If you’ve ever asked me about social media, read my blog or my book (thank you!), you know I repeat a line I admittedly stole from someone and can never remember who: Don’t build houses on leased land. I am not against “renting” from online third-party networks. I love the tools and wide nets they provide, and the many hard-working, good people who work for them. But if we don’t have ownership of the information we yield from these networks, we shouldn’t care so much about their public fan/follower counts in lieu of building our own business on our own private networks.

Let’s start here: What is a partner? Is radio your partner or a channel for growth? Is TV or MTV your partner or channels for growth? What about magazines? For some reason, when we talk about current digital platforms, under the façade of “building audience” and accepting scraps of monetization thrown at us, we often refer to them as partners. We need to look at them as what they are: channels for growth. How have you classified relationships you pay to access, whether it be up front or with the cost of building assets or to distribute assets? Their value is that they provide a service or a reach you cannot obtain on your own. But are they really your partner if you can’t walk away with what you’ve built? There’s also the double whammy right now of not only paying to create the assets for use (which we’d do anyway), but paying to distribute them (most of us would do that anyway) and THEN in some cases, paying AGAIN (paid media) to access the audience you’ve built on the platform you already paid to build your audience on. DOES YOUR HEAD HURT YET? If you can’t export your customer data to use in your own database, do you have a partnership or do you have a middleman? Both have their place and their value, but definitions and classifications also have value.

Historically, after an amount of people saw your video on TV, heard your song on the radio, or read an article about you in a magazine did you count those consumptions as a 1:1 relationship that you owned or did you refer to potential reach/audience? When you got booked on TV or had a single on the radio or a positive critical review, did you decide to only cultivate your audience in that one area of business or only talk to the one person who was favorable to you? No, you didn’t. You saw the value of those outlets for what they were and when you got traction, you probably worked hard to expand the reach quickly to more avenues. And yet today, we see more doubling down on singular channels that we don’t own, and then acting surprised when we are affected at the whim of the platform changing or even…staying in existence.Worse, we now get overwhelmed at the thought of having to learn another platform (an opportunity) or produce more content (a creative outlet) to reach a potential new audience… so we either do the bare minimum or we quit.  When we ask ourselves why new people aren’t streaming our music, I’d like us to remember we are exhausted – but are we making the right choices on what gets our attention?

The very timely conversation about news outlets and websites and their relationship with Google/SEO could also easily be used as another “I Told You So” case study. Yet, here we are with outlets recently sounding the alarm of outrage when they allowed third parties to own their relationship to their readers/subscribers. When those third parties change their strategy, become obsolete or cease to exist, if you haven’t worked to get people from the wide net of these networks into your owned data ecosystem where you have a direct connection to them, you get left behind. These are not our partners, these are our landlords.

Everyone who is invested in “content” knows it’s costly to create in both money and resources. Are there people really succeeding at making content they are proud of and making money on it? Sure! But most of us are in a loop of expense to create “more” without any real creative guiding light. The monetary and informational return is less than ideal. For those of us who grew up on promotional content like music videos, I think the informational return is more disappointing. Conversely, the owned properties (websites, databases, blogs) don’t give us much room to widen our net. It’s a conundrum. So, while we are in this chaotic crossroads and the business feels like it’s increasingly based on projected “growth,” performance anxiety and instantaneous results, what can you do to ensure you don’t absorb the panic-stricken “marketing plan” that’s really just a comparative Excel spreadsheet and instead build a real business that you may be the only person who knows it’s real value? It’s time to get off the rollercoaster and re-focus on what really matters!  

Nothing I am about to suggest makes the investment to create in both hard costs and sweat equity any less expensive. Whether you agree with it or not, we are waist-high in the creator economy and we should want to lean in, have fun and have healthy growth benchmarks. We should ALSO use third party networks to help with growth… but not be reliant on them. I listen to a lot of people talk about their algorithms and their strategy and yet they aren’t paying any attention to their sustainable foundation. How are you determining what your multi-level connections are and how are you GIVING value to those connections?

IS YOUR SIDE OF THE STREET CLEAN?

When is the last time you gave your website some attention? Do you need to add or delete pages? Do the links work? Is everything updated? Are you holding any great content back for use on your website and/or owned database subscribers (email, text)? If so, what is your plan in terms of cadence and consistency? How is your online store looking? When is the last time you revamped and looked at your imagery, pricing and strategy? Do you have an updated privacy policy and legal opt-ins for any offsite purchases? If you have an email list and you say you don’t “have a blog”… yes, yes you do. But, if you’re only using your email database to sell products or worse, maybe you don’t even use your database… get over the word “blog” and try to write a letter or make a video exclusively for your subscribers. You might find that writing a “letter” feels easier and more natural. Give something away! Have fun! Say thank you!

DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR FANS ARE?

Have you checked your website and database analytics lately? Do you know your baseline audience information and where you are year-over-year? Are you looking at your store metrics and A) cross-referencing those purchasers into your database, and B) identifying your most loyal purchasers? You need to know and reward your VIPs. If you sell a product with a third-party (like a label, a product partner, or a live event producer/ticketer) have you asked for your opt-ins and imported those? A lot of these partners WILL share information with you, but you need to be asking for it regularly and ensuring legal opt-in. THOSE ARE YOUR FANS buying on their sites!

Don’t just look at the dashboards of third parties and be grateful to know how many folks you’ve built up that you can’t take with you. Compare your real audience with your wide-net networks to see where the cross-sections land and the gaps are.

EDITORIAL IS A FACADE

You are the real influencer, and your engaged fan is your biggest flex. That playlist add is nice, but you can’t count on it. How are you getting your fans to see/hear/read/watch what you’ve created? If you used your engagement attention more toward your real fans who post positively or create content using your sounds, you’d see a bigger authentic return compared to the quick hit of a paid media campaign or an “influencer” campaign.  Why would we value a talking head who gets paid to use sounds or endorse products they may or not actually be passionate about? What is the result offline to this strategy?  How are you measuring success beyond eyeballs? I think influencer campaigns have their place with certain drivers, but as a strategy to bring new fans into your base, I am iffy at best. Regardless of their reach, if you count their “followers” without cross referencing your data with them, what return are you hoping to gain realistically? I like a quick and easy win just as much as the next guy, but what is this crazy loop of vapidness we’ve entangled ourselves in? Remember, the artist IS the influencer.  This is why whether it's shit talking/beef or lifting up other artists, interests, hobbies, charities, etc., when there’s a passionate share, people care and usually respond accordingly (buyer beware!).

When social networks were in their early stages, we used them to connect with friends and fans in a direct fashion. The innovation provided us ease of connection. I think a lot of us are still holding on to that original exchange. I build a profile on your platform, because of the content, the platform attracts new audience and then the platform helps me by exposing my content to other fans based on the collective data (i.e. algorithm). That’s not where we are anymore. Editorial real estate is slimmer than ever and we find ourselves once again, begging for placement on the platforms we helped build off our assets. While there’s still many great things to be tapping into on these networks, to not be prepared for change and to not to be servicing your earned fans with communication and the best content first, you are doing the opposite of future-proofing your business.

SO, NOW WHAT?

• Re-invest in your website creative and at the very least, make sure you have an email database that collects the right information to crush your future goals. My advice is to also have text, but if you have to chose one for now, go with email.
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• Find out who your earned fans are and strategize the best way to communicate with them. You have a real advantage of being able to plan and be thoughtful without the anxiety of an algorithm or responding to trends. You aren’t going up “against” anyone on your own sites, so have fun and be creative!  
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• Look at all your outside networks that provide acquisition information. Compare that information to your owned audience so you can see actuals. Network by network, ensure you are utilizing all the tools and information that they provide. Things change rapidly, it’s hard to stay on top of it all, but it’s important to make sure you are taking advantage of what you can.
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• Stop coming up with goals that mean nothing. While you should always be aiming at an upward trajectory, someone sitting at a conference table deciding a 20 percent growth on whatever platform is a goal, is ridiculous. Who says? Pay attention to growth and engagement and figure out better ways to connect off platform. You will win.
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• Double check your monetization settings at least once a quarter. It may be scraps but never walk away from money!  

Be good online… and in real life,
Jennie

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