Musicians & Marketers: Identify Your Hidden Army Of Angels With guestHub
guestHub is a new service that identifies the hidden influencers that spread the word about your events or products and whose influence leads to actual sales. If you check out their site, it's easy to be put off by the corporate marketing speak but guestHub is potentially a powerful tool for anyone with music events or products to promote. They're partnered with Eventbrite so if that's your ticketing platform of choice they should be especially useful.
But even if you're not using Eventbrite, guestHub is the kind of tool with which you should become familiar. It's easy to identify noisy people with lots of Twitter followers but they aren't always as influential as one assumes. As guestHub states in their intro video below, low profile influencers can become an "army of angels" working on your behalf if you identify and reward them for your efforts.
How guestHub Works
To some degree guestHub is simply an influence and conversion tracking tool that uses custom links to track sharing and identify those whose sharing leads to conversions i.e. sales or other actions such as downloading promotional tracks.
Their starter plan is affordable at $9 a month but, beyond that, their pricing indicates that they're a better fit for indie labels, music marketers and people who regularly promote events than for smaller individual acts.
As their discussion of their partnership with Eventbrite and best practices for Eventbrite campaigns reveal, guestHub can create unique links for both individual invitations and for specific marketing channels such as Twitter or Facebook. When people click on channel links an individual link is generated for tracking purposes.
That means you could quickly exceed the 200 link $9 a month account and then start getting billed at 7 cents an individual link. Currently they're running a special deal for the $49 a month accounts with unlimited links but that's just till the end of the month and doesn't give you time to test the service. That said, for local shows with a relatively limited audience, guestHub could be an affordable way to identify local influencers for a smaller act.
Beyond identifying "conversion-based influencers" and providing analytics to judge the success of particular campaigns, guestHub helps with organizing rewards programs.
To identify individual, they have to sign up for guestHub so it's not like you're taking Eventbrite data and tracking people down which would not be a good look. You can see how the sharing and signup bar looks on an Eventbrite page. Click on "start the goodness" to see how that works.
guestHub is likely more useful for music marketers, businesses and larger acts than for individuals or still emerging bands. But the concept of recognizing those who don't just make noise but whose support leads to action when they spread the word is powerful.
While using a service like guestHub makes it easy to track, there are other ways to get at this information especially if you're operating in the context of a local scene. For example, if you can have someone at the door or at your merch table asking attendees how they found out about the show, you could well end up identifying the most useful channels and even individuals that are spreading the word.
That may sound complicated but such personal contact can lead to information that could be disproportionately valuable as you develop your previously hidden "army of angels."
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) blogs about music crowdfunding at Crowdfunding For Musicians (@CrowdfundingM). To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
I won’t use it, our fan-base is not that huge that we would lost track of who is doing what, but the concept certainly worth some reflection.
I notice it everyday, that most interesting connections/sales are made threw people that don’t have any blog, or site or even a twitter account. They aren’t necessarily very active on facebook, but when they share something from you, they’ll do it with a personal message, talking directly to their own friends, explaining why they like it, why they’re sharing it. And any time we got some “Angels” like that talking about us, we got immediately more fans, more visits, more contacts.
But, although I identified them, I realise that I may not have rewarded them the way I should. Thanks, this really points it out.
I think this concept could extend to media as well. Up and coming bands often spend a lot of time trying to catch the attention of big sites when they’d actually get a better response from smaller sites. There would also be less noise to block their signal.
The biggest challenge might be maintaining those relationships as you get bigger. For example, I’ve noticed that some music tech startups that were really appreciative of coverage at Hypebot seemed to forget about us when they were able to start getting the attention of bigger blogs like TechCrunch.
When you realize you’ve been bypassed, you start to lose interest in providing future coverage or support. So maintaining those early ties is also something to think about whether it’s with fans or the media.