the fans more and more control. Now more music resources are available and so there is more competition meaning more attention needs to be paid to the fans. It is no longer the case that a wealthy few own the media. The fans create the media. In fact the fans are the media.

The time of a few music giants controlling the music to our homes is fading. It is now the fans who can send music around the world. This freedom of expression stimulates the fans to take an active part in shaping ideas. There are many more fans than there are of the music business and this means a new paradigm in which fans are co producers of services of content, of taste and emotion, of goods, of contacts, of relevance, of reputation and feedback, of storage and server capacity, of connectivity and of intellect. As long as the Internet is free empowered fans will keep on innovating. Our communications technologies allow the fans to make up their own minds meaning they can decide what is quality, truth or value and reject its interpretations by corporations or power agencies.

It is important to remember the fan is not a market segment. The fact is that large groups of fans are smarter than an elite few no matter how brilliant its members. They are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and predicting the future, through their collective intelligence. The role and the obligation of the intermediary music business organisation is to empower the fans and solidify the relations between fan and artist.  We don’t know enough about the fans after all there was no need to we told them what to consume and how to consume it. Now the difference is they are telling us. This is simply the market correcting itself. We cannot control the fan nor should we be trying to. You cannot control a person’s experience. You cannot control people."