Let’s say you are the Marketing Director for…..Nettwerk (just for example). The president of the company has put you in charge of promoting a pair of concerts for a new, but promising recording artist that Nettwerk signed last year. The artist so far has no hit singles, but their debut CD is receiving good reviews, and the president of Nettwerk wants to galvanize support for the artist at the grassroots level.
To that end, your task is to find a way to promote the concerts via the internet only, to a very small, but very dedicated group of fans. In fact, the president has told you that he wants these 2 concerts to be the spark that launches the artists’ career. Better yet, he wants the buzz for these concerts to be so big that these fans will willingly travel across the country, and even come from Canada to see the artist perform.
It’s the end of February, and the concerts will be in July. How would you use the internet to reach these fans, and build buzz for these concerts? Create a MySpace profile and blog about the concert there? Maybe send 500 CDs to 500 bloggers if they will blog about the concerts? You start brainstorming when you get an email from the president saying that the first concert will be FREE! Hell this will be a piece of cake!
Then that afternoon the president stops by and tells you that he left out a few details of how he wants to promote the concerts. You can’t use MySpace. You can’t use blogs, you can’t create a website for the concerts, no scratch that, you can’t use any websites at all. You can only use consumer-generated media, and you ALSO have to convince the concert attendees to handle almost all of the arrangements for the concerts themselves.
Impossible you say? Guess again, because it happened. And it didn’t happen in 2006, it happened in 1996. That’s right, it happened back in 1996, when an artist used the internet, thought by many at the time to be a passing fad, to promote themselves and convince their fans to arrange for a pair of concerts that many attendees referred to as a ‘life-changing experience’.
Who was the artist? Well I’m not going to give that away till a link at the end of this post. That link will send you to the first-hand account of what happened from one of the concert-organizers. He tells the simply amazing story of how one artist used a relatively new medium, the internet, to reach their fans, and also the incredible story of the lengths these fans went to organize these concerts, to share two magical evenings with an artist they loved.(As an aside, these two concerts totalled a staggering 7+ hours, featuring *64* songs with FIVE encores!)
This artist used ‘viral marketing’ to reach ‘customer evangelists’ before either term had been coined. If they could do this in 1996 when the internet was just taking baby steps, then artists in 2006 have no excuse.
And yes Jewel, that includes you. Here is the simply amazing account of how these
concerts were organized, and executed.
As a matter of fact I’m listening to Johnny Cash’s 1969 concert in the San Quentin prison as I type this 
