The Four Kinds of Fans

One of the biggest questions circulating at DIY Days Philadelphia last Saturday was, how do you spur your fans to actually do something? Once someone has joined your Facebook fan group, friended you on MySpace, or started following you on Twitter, how can you actually get them to buy a ticket, a DVD, a download, or some merch?

An important starting step, I'd suggest, is to start thinking about four different kinds of fans.

1. The Impulse Fan. The impulse fan sees a video you've made, or hears about your band from their roommate, and signs up to follow you on Twitter or joins your Facebook group. This fan will never do anything else -- ever. They are good only for your ego: yesterday, you had 1000 followers on Twitter, and today you have 1001.

2. The Prospective / Occasional Fan. The prospective fan is someone who can be lured out to a show or screening, or convinced to buy a new CD/DVD, but with some effort. You may need to dangle free samples. You may need to offer a free ticket to a pre-release, top-secret, underground album listening party. You may need to mention that there will be free, limited edition t-shirts given to the first 25 people who show up. The prospective fan can be activated, with a little creative strategizing. They can be "converted" into an occasional fan, showing up every once in a while to your events or buying a book or digital album download every couple years. And they may even be transformed over time into a True Fan.

3. The True Fan. Kevin Kelly defined the True Fan as "someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name." A True Fan will follow what you're doing on your own site, your blog, your Twitter feed -- wherever you choose to communicate. You shouldn't ignore their care and feeding, but these fans have already been activated.

4. The Super Fan. The Super Fan is a True Fan who is willing to help you out in some way. In Fans, Friends & Followers, the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule says she has a super fan who built and helps manage her Web site. Cartoonist Dave Kellett talks about super fans who have given him a lift from the airport in their city to a local event, or have been willing to accept shipments of books on his behalf and cart them to a book signing. Jonathan Coulton says that super fans have helped him find a great concert venue in which to perform. Super Fans, if you ask nicely (and offer them copious thanks and credit) will post flyers for you in their city, or point you to the best bar for a post-screening cast party.

I don't purport to have discovered all of the keys as to how you activate Prospective / Occasional Fans. But two things are certainly essential: making them feel part of your circle, and that you're grateful for their support. Incentives and discounts and give-aways can help. So can events that feel special, secret, unique, limited in space, or invitation-only.

What do you think the typical breakdown is between these four types of fans, for the typical artist? Just to throw something out that you might think about, I'd suggest:

- 25 percent Impulse Fans,
- 50 percent Prospective / Occasional Fans,
- 20 percent True Fans, and
- 5 percent Super Fans.

I welcome your comments below. If you'd like to read another take on different types of fans, here's a blog post from music industry guru Jason Feinberg.

The Difference Between a Fan and a Friend

Lance Weiler organized a few roundtable discussions at SXSW this year, outside of the conference itself; audio and video will be posted on the From Here to Awesome site at some point.

They were held at the offices of B-Side Entertainment. I'm not exactly sure how to describe the focus of the conversation, which lasted about two hours and included about 20 people packed into the conference room at B-Side. It touched on financing and fandom, contracts and deals, marketing, patronage, and new distribution avenues. (The roundtable I was part of included Brian Chirls, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, Tommy Pallotta, Scott Macaulay, Brett Gaylor, Isis Masoud, David Garber, Slava Rubin, Danae Ringelmann, and Scilla Andreen, among others I didn't really know.)

For me, the most interesting threat of the conversation was about fans: how you accumulate them, and how the nature of fandom is changing. (We started by summarizing Kevin Kelly's excellent essay 1,000 True Fans.)

I tossed out the idea that "fan" is starting to feel like a vestige of the (good) old mass media days. In the age of Facebook and MySpace "friends," is anyone happy to simply be a fan anymore?

"Fan" feels like such a passive word. They're supposed to join your fan club, read the fan club newsletter, and buy tickets to your movies when they come out. They're consumers, pure and simple -- a ready audience when you need them.

The new fan -- or friend -- or "peer" (the term that Susan Buice proposed) wants to be more connected to you and your work. They want to hear first about your new project. They want to have input to it, or help shape it in some way (Brett Gaylor is allowing "friends" of his documentary project Open Source Cinema to edit some of the sequences.) They want to respond to your YouTube videos, comment on your blog, tell you when they think you're selling out or full of shit. (Some "friends" those are!) They want to give you ideas and be credited for their ideas. They may even be willing to help finance your next project or pre-buy the DVD through sites like IndieGoGo or IndieMaverick. They'll help promote it when it's finished, embedding clips in their blogs or Twittering their friends that they're on the way to the premiere.

What's amazing about the Internet is that there are the tools that let you communicate with this "friend base" and ask them for help.

What's even more amazing is that people are willing to offer help, if it's asked for in the right way (and rewarded in the right way, with recognition and perhaps more tangible trinkets.)

But what's scary is that it's still hard to tell which of your "friends" will actually *do something*, like turn up in a theater and buy a ticket, and which ones are simply compulsive about creating new connections, adding you to their own ever-growing roster of friends. And I think it will be challenging (perhaps scary) to manage some of your friends who want to be more than just friends ... like sending you the script they hope will turn into your next movie.

I'm not suggesting "friend" is definitively the right term to be using. (I still think of a friend as someone who intuitively knows when you need to be taken out and bought a beer, and who knows about large swaths of your history.) Peer is pretty good, as is collaborator. Patron feels too passive, like someone who's just bankrolling a project.

But finding a new term for the people who support creative endeavors seems to be an important step in moving beyond just thinking about them as fans.