A Photograph or a Photographer?

This week, I sat with a client who sings with an elite choir. The quality of what they do is outstanding. They’re known for loving attention to every detail. When they sing Russian opera, they study the deep meaning of the words, not merely clear pronunciation. It comes through in every blissful sound they blend, share, and offer. Their musical director is exceptional. Their production staff is to die for. Their board is prestigious and powerful.

The music they make is heavenly.

But aside from an occasional sale to a friend in Japan and the many CDs sold go to friends and supporters. The choir is hardly known outside of their personal and professional network.

That’s why my client was meeting with me.

“I was thinking we should use the Internet. I thought maybe a piece of your blog or some others,” he said.

I said, “What do you want for the choir? What’s your goal?

He told me without hesitation. “We should have a grammy — more than one.”

“You could do that. You’ll reach my audience and they’ll love you. But I’d like to suggest something more and more lasting. Why not build an audience of your own?”

Hire the Brain Behind the Blog

Often first conversations with clients start with how to get their information on many influential blogs. That leads to discussions of buying, renting, or borrowing bloggers’ influence, determining the right audiences, and how much information on the Internet is misstated, misdirected, or outright ignored.

Boring products need to be “pushed” or “seeded” into the market.
Compelling valuable resources don’t.
One look at Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or FriendFeed shows that we like to share great things with our friends. Susan Boyle’s YouTube video is an example of great content that didn’t need to be pushed or seeded. It felt good to share it. It made us feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

Using those thoughts and basic strategy — start with the reachable and move out with purpose and logic — we scoped out the existing and realistic possibilities. The plan my choir friend and I started looked something like this one.

Great word of mouth depends on three things:

1. The product has to be outstanding — and the vision has to be clear.
2. The way to share it has to easy, growing from the community’s natural connections.
3. People need to feel proud that they were part of the process.

It sure seemed that my choir client had step 1 — an outstanding product and vision — covered. We moved on to the strategy for building out the community and letting them enjoy the process. We set out to make it easy, meaningful, and about the folks who would help. We were building a movement more than a strategy.

• Start at Home.. Identify the offline network the choir already reaches. Determine best ways to leverage and expand it — keep the offline connections strong and growing. Keep the offline community engaged and participating in fun, meaningful ways.
• Learn from, Listen to and Engage the Energy. Find and have dinner with the champions of the choir in the offline community who are already engaged in online social endeavors related to music, the choir, and possible connections for the choir.
• Let the Leaders Lead. Join and enlist their armies and networks. Let those champions lead their own initiatives in the name of the choir.
• Momentum Drives Building. Using what we know of our network and their skills, now is finally the time to put up build and release that YouTube video of the choir. They’ll already be part of the endeavor and their armies will know about it when it goes up. Sharing will be fun.
• Celebrating and Sharing Are Natural. Our friends on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and the music sites we’re already on will be delighted to hear about it too.
• Reporting Results. At the end, what we about on our blogs will have the power of our community as well as the single event.

And we’ll be well on our way to a network, a community that loves the choir, not one that was borrowed from a network of blogs.

You can hire the blog or you can hire the brain behind it.

It’s a matter of short-term or longer-term thinking.

Do you look at your blogger relationships as a chance to tap into new strategic ideas?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!