CHAPTER 11

Build a Following

Word-of-mouth was a very important factor in increasing the Grateful Dead fan base. Friends told friends who told friends, which spread the word and swelled the fan base, but in those pre-Internet days, how did the band keep fans apprised of concert dates, news, and other Grateful Dead happenings? It’s a great question, given that fans today can easily learn the latest Dead news with just a few clicks to the band’s official web site and chat forums, Facebook fan page, and Twitter feed.

 

From the outside, the Grateful Dead looked like they didn’t have a clue about business, but in reality, they were forward-looking, especially when it came to building their database and connecting with their fans—a lesson companies today can readily apply.

 

In 1968 the band hired the Grateful Dead fan Scott Brown as an album production coordinator. In addition to his day job, Brown also manned a booth at all the Grateful Dead shows where he signed up thousands of fans who wanted to receive updates about the band and their tours. As we mention earlier in the book, the Grateful Dead also placed its “Dead Freaks Unite!” notice on the inside sleeve of the “Skull and Roses” album in 1971, marking the beginning of the Grateful Dead Fan Club and growing the mailing list.

At the time, it was a radical idea for a band to add a “call to action” to an album as an overt way to build their mailing list—and by extension, their following. Six months after running the notice, the band had 10,257 names on their list, including 885 from Europe. The Grateful Dead soon hired Eileen Law to manage the band’s burgeoning mailing list. Five years later, the list had grown to 63,147 names in the United States alone—sorted by name and zip code. (And this was before personal computers!)

 

The band not only reached out to fans, but fans reached out to the band by sending in letters, postcards, and artwork. Law, the “keeper of stuff,” saved almost all of this correspondence, much of which is now at the Grateful Dead Archive at U.C. Santa Cruz.

THE GRATEFUL DEAD WERE EARLY ADOPTERS, FOR THEIR INDUSTRY, OF DATABASE MARKETING TECHNIQUES.

Starting in the 1970s, the band sent out newsletters and other mailings two to three times a year. Early newsletters were typed by hand on an IBM Selectric typewriter and included personal letters to fans.

 

In May 1974, the band sent fans a one-page letter alerting them to the From the Mars Hotel album release and exhorting them to call radio stations: “We know you’ll enjoy our album, and if you get real enthused call a radio station or tell a record store. We need all the help we can get.”

 

As the band’s fortunes increased, their newsletters became more polished, featuring hand-drawn artwork and articles about the band’s doings. The Grateful Dead fed their fans’ voracious appetites for any kind of news about the band’s members—knowing the smallest details became a point of pride among Deadheads. A February 1980 newsletter gives this insight into the band members and their instruments:

Jerry and Phil are both playing custom-made guitars by Doug Irwin. Bobby still plays an Ibanez and Billy and Mickey are now playing Sonar rosewood drums and Zildjian cymbals. Brent plays a Hammond B-3 organ and Yamaha electric piano.

And of course, Grateful Dead faithful had the Grateful Dead Hotline. Whenever you called, you heard Law’s warm voice giving you updated tour information and concert dates.

 

Once the Internet came into play, the Grateful Dead were once again early adopters, feeding information to Dead-Flames, a Usenet news group, and developing the official Grateful Dead web site and an e-mail newsletter.

MARKETING LESSON FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD

Build a Following

If you’re a marketer or business owner, you’ve heard the adage that your in-house database is a goldmine. Yet we’ve both seen how companies mishandle this asset: names of people interested in the company’s products or service are collected at a trade show, put in a file folder and filed away in a drawer somewhere . . . to be forgotten. Or, a company adds a subscription form to its web site, but never sends the people who enter their name and e-mail address any type of information—ever. Even worse, a company dumps names and e-mail addresses into their database and begins sending impersonal and unsolicited e-mails—and making recipients angry in the process.

THE GRATEFUL DEAD TEACHES US TO KEEP IN TOUCH WITH OUR CUSTOMERS ON A PERSONAL LEVEL AND TO USE THE NEWEST TECHNOLOGIES AVAILABLE TO REACH OUT TO THEM.

The Grateful Dead understood that their mailing list was a valuable asset, and they used it to keep their fans informed, to build community, and to let fans know their concert schedule. Just as the Grateful Dead were innovative in the way they built their following by directly communicating with fans via their mail list, you, too, should be similarly innovative in how you build your company’s following.

Building a following today requires much more than simply collecting names and e-mail addresses. You need to collect telephone numbers SMS, Twitter followers, Facebook fan page followers, and LinkedIn Group members. You build this following by creating lots of remarkable content that pulls people in—content that’s personal, relevant, and interesting to your followers.

 

In time, your following will dwarf your e-mail list, giving you real leverage. Each time you have a new product or service, you can announce it to larger and larger numbers of people much more efficiently—just as the Grateful Dead did when they grew their fan list by over 500,000 names in five years.

HUBSPOT EXTENDS ITS REACH WITH WEBSITE GRADER

Shortly after its founding, HubSpot, where Brian is CEO, created its Website Grader (www.websitegrader.com), a free tool that analyzes a web site’s ability to get found in search engines, blogs, and social media sites and then gives it a grade of 1 to 100 along with some tips on how to improve. A grade of 90 means your site has some mojo while lower scores mean you need some help to increase your ability to get found online. Those who use Website Grader have the option of giving their e-mail address, which HubSpot then adds to its database.

 

In addition to Website Grader (and similar analysis tools, including TwitterGrader, PressReleaseGrader, and Blog-Grader), HubSpot has built its following (or “reach”) by offering lots of other free content, including free e-books, white papers, webinars, a blog, a weekly HubSpot TV show,

Facebook fan page, and its Inbound Marketing University web site and LinkedIn Group.

 

HubSpot’s efforts have paid off. The company’s “reach” in October 2008 was a little over 100,000. By February 2010, that reach had grown to over 500,000, including 33,000-plus followers on Twitter (this does not include individual employees’ Twitter followings), 44,000-plus members for the company’s Inbound Marketers LinkedIn Group, and 27,000-plus blog subscribers and over 300,000 opt-in e-mail subscribers.

 

The large reach HubSpot now enjoys brings incredible and ever-growing leverage. When announcing an event such as a webinar for example, they’ll send out an e-mail to their list, Tweet about it, announce it on their Facebook fan page and LinkedIn Group—and then watch all of their followers post about the event, too. In October 2008, a promotion reached 100,000 people and by February 2010 it reached 500,000 people. This leverage means that webinar registrations have skyrocketed from about 2,000 to 10,000 people per webinar. As long as its reach continues to grow, HubSpot’s leverage in the marketplace grows with it.

ROCK ON

Extend your reach

Like the Grateful Dead, you should be an early adopter in your industry of ways to increase your reach in your marketplace. Since it’s 2010 and not 1990, this means you should stop obsessing over your e-mail database and start enlarging your view of your “reach” by focusing on your blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and LinkedIn Group members.

 

ACTION: Make a chart that shows the total number of names on your e-mail list plus your blog subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and LinkedIn Group members. Update your chart monthly and make it part of your standard reporting and metrics. Create a goal for yourself of growing your overall reach by 5 percent per month.