Build Your Community Online By Thinking Like A Fan

First become part of a community, and then focus on leading it

There’s a lot of talk these days about community-building, and many look to that as a modern strategy for spreading a band’s music.  While I do believe that it is a great strategy, many bands tend to overthink or underthink this strategy – some are too selfish, and for some reason it seems all natural behaviour of interaction and human nature can go out the window when it comes to promoting a band.

To build a community online, one not-recommended method is to take a passive approach… like start a myspace page, post some tunes, and wait for people to find you and friend you.  Then only communicate with those people that have reached out to you.  That’s okay, in that, at least you’re only talking to people who have expressed previous interest in you.  However, it’s certainly not enough, unless you manage to catch lightning in a bottle, and make a song that takes off virally, spreading through the online space like crazy.

Another poor approach to community-building could most-politely be called “the aggressive approach.”  You know this approach when you see it, and the results are the bands who have a billion friends on Myspace, and very little plays.  These are the bands that send email after email (or facebook event after facebook event) about their songs and their shows to anyone they can find, regardless of whether they have permission, and regardless of whether it makes sense or not.  Some “clever” bands even think that if they friend all the attractive women on Myspace, that their true target fans would be fooled into thinking the band attracts those folks to their live-shows, and that somehow the true fans would be more inclined to be a fan of the band because of this.  Does this make any sense to anyone?  Seems to me it would be much easier and more effective to focus on your target fans to begin with.

The truth is, the best way to build a community online is to start by getting involved in existing ones.   I guarantee you there is already at least one, and most likely several places online that exist for people who might like your particular sound to already be congregating and discussing other bands who are somewhat similar to you.  Take a minute, think about your band, and your music.  Think about yourself too.  You probably make a similar sound of music to the type of music you personally like to listen to (or at least one of the types of music you listen to.)  That’s because you’re a fan! So get in touch with your inner-fan, and think like that!  And don’t ever forget, Online is the same as “The Real World” because it IS the real world.  It’s still people talking to people.  We just use new tools to communicate.  But the rules don’t really change.

Let’s for one minute pretend you don’t make your own music, but you are an avid fan of punk rock… you would go online and find messageboards, facebook groups, myspace friends, twitter friends, blippers, fan-pages, artist websites, blogs, online magazines and local-scene websites that all focused on the music you like, and you would get involved in the current conversations.  You’d ask questions, make comments, have discussions, talk about music you like, check out the music that other people were talking about, etc.  What would end up happening, naturally, is that you would develop friendships, meet new people, find a group of folks who you agreed with often, bonded with, and felt connected to.  That is called building a community online.

You wouldn’t go on, only post things that you wanted to say, never comment on anything that is already being discussed, never answer any questions people ask you, and only talk about one band.  That’s ridiculous, no humans interact that way, and no one’s ever made a friend or bonded with anyone from having a one-sided conversation like that.  So don’t promote your band like that!

Think like a fan, be a part of the existing community, have conversations, make friends, and talk about all sorts of bands…yours included, of course.

And if you’re in a band, and are having difficulty getting started, email me. I’ll try my best to help!

Next post… I’ll talk about how this can apply in the offline world.  Or in the meantime, maybe you can tell me?

See you on Wednesday.

- The idea for this post came out of a conversation I recently had with @withabullet.