Your Fans, Your Next Big Relationship!
Creative Sydney
Week 2: Day 2
Event: Finding Your Fans
The internet has played a huge part in reshaping the way we approach business, branding and, in fact, communicating generally. Finding your fans, in this contemporary context, means that the old paradigms of success are no longer relevant, but often means new paths are sometimes unclear, less tangible and often uncharted territory.
[Que: Finding Your Fans]
Finding Your Fans serves as a ‘How To… ’ session to just that, and while the event did have the tools and case studies galore for the audience to feast upon, it was made abundantly clear that there is no cut and dry approach to this ever elusive subject. What the panelists did well to show was that finding fans translates to a long process of trial and error, of researching and engaging to build lasting audience-based relationships, and also requires adapting easily to change and ideas.
The charismatic Adam Ferrier, consumer psychologist from Naked Communications, summed it up well for the rest of the panellists by saying that the two most important facts to being successful is this: 1. Have a remarkable product/idea – by spending time making it right; and 2. Distribution - finding distribution that works and distributes well for your idea.
Adam Ferrier makes comments like, “If you’ve got something you’ve created and have been pushing it out for a few years and it’s not working, you’re basically fucked!” As a case study, Jean-Claude Abouchar’s work on setting up the fashion website The Grand Social really works well with this statement. He shows that the idea of “having accessible fashion for everyone everywhere” isn’t just a brilliant concept, but highlights the value of building and nurturing relationships, which was at the heart of creating his successful service. His brand/website developed as a collaboration with its fashion designers to get the best service possible for them. The consumer aspect of the site was secondary, and he discusses that the website evolved and changed over time as issues were ironed out, individual agendas were met, and finally consumers needs were addressed. Time spent on this process meant that in the end the product was tweaked and perfected, and the website’s identity was made clear.
Virginia Hyam, Head of Contemporary Culture at Sydney Opera House presents her challenge in changing the program for the Opera House and making it more diverse and accessible to more people. She expresses that she was working against an already long-standing and conservative image of the Opera House and illustrates the importance of working hand-in-hand with marketing to help establish a new identity and in finding new audiences. Of this process she says, “It built slowly in the way it needed to and changed as the landscape changed.” She points out that the support of the media, plus word of mouth strategies helped significantly in this reinvention process, but again highlights the importance of this idea of creating a ‘community’.
Cutting through to grab the media’s attention is also more than just having a remarkable product. As a busy editor, Kate Bezar of Dumbo feather, pass it on. has simple advice to ensure an editor will take notice of you above the other 100 emails that come through daily. It is this: tailor your correspondence to each individual media personnel; making it easy (by getting your facts right, providing as much material as possible and crafting your words) means they’ll be inclined to use and even copy and paste the information you’ve ‘helpfully’ provided.
Often, working with a limited budget can intimidate anyone with even the more modest idea, but Jean-Claude’s approached of tapping into “the creative assets that we already had,” meant that The Grand Social team pooled their resources and looked for innovative ways of getting their website ‘out there’. Some of the site’s success came from pooling PR agents (utilising designers’ own PR agents), accessing social media, and came up with “unique concepts to attract attention” (and in their case, pop-up stores and collaborative shoots and concepts were invented to really showcase the experience of not only the site and industry but also the designers’ works).
The importance of the idea of engaging and communicating with your audience/consumers/fans, really hits home when Natalie Tran – Australia’s biggest YouTube vlogger – talks about her success. Natalie, after discovering that “if you make a video response, you get an answer quickly,” found success from creating YouTube ‘everyday-style’ videos and spent considerable time chatting with her fans online. Through the marriage of her innate talent to entertain and chat, she has been able to identify what works and doesn’t work, as well as use this interaction as a resource to generate fresh ideas. She illustrates the importance of ‘engaging’ in remaining relevant saying, “the only time I ever run out of ideas is when I don’t see my friends or stop the engaging.”
By the end of the discussion, it became evident that being a commercial brand is no different to being a stand-alone communicator when it comes to establishing yourself as an engaging entity. Overall, obtaining fans seems to be as much about distributing a remarkable, unique idea, as it is about researching, chatting with your audience and moving with change.
