This is the fifth post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here, and part four is here.

Recently I blogged on The Daily Fix about how Amanda Palmer sold $11,000 worth of t-shirts in 2 hours via Twitter.  I think this ‘case study’ is a perfect example of how rockstars and companies differ in the way they view the people that buy their products.

For the most part, I think many companies see customers as people that they ‘have’ to connect with, and that having contact with these people is a ‘necessary evil’.

But rockstars such as Amanda seem to thrive on the interaction with their customers.  They don’t see it as something that HAS to be done, but they WANT that interaction, and crave it.  As a result, it makes it much easier for customers to become fans.

Another example, during my Rockstar presentation at Social South, I mentioned how Collective Soul is using Twitter to connect with their fans, and showed this tweet they had left:

Trey Pennington was in attendance during my session, and immediately tweeted to Collective Soul that I had mentioned them in my presentation.  Within minutes, the band left this tweet:

See what just happened?  Collective Soul noticed that both Trey and I were promoting them, so they went out of their way to ENCOURAGE that behavior from us, by interacting with both of us and thanking us.

Companies should be taking close notes on what rockstars such as Collective Soul and Amanda Palmer are doing.  They are openly embracing the people that are more passionate about them.  Basically, they are finding the people that are already singing their praises, and handing them a microphone.  Brilliant.

Look at what Cirque du Soleil is doing in using social media to embrace their brand ambassadors.  They are finding the people online that are passionate and vocal about their shows, and are embracing them to help promote them online.  And the results speak for themselves, Cirque’s Social Media Manager Jessica Berlin explains that “The ROI for our social media outreach has been better than for any other form of advertising for us.”

Find your most passionate customers, the ones that truly love you, and give them a microphone.  All of the lessons that we’ve covered this week (Interacting with your fans in their space, Getting out of their way, Tapping into the ‘Bigger Idea’) are about giving customers a reason to become fans, and then when they do, you turn them loose.

And the great irony is, many of the companies that would NEVER consider embracing their most passionate fans via social media, are the same ones that wouldn’t think twice about turning their ‘social media strategy’ over to an intern. (HT – @CC_Chapman)

Thanks for checking out this Rockstar series this week, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!  BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

This is the fourth post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here, part three is here.

One area that so many companies are struggling with in creating content is finding a way to make it valuable, interesting and relevant to the people they are trying to reach.  Or put another way, they are struggling to find the ‘bigger idea’ behind their content.

Rockstars do a great job with finding the ‘bigger idea’ behind their music, tapping into ideas, themes and beliefs that trigger involvement and interest from their fans.  The video for the song World on Fire is a classic example of this.  Here’s how the video came to be:

In 2003, Mike Quinn was an engineering student in Canada.  He was working with a charitable organization Engineers Without Borders.  EWB brings together people that want to donate their time and talents to help people in impoverished areas around the world.  In 2003, Mike had been working on severals projects in Africa, and was detailing his group’s efforts via a series of articles.

One of those articles was discovered by Sarah McLachlan, who was about to start shooting the video for her new song World on Fire.  After reading Mike’s articles, and discovering how EWB was impacting so many lives, Sarah decided to take almost every penny of the $150,000 Arista had budgeted her for the video for World on Fire, and donate that money to 11 charitable organizations, including EWB.  The projects that were executed from Sarah’s donations eventually bettered the lives of over 1 million people around the globe!

But there was one problem; Sarah still had to shoot a video for World on Fire, and now she had no money for the video, save $15.  So she took that $15 and bought a video tape.  And she got a crew to volunteer their time to shoot a very simplistic video for the song.  What Sarah did was detailed what the normal expenses for the video shoot would have been and instead where the money went now.  A few thousand that would have normally paid for catering during the shoot for a day, instead bought a few thousand meals for homeless children.  Examples such as this really hit home Sarah’s core message (bigger idea) that by donating a seemingly small amount, a larger number of people could have better lives.  Here’s the amazing video:

And oh by the way, Sarah received a Grammy nomination for that video. So she got to help over a million people AND get a Grammy nomination. Not a bad return on a $15 video!

So how does this translate to companies and how they use social media?

Let’s talk about how Patagonia positions their blog, The Cleanest Line.  Now the strategy for many companies would be to use their blog as a promotional vehicle, right?

But Patagonia doesn’t directly promote their company and products on The Cleanest Line.  Instead, they focus on the ideas, themes and interests that are important to their customers.  The company focuses on the environment, sustainability, and being active outdoors.  Because Patagonia is smart enough to understand that it’s not about their products, it’s about what ‘bigger idea’ is their products a part of?  By focusing on more customer-centric ideas and themes, the content on The Cleanest Line is much more interesting, valuable, and relevant to the blog’s readers.

Another great example of tapping into the ‘bigger idea’ is what Kodak does with its A Thousand Words blog.  Instead of putting the focus on Kodak’s cameras and printers and film, instead A Thousand Words focuses on photography.  Because THAT is the bigger idea that its customers are interested in.  They want to know how to take better pictures.  If Kodak can teach them how, then they have created value for their readers, and contrast that value being created with a competitor that’s using their social media efforts to directly promote their products.  Who wins?

On Tuesday we looked at how Graco positions their blog as being written by parents, for parents.  But even here, in positioning the blog as being about parenthood, Graco has tapped into the ‘bigger idea’ that their customers are interested in.  Their customers ultimately don’t want to know how to buy Graco products, they want to know how to be better parents.  So that’s what the blog focuses on, and that’s a big reason why it’s been so successful for Graco.

So if you want more fans of your company and its social media efforts, find a way to tap into the bigger idea behind your content.

Coming tomorrow, the fourth and final way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; by embracing their fans.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

This is the third post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here, part two is here.

A few months ago I was doing research for a post on music marketing and found the above site, TheDonnasMedia.com.  This is a massive fan-run site that has audio and video from performances by the band The Donnas.  We are talking everything from late night appearances to full-length concerts from all around the world.  Not only that, but for some of the concerts, custom artwork and liner notes have been created so you can literally burn the concert to CD, then print out the cover art and liner notes and create your own CD.  Thousands upon thousands of hours of audio and video is available, all to download for free.

After poking around and seeing all the content that was available, I assumed it was only a matter of time before The Donnas found out about this site, and their lawyers made the site go away.  As it turns out, The Donnas DO know about the site, and not only haven’t tried to close it, but they actively support what their fans are doing there.  Even to the point of putting out calls to their fans to upload concerts to the site if there’s not a copy currently available.

I was surprised by their stance, and contacted their manager, Molly Neuman, and told her that this looked like the band’s strategy was to sell more music, by giving it away.  She said that was the idea, and explained that “We want our fans to get into the music and also support us by buying our records. We trust that our fans won’t abuse the availability and that makes for a great relationship.”

Note those two bolded words ‘trust‘ and ‘relationship‘.  How many companies have squashed efforts by customers to make their content, even commercials, available on sites such as YouTube?  But The Donnas approach their fans as people that are helping the band promote themselves, and they see them not as adversaries, but as partners.  So they embrace what their fans are doing with TheDonnasMedia.com, and trust that they won’t abuse that trust.

And for their part, the fans that run the site actively police it.  No content on the site is commercially available for sale by the band.  If anyone attempts to upload any song or video that the band is trying to sell, the site’s community immediately flags it and deletes it.  Because they appreciate the fact that The Donnas are trusting them with the site and have empowered them to help promote and grow the band that they love.  They feel a sense of co-ownership in an effort to support and grow the band that they love.  And to The Donnas’ credit, they see how effective their most passionate fans are at promoting them, and are empowering them by giving them more control to do just that.

Let’s talk about how Fiskars has applied many of these same lessons via social media.  Many of you are no doubt familiar with the story behind The Fiskateers.  Fiskars was looking for a way to reach their customers and form closer relationships with them.  The products themselves had little emotional connection with their customers, but Fiskars, in working with agency Brains on Fire, discovered that there was a very active crafting community online, and Fiskars created some of the most popular products for crafters and scrapbookers to use.  So Fiskars decided to position their efforts not on their products directly, but instead on the bigger idea of scrapbooking.

And they decided to reach out directly to people that were active in the crafting and scrapbooking communities to lead their effort, or become Fiskateers.  Fiskars was smart enough to find the people that were most passionate about their products, and give them control over their efforts.  Spike Jones from Brains on Fire explains what they learned:

“I’m blown away. Sure, when we first set out to create a community/movement for kindred spirits for one of our clients, we knew – that with a lot of hard work that involved rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty (in a great way) – that something special would happen. And the key part of the movement was to find those passionate people, give them the online and offline tools and opportunities to talk to one another (and also reach out to potential kindred spirits) and then get out of the way. Sure, we expected a lot of things to happen. But even in its infancy, it’s gone far beyond what I ever imagined.

Now – unprompted – these passionate advocates are creating their own marketing tools. They are stepping up and taking ownership in an international brand. They are personalizing something that used to be institutionalized. And they are coming up with ideas that the brand – or even (gasp!) Brains on Fire wouldn’t have thought of.

And I’m in awe.”

In both cases, The Donnas and Fiskars were smart enough to shift control to their most passionate fans and the people that were most passionate about their products.  And in doing so, their efforts were spoken in a voice that resonated with their customers because it was their own.  Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba had a great nugget in their book Creating Customer Evangelists, where they said that evangelists know your target market better than you do because they ARE the target market!

Why wouldn’t you want your most passionate fans to promote you?

Coming tomorrow, the third way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; by tapping into the ‘bigger idea’.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

This is the second post in a five-part series on What Rockstars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  Part one is here.

If there is a ‘secret weapon’ that rockstars have in converting customers into fans, this is it.  By default, they are a member of the very community of fans that they are trying to reach.  Since they are members of their community of fans, that means they are much more closed connected to them, and better understand them.  And the fans also feed off this increased interaction, and it makes it that much easier for them to relate to and trust the artists.

Graco is a great example of a company that’s using social media to put themselves in the shoes of their customers.  When Graco decided to launch a blog a couple of years ago, the company invested several months studying the ‘online chatter’ and trying to decide how they would position their blog, and who they wanted to reach.

After doing initial research, the company decided that it wanted to reach parents, and that the blog itself should focus on parenthood, moreso than Graco’s products.  A great move, but what Graco did next was even better.  In selecting the team that would write for the blog, Graco decided that if they wanted to reach primarily younger parents with a blog focused on parenthood, why not have younger parents be the bloggers?  In this way, the bloggers are speaking with the same voice and point of view as the people Graco wanted to connect with!

Graco’s former Social Media Manager Lindsay Lebresco told me that one of the key goals for Graco’s blog was to help “underscore the fact that the people behind the products at Graco are on the same journey that our consumers are on or are headed on.”

That’s incredibly powerful, because in doing so, Graco has positioned its bloggers as a member of the community they are trying to reach.  And what have the results been?  In 2007, 68% of all online mentions of Graco were positive, but by last year, that percentage had increased to 83%, and total online mentions had DOUBLED.  And of those additional online mentions that the company gained after launching its blog, almost 100% were positive.

That’s the power of a well-positioned blog that’s creating relevant and valuable content for its readers. It’s also a great example of what happens when a company puts themselves in the shoes of the customers they are trying to reach.  Rockstars do this every day, and thanks to social media, companies now have a greater ability than ever before to do the same.

Coming tomorrow, the second way that rockstars can teach companies how to kick ass with social media; it’s all about giving up control.

BTW if your company would like to learn how to use social media to better connect with your fans/evangelists, please email me.

Last week at The Viral Garden, I posted an interview I did with Kodak’s Director of Interactive Marketing and Convergence Media, Tom Hoehn.  Tom was nice enough to give me an exclusive look at Kodak’s ‘Ripcurl’ social media engagement system, which he co-created with Kodak’s Chief Blogger, Jenny Cisney.  The system is designed to quickly and easily explain the different ways in which social media (and other forms of marketing) function, be it as tools to create content, engage in 2-way dialogue, or as a channel to distribute content.  The system also shows everyone the tone to use when engaging with customers via social media, and what the expected outcomes are.

Similarly, The Air Force has created a wonderful ‘blog comment flowchart’ that clearly explains how every blog comment should be handled, based on the intent of the person, their tone, and gives a clear course of action to take.  You can view the flowchart here.

Having a clear set of social media policies and guidelines isn’t just a good idea, for larger companies and organizations, it’s a necessity.  If your company is considering crafting guidelines to help your employees understand how to reply to customer feedback via social media, here are some areas to focus on:

1 – Intent.  What is your purpose for replying to a blog comment or answering a tweet on Twitter?  What are you trying to accomplish?

2 – Tone.  How you respond to people online is just as important as what you say.  Make sure that your employees understand this, and are given guidelines for what acceptable.  In general, be respectful and courteous, and you’ll almost always get the same in return.

3 – Who should reply.  If you encounter a customer-service issue on a social site, is it best for you to respond immediately, or forward the information to someone in the customer-service department?  Employees should know which areas and departments within their company are qualified to address feedback from customers on social sites.

4 – Transparency.  If you do reply or address someone online, make sure you clearly identify yourself as an employee for your company, and that you are speaking on your company’s behalf.  This is not an option.

5 – Be careful in sharing private and confidential information, or speaking on behalf of another employee.  Always double-check before doing this.  Being transparent doesn’t mean you have to share everything.

6 – Adding value, not a commercial.  Be very careful to address comments and points raised, but to not offer unnecessary promotion.  If you can provide more information about your company that’s related to the topic being discussed, that’s normally fine, but don’t promote areas that have no interest to others.

7- Being humble, being human, being open.  If you screwed up, apologize.  If you enter into an online conversation, invite readers to leave more comments and feedback for you on that site, and also let them know how they can get in touch with you directly, via email or even your phone number.

8 – Never respond when you are angry.  Sooner or later, you will encounter feedback online that you think is dead wrong, and that makes you mad as hell.  If you respond when you are in that frame of mind, you are potentially doing damage to your company’s online reputation.  Remember that you are a company representative and are speaking on your company’s behalf.

These are some quick pointers to get you started on crafting guidelines for how your employees should respond to customers online, especially via social media.  For reference, Intel and IBM also have excellent social media guidelines that you can learn from.  What areas did I miss?  If your company has set guidelines for how employees respond via social media and on social sites, what areas did you focus on?  Or if you don’t want to comment here, feel free to email me.