Factory Interactive. Now.
March 3, 2010
What does Trent Reznor have to do with Factory Interactive? Well, a lot. And he has a lot to do with it for the simple reason that his approach to fan engagement and communication on the Internet changed my thinking about web’s potential more than anyone else since I’ve been a web developer.
This is about how Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails, has influenced what I want Factory Interactive to be as a company—the agency people use to give them the tools engage people on the Internet.
Engaging people on the web is one of the hardest things to do well, especially for sustained periods of time. But I believe Trent Reznor does this better than anyone. It likely has a great deal to do with the fact that he legitimately cares both about what he does and about his fans. And I believe that because everything thing he does to engage people seems both well-thought out and spontaneous at the same time. The execution hasn’t been perfect, but that’s what guarantees the authenticity of it.
I’ve been in the web business for a long time—more than 10 years—and on occasion, I think I understand how things work when it comes to communicating in the medium. On occasion. But this is where Trent Reznor has helped me understand that on occasion is enough to learn some extremely valuable things.
Engagement, Reznor style
I’ve been a fan of Nine Inch Nails for nearly 20 years. I’ve seen them play five or six times, enough to have been satisfied if I hadn’t had the chance to see them again.
But in 2008, Trent Reznor released a full length album called The Slip. He gave it away on the internet as a free download. I liked it so much that I bought the limited release CD anyway. I started poking around the internet a bit after that, fueled by the fact that he’d just given me something incredibly good, for free, just for being a fan. I was looking to see if he was touring in support of the new album. There were two dates near me that summer, one two hours north at a huge outdoor festival in Pemberton, British Columbia, and one a few days later in Seattle, but none in Vancouver.
Now while it didn’t seem to matter to me because I’d seen them many times before, I kept poking. What I’d found out was that in the last 3 or 4 years a lot of intriguing stuff had been planted on the web by Reznor: virtual detective games, a community for his fans and a rich collection of artwork and music that had always only been available in hard copy.
There was also stuff like this:
At the same time that NIN released The Slip, they also released four very well produced ‘rehearsal’ videos of themselves performing songs off the album. All of these shipped on a DVD with the CD too, by the way, but the moment after I discovered these, after wishing more than anything that I’d there for the shoot, I found myself ordering NIN tickets at three times their face value for the Seattle show.
I’d been seduced. I went to that gig. I bought merchandise. I was a NIN fan reborn. And it was all because Trent Reznor had engaged me in exactly the way that I wanted to be engaged. He rewarded me simply for being interested and he asked for nothing in return. It was authentic.
I followed his Lights in the Sky Tour on Flickr, on the NIN.com site, and on Twitter. And when the tour passed by at a range close enough that I could justify another intercity journey, I went again. My wife stopped me from getting on a plane to fly to a third show.
That occasional understanding
What I know about this is that Trent Reznor’s strategy to create a presence on the internet elicited exactly the result he was hoping for. He did it with great content deftly placed.
Trent Reznor played to sold out shows for more than a year an half, long after most critics had written him off as no longer relevant. He even allowed his fans to photograph and records his concerts with video cameras, the footage of which was gathered to produce a fan-created high definition film of the tour. He allowed people to download it free and produced limited edition DVDs he sold through his site. PC World magazine called NIN ‘the first open source band’. Reznor was including them in his work, engaging them at meaningful levels.
Reznor made exceptional use of the web’s existing channels to create an incredibly strong pull back to a definitive source of all things NIN at NIN.com. Part of it was carefully calculated, part of it the byproduct of just being out there to connect with his fans with no real plan other than that, to connect. The result has been the precipitation of one of the most recognizable brands in the music industry in the last 20 years. He even won the Webby Awards Artist of the Year.
And every kind of business can learn extremely valuable lessons from his work. In a future entry, I’ll deconstruct his work so that organizations keen to engage fans and supporters can forge a plan to emulate his success. Achieving that kind of success isn’t easy, but seeing it deconstructed might give a better understanding of how it might be achieved.
I was influenced enough by Reznor’s strategy that I took steps to focus my business exclusively on the music industry. I wanted to help artists and labels do what Reznor had done. What we found out after a year of relentless focus on the music industry is that there’s no significant money being devoted to web efforts, so we had to re-chart our course. Again. But the lessons we learned in the process about using the web in ways that build true fans and devoted members of solid, active communities are priceless in building any kind of faithful brand following.
For Factory Interactive it all means a renewed focus on internet development that is as much about engagement and content strategy as it is about the technology used to execute it. We used to be happy to build websites for people that simply gave them the ability to publish their own content, now we know it has to be much deeper than that. Just ask Trent Reznor.
Comments [0]
Leave a comment