If you want to ace social, embrace your inner Deadhead
Anyone looking to scale their personal brand should abide by the "Deadhead Marketing" playbook.
Elon Musk, now the single-biggest shareholder of Twitter, got everyone riled up the other day when he posed this question:
Let’s not kid ourselves. Even Elon wouldn’t spend nearly $3 billion on something if he truly thought it was dying.
But he makes an interesting point that alludes to one of the biggest axioms about social media influence.
Follower count is big currency in the world of Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. But in a country where 25 percent of Twitter users comprise 97 percent of tweets, it’s not everything.
This isn’t linear. It’s not like if you have X amount of followers you’ll drive X amount of subscriptions to your newsletter, or X amount of registrations to your webinar. What really matters is not so much your follower count alone, but how much of that follower count is dialed-in to what you’re doing, on top of how much thought leadership you’re providing on social.
Here’s an example from my own employer, Hudl, that I like to tell people about.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we put together dozens of coaching webinars hosted by names big and small. One of those big names — let’s just say, if I told you, you’d agree he’s a USMNT legend — did an hour-long live AMA with us. He also has a Twitter following in the six figures.
The problem: He rarely tweets, and didn’t do any pre-event promotion on his social channels to drive interest. The result? We had 18 live viewers — and half of them were Hudl employees.
Conversely, when we collaborate with high school football coaching influencers who only have Twitter followings in the 10-20,000 range, they will drive insane traffic to our webinars, our blogs, our events, pretty much whatever they encourage their followers to check out. When we have them speak at our annual Blitz event, they’re routinely among the top 5-10 most requested speakers. In some cases, they’ll have more live viewers for their presentations than some of the most well-known coaches in college football.
(Am I suggesting Taylor Swift wouldn’t drive galactic registration numbers for your company’s webinar? Of course not. But that’s not the point of this column. Pay attention here…)
Such is the essence of one of my favorite tactics in marketing — “Deadhead Marketing”, or creating growth through intentional friction with your most dedicated fans.
There’s a couple great books out there about this. One is from Brian Halligan, the HubSpot founder and inbounding marketing pioneer, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History. Another, from Barry Barnes, Everything I Know about Business I Learned from the Grateful Dead, is just as good.
But the best explanation I’ve found for how “Deadhead Marketing” works comes from Seth Godin in his book This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See:
The Dead are an almost perfect example of the power of marketing for the smallest viable market. It’s worth a few minutes to deconstruct what they did and how they did it, because it will inform the long, strange trip we’re on here.
Although it’s become a familiar example, musicians, publishers, gym owners, consultants, chefs, and teachers seem to forget the core lesson in the Dead’s failure to race for a hit.
First, few kids grow up wanting to start a band like the Grateful Dead. The Dead had a grand total of one top 40 Billboard hit. One.
They’re easily dismissed as some sort of quirky hippie band. They have fans, true fans, fans who are also easily dismissed as quirky hippies.
And yet…
And yet the Dead grossed more than $350 million in revenue while Jerry Garcia was alive, and another $100 million since his death. I’m not even counting record sales, just concert tickets. Most of that run was accomplished when ticket prices averaged just twenty-three dollars.
How? Because the true fans showed up. Because the true fans spread the word. And because the true fans never satisfied their need to be connected.
Here are the key elements of the Dead’s marketing success:
They appealed to a relatively tiny audience and focused all their energy on them.
They didn’t use radio to spread their ideas to the masses. Instead, they relied on fans to share the word, hand to hand, by encouraging them to tape their shows.
Instead of hoping to encourage a large number of people to support them a little, they relied on a small number of true fans who supported them a lot.
They picked the extremes on the XY axis (live concerts vs. polished records, long jams for the fan family vs. short hits for the radio) and owned them both.
They gave the fans plenty to talk about and stand for. Insiders and outsiders.
They needed three things to pull this off:
Extraordinary talent. You can’t fake your way through 146 concerts in a year.
Significant patience. In 1972, considered by some to be a peak year for the band, only five thousand people came to a typical show. It took more than a decade before the Dead became an ‘overnight’ success.
The guts to be quirky. It couldn’t have been easy to watch the Zombies, the Doors, and even the Turtles sell far more records than they did. For a while, anyway.
In 1972, being obstinate, generous, and lucky was an accident that led to their surprising success. Today, though, in most industries (including the music business) this sort of success is not an accident. It’s the best path to success, and in many ways, the most rewarding as well.
Look, I don’t like the Grateful Dead all that much. More of a Nirvana guy. But if you’re a startup media brand trying to grow, trust me when I tell you this is your playbook.
Don’t believe me? Here’s how we did it building the high school page from scratch at ESPNBoston:
We rallied around the hardcores — Social media was just starting to get its footing when we launched. So we made sure every one of our blogs, and especially those rankings, made its way to the messageboards. And boy did people get teed off about those rankings. We were the only media operation doing true statewide rankings, and everyone within 30 miles of Boston generally thinks the world revolves around them, so just imagine what happened the first time a team from Springfield came in ahead of Brockton. We also crushed it on Twitter at a time when some competitors were just getting their bearings, and we never shied from a good debate from the fans. Nobody’s perfect, so you should always be comfortable answering the bell. Even when Galvo508 and BammaSlamma are calling for your head. Matter of fact, you should be friends with them, because deep down they mean well.
We rallied around the towns and fans — Kyler Murray had 28 teammates sign with Division 1 programs his senior year at a Texas high school blueblood. In Massachusetts we’re lucky to get a dozen players from the entire state to sign with an FBS school in a given year. But what we have that Texas doesn’t? Fierce town-border-to-town-border tribalism. Everyone’s really proud of where they’re from around here. For instance, I live in Framingham. Which hates Natick. Which hates Walpole. Which hates Foxboro. Which hates Mansfield. Which hates Franklin. And so forth. Granted, we treated those dozen studs like rock stars, and covered their recruiting like it was an SEC arms race. But in an era of high school coverage that seems to skew heavily towards recruiting, we mostly went the opposite way and made the communities — and more importantly the fans in the student section — feel like this was as much their site as it was ours.
We were boots on the ground everywhere — Nothing beats face-to-face interaction. In fact, it’s probably more valuable in the post-COVID world. I bought a brand new car with no miles on it three months into the job, in the summer of 2010. By the time our operation ended in the fall of 2016, I had put in over 175,000 miles. And the Mass Pike ain’t exactly the Alaska Highway.
When I agreed to become co-editor of the high school page with my partner-in-crime Scott Barboza, my title was “editor/writer”. After a couple of weeks that expanded to writer, editor, photographer, videographer, guerrilla marketer, street team, sponsorships and partnerships, and half-dozen other disciplines I was learning on the fly. And yet, with our army of two full-timers and a small but dedicated stable of freelancers, we averaged more daily site traffic than everything else on ESPNBoston besides Patriots and Red Sox coverage.
And by the way, that’s with the Celtics and Bruins making deep runs to the finals.
Perhaps most revealing was that when ESPN revamped all of its digital pages in 2015 to become more mobile-friendly, our detailed little landing page and its carousel, news stack and litany of rankings and social feed modules went away. The page just become one infinitely-scrolling blog. And yet, our daily site traffic increased by the thousands. Fans became so accustomed to seeing us on Twitter that they no longer visited our page natively — they simply waited for us to tweet the latest article, and click through.1
It takes a lot of guts to blaze a new trail and commit to the unknown.
That’s part of what made the Grateful Dead who they are.
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb to find the Deadheads that will vault your brand. Because at the end of the day, it’s that community that creates your commerce.
In hindsight, perhaps this was a canary in the coal mine. Because unless you’re Barstool Sports, readers today just aren’t going to visit your page natively like they did 10 years ago.