Telling stories about concert fans has taught me a lot about how live music changes our lives forever.
And my curiosity about live music communities has led me on a journey to explore many other types of emerging communities.
For starters, in our brand explorations, I’ve applied what we’ve learned about concert fan communities to help grow, nurture and engage several internal and external social communities for companies and big brands.
And because of everything I’ve learned during our psychological, sociological and emotional explorations, I’ve decided that it’s time to stir the pot, mix in a couple more ingredients and cook up a new meal to sink our teeth into.
How Do You Merge Live Music, Community Management and Social Business?
I believe concert fan communities and employee communities are related. And there’s a lot to learn by merging ideas about the two communities. Which is why I want to start exploring the questions below to see what kind of answers we can come up with.
How do you begin to write about the crossover between communities for concert fans AND internal employee communities for big brands? And are the two even related? And if they are related, how do you apply what you learn in one community to develop another?
How We Got Here, Where We’re Headed
Like I said, this is a new path for Live Fix, so I thought it would make sense to tell you a quick story first to explain how we got here and why we’re going to talk about community management and social business more on Live Fix.
One of the things that has made Live Fix such a blast from the beginning is that I didn’t have the answers. I only had a growing curiosity to know more about what made concert fan communities and our live music experiences so addictive, unique, memorable and life-changing.
Back when I first started Live Fix no one else was writing about this kind of stuff so there were no rules.
And if you ask most bloggers they will tell you that one of the best things about blogs, and social media in general, is that if you have topic that you want to read about but there’s no one writing about it, you can go blaze the trail yourself. It’s very easy to set up shop yourself and go create the content you want to read.
So that’s what I did.
I took that seed of curiosity, planted it and watered it. I was guided by the simple notion that each post I wrote was an experiment. I began to write about what I saw, felt and discovered at live shows.
And after writing each post the road map become more clear.
I began to see where our explorations needed to go.
As I wrote each post I realized more and more how important it was to understand why bands, fans and brands are addicted to live music. And the result were successful experiments like:
- and these these all-time Reader Favorites
And five years later, by doing lots of testing and experimentation, Live Fix is now a growing community of live music fans that I hoped it would be.
How One Inspires The Other
Up until this post I haven’t really talked about my non-Live Fix world, but now I’ll be sharing with you what I’ve learned and will continue to discover as a community manager leading internal employee communities at Walgreens. Why share this stuff with you?
Well, it’s simple.
I have always seen Live Fix as a dynamic laboratory to test new ideas, meet amazing people and learn many new things about how online and off-line communities engage and evolve. And all those things I discover in the Live Fix laboratory continue to be a source of inspiration for the employee communities at Walgreens.
I’ll wrap up by saying this.
It’s obvious that what I learned about live music communities, what goes on in internal employee communities at Walgreens and the future of social business are all linked together. And I’m excited to see what happens when we start collaborating and swapping ideas about all three topics.
So to all you loyal Live Fix readers, I thank you for faithfully following along all these years and I hope you enjoy this new thread of discussion and experimentation. And if you’re new to the Live Fix community, I welcome you and hope that you join in and share your live music stories and community management insights too.
What’s Coming Down The Pipeline?
As this new exploration gets rolling you can expect posts about social business, intranets, community management trends and links to my favorite community manager blogs. Again, some posts might be just about those topics and some might mix in my live music experiences. Either way, it’ll be fun to see where the journey takes us.
What do you think about our new exploration? What similarities do you see between concert fan communities and social business communities? What would you like to see us explore about this topic?
Thanks again for following along and let’s continue the conversation in the comments below, on Twitter @livefixmedia, on Facebook or call the concert fan hotline at 773-609-4341, and we’ll include them in a future episode of Live Fix Radio.