Engaging people on social media can be the easiest or the hardest thing in the world. In my opinion, it’s more entertaining to watch companies attempt engagement with their customers and having it backfire in their faces (JPMorgan Twitter scandal, anyone?) But to truly understand what good social media engagement is, it’s important to look at companies and organizations who are having those good and enriching conversations with their customers via social media. I will be focusing on the podcast: Welcome to Night Vale and the YouTuber: John Green. Both have managed to stand out by having incredible social media presence and engaging with their fans.
(Left: Welcome to Night Vale Podcast photo. Right: a darling picture of John Green)
Let’s start with Welcome to Night Vale. This podcast first aired on iTunes on June 15, 2012 and will release it’s 45th episode on April 15 of this year. The podcast centers on the fictional town of Night Vale and the strange and mysterious things that happen to the town and its residents. The podcast is presented as a radio show, hosted by the amusing and adorable, Cecil Baldwin. I am not one to listen to podcasts, but someone on Tumblr mentioned it was good, so I decided to give it a try. Now from my limited knowledge of podcasts, most of them aren’t super engaged with their listeners outside of the podcast or a website. WTNV is extremely invested in its listeners and will do anything to get them involved or donate money to help keep the show continue.
There are incentives for donating such as getting your name read at the end of the podcast or, if you donate enough, getting a personalized thank you message from Cecil himself. For those that want to donate money and also get something tangible in return, there is WTNV merchandise. Some of it is created by the WTNV staff, but others are created from the fans themselves. They run a t-shirt contest every few months and the WTNV community gets to vote on their favorite shirts. The winners are then put up for sale on the WTNV website for a limited time. Sometimes if a t-shirt is particularly popular (like the one I want desperately), they might re-release it for a short amount of time.
If people want to contribute their ideas instead of their money, WTNV allows its listeners to submit ideas and writings for future episodes or audio submissions for a segment called, “The Weather”. If a listener’s suggestion is used, they will often be thanked at the end of the podcast, saying what they contributed to the show. Lastly, they decided to go on tour and give fans the opportunity to meet and greet with everyone who works on the show, including taping a live show in front of each audience. They just released their live show from their last tours, Condos, on bandcamp. You can purchase it or download it for free (it’s a donation, not a required payment). I wanted to donate, so I paid for the download and it was a great investment. The whole podcast was full of plotlines that fans had wanted to happen for a while and the writers actually listened to them. It made the experience that much more interesting for a fan, like myself
All of their communication is done through their website, Twitter, Facebook, and the podcast itself, of course. They are known to release traditional quotes with a slight tweak to make them weird and strange. WTNV fans love them and its a majority of what they post on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the way to get involved within the community. If fans ever have questions, they can ask on Twitter and will receive a vague and weird response, which is exactly what they want, since that is the nature of the show.
Now this blog post is quickly becoming a very long ramble, so I will talk through John Green quickly.
In case you forgot, the man below is John Green.
John Green is an American author and YouTuber vlogger (one who does video blogs). He has written several young adult books like The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. He also runs a vlog on YouTube that often is centered around educational themes. He is known as one of the “Vlog Brothers”; his brother, Hank Green, is also a vlogger and they make videos “to each other” about a wide variety of topics. They will often appear in videos together, like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQi79aYfxU
Anyways, John Green is all over social media, constantly communicating and talking to his viewers and fans. He’ll often has them what he should make his videos about:
He constantly keeps his fans updated with his books, videos, and upcoming movies, as of late. His book, The Fault in Our Stars, was made into a movie and is being released later this year. John Green started his own blog about it and constantly talks about…you can’t get him to shut about it. Through his interactions with the fans of the book, the movie, or both, he’s increasing the chances of more people going out to see the movie.
He also does this awesome project called Project Awesome where he has his viewers submit videos about charities that they are involved in. Throughout the process, people vote for their favorite videos and the audience donates money to the different organizations involved. In 2013, almost $870,000 was raised through this program.
To end this long post, both groups do a good job of engaging their fans in conversations that help continue loyalty and often times lead to some kind of financial support. And they do it all using social media. #getit #awesomeposseum
#postgraduatelyfe 