(This is Part 3 of  a 3 part series on “The Anatomy of a Stan”)

To wrap it up, I want to offer four principles that allow artists to connect with stans in ways that directly nurture the internal strengths of stan communities and that will feed in positive ways for the artist. They are all based on demonstrating respect for the stans and for their independence.

1.  Build personal connections

2. Use a variety of social media

3. Provide fans with social resources

4. Encourage fans’ creativity

Make personal connections

The reduction of social distance means that stans have a far greater expectation of making personal connections with you the artist. That brings with it its own set of problems, but also brings with it a lot of power to generate goodwill on your behalf. Goodwill or G.P. is increasingly important as the incentive to pay for anything an artist does  and is increasingly motivated by voluntary ethical and moral feelings of relational obligation rather than economic and legal contracts and constraints. Having personal connections with audience members is also a powerful reward for many artists, one that is usually overlooked when we focus only on monetizing the relationship.

Connection happens at two levels: holistically with all your listeners paying attention to you online, and with the specific individuals doing the most to spread your presence/buzz.

Connecting isn’t easy: Social skills and music making skills are very different & there is not one right way to do this. It’s important to have a match between the identity put forward in the music and promotional materials, and that put forward by the individuals online.

Use varied social media

Have a well-defined online presence that is distributed across different sites, but that is well-integrated and consistent. Make sure that your own homepage is the core, that all of your other sites point people back to it, and that it points outward to all the other places you’re building an active presence. DO NOT use your Myspace page as your end all be all destination.

Warning: only communicate with your stans in as many ways as you can manage to maintain regularly over the long haul. Don’t try and do three much. Dead blogs and empty twitter accounts are worse than none at all.

Provide them with social resources

If you want stans to talk about you, you need to give them something of social value so other people can give a shit.

Some of this is social for you too: information, news, backstage & behind the scenes drama.

Others you view as economic: the songs, the videos…but from the stans’ point of view, both of these are forms of social capital that they can use to connect with each other.

The music provides them the emotions they want to share. You can and should give them resources that stimulate the other activities they want to do.

·          Provide them things to build identity with (songs for playlists, widgets, email addresses, urls)

·         Enable them to pool into collective intelligence (back stories, histories, detailed information)

·         Offer up for collective interpretation (music & video source codes, art/psd & high resolution files)

Encourage their creativity

My final suggestion is that you find ways to encourage your stans’ creativity. If they are into something, they will use it to create. Increasingly, this kind of remix culture is the main way young people and those who are tech savvy are able to engage creative practice at all. They are going to remix, make videos, figure out lyrics, build archives, and play with the music no matter what you do. This is part of how they build their social identities for each other.

When you encourage their creativity, and provide them with tools, incentives and rewards for it, as Coldplay, Weezer, Radio Head & Nine Inch Nails did with their recent video competitions, you enhance their connections to the music, to each other, and to you.

(Read Parts 1 & 2 here and here)