Book: My History in Word of Mouth

I've been doing Word of Mouth marketing for nearly twenty years. It wasn't called Word of Mouth marketing when I started doing it. I was working for a record company, A&M Records and running a division called Artist Development. Artist Development was the area of the record company that handled all the bands that no one had heard of. It was our job in Artist Development to keep bands occupied until the world hopefully caught on and started buying their albums. This happened primarily by keeping the bands on tour and visiting radio stations and record stores in each town where they performed.

One of things we did while I was at the record company was to give the artists pre-printed 3 x 5 note cards that asked fans to give us their name and address. Fans would fill them out at the merchandise counter and either leave them in a drop box we'd created or send them back to us. Then we'd enter them into a database and eventually we'd send them information about that band.

The idea was a simple one - keep track of your fans. Ironically it was something that was not regularly done in the music industry. The music business was based primarily on putting out an artist's album, hoping it got played on the radio and if all went well, the artist would sell millions of albums. When it was time to put out the next album there was no record of who bought the last album. To find those fans we had to once again try to get a song on the radio or a video on MTV; we'd advertise in Rolling Stone magazine and snipe colorful posters on construction sites in major cities. Not surprisingly consumer research showed that the biggest problem with selling follow up albums was the fact that fans who bought the previous album had no idea there was a new album out.

I'll admit it, I stole the idea of keeping track of fans from another band. I was on tour with a band called the Gin Blossoms and they were opening for a band called Toad the Wet Sprocket. I noticed that Toad had these note cards at their merchandise counter. I asked Toad's drummer, Randy what people got when they filled out these cards. He told me they sent their fans music, stickers, and thank you notes. He said that it was one of the main reasons that Toad the Wet Sprocket was able to sell out venues across the country long before they had a hit song on the radio.

That core concept, keep track of your fans and then thank them, laid the foundation for the company I co-founded, Fanscape. The idea being that if you take care of your customer and reward them for being loyal, they will tell others and your customer-base will increase. True word of mouth.