How You Can Make Your True Fans Work For You, For Free

The crowd sourced biography of Imogen Heap

Photo Credit: Imogen Heap

Over at Deep Dive Marketing, Collete Wientraub tells the inspiring tale of Imogen Heap. To most people reading it, it is quite an astounding story. Whilst I agree it is a great yarn when you break it down its quite easy to replicate. Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor are two other leaders in this are, they tend to their tribe. As a result their fanbase is extremely strong, and very influential. Provided your music is good, this is possible for you to achieve too, if you're willing to put in the time and effort.

Value Proposition 

Regular fans see the value proposition as some variant of "pay for goods, receive goods". The goods are associated with the artist in some manner and tend to be tangible, for example merchandise or gigs. True fans have a similar, yet different motive when evaluating the value proposition.

For a true fan the best value proposition is one in which the artist benefits. That is to say, the artist gains something that can either help support them or help them produce their creative works. The reward for a true fan could be anything. From a unique object, such as the wine bottle Amanda Palmer sold for $250 in her twitter auction because her fans knew it was helping pay her rent. To a mention on an album. Or it could be a purely moral reward, the joy of giving or helping as it were.

More commonly the reward is something akin to an investment in the artist. Mostly this is a social investment. Whereby the fan gets some credit for helping rather than a monetary stake in the artist. Such as donating to help them produce their album, buying something for a few hundred times its worth just because it will pay the artists rent.

Crowd sourcing your fans

Now we know we can get our true fans to work for free, but what work can we actually get them to do? Well, anything from writing your bio (more on that in a sec) to helping create album art. Even helping write lyrics. Engaging fans to help you with all this has roll on effects into marketing too.

Imogen Heap has built up quite an impressive and active fanbase. So when it came to writing her bio she looked no further than her own fans. Putting out a call to her twitter followers, she asked them to help write her biography, 140 characters at a time. As an added incentive (also a method to convert regular fans to true fans) she promised for those who's tweets make it into the bio that they "will receive a hand signed copy of the new album on the day it's released." 

Notice how she offered two incentives of great value to fans. A chance to be recognised as a fan in her biography, and a free signed copy of her new album on release day. All for writing 140 characters. Little effort for huge reward. The barrier of entry for a fan to enter this competition is minimal, yet the gain is great, for all involved.

Make it worth their time and effort

In a nutshell if you want to get your true fans to work for you, you need to make it worth it for them. Either with a tangible incentive, or a reputation based one.

The advantage of crowd sourcing is that with scale, for the fan the barrier to entry is minimal yet the overall (for the artist) gain is huge. Take the aforementioned twitter biog story. A few thousand people helped write her biog with more insight than a single copywriter ever could.

To get a true fan to work for you, for free it has to be mutually beneficial. You both must gain something from it, though a true fan doesn't necessarily need monetary or a tangible reward.

Make sure you don't miss a post in this series, subscribe RSS or by Email. It's free so you have nothing to lose. If you haven't already had a look, sit back and ponder over the Long Tail of Fans infograph.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series, but for now have a read of the previous post So Just What Are True, Regular And Casual Fans.