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Why is a Rockstar Better at Social Media Than Agencies?

Lately Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has been making a great effort at changing (thwarting?) the traditional model of making money as a musician.

In the last few months he’s produced 2 albums worth of content, fired his record label and used his popular website to sew it all together.

The interesting part isn’t the website itself, but how he’s managed to pull together a lot of very popular social networking sites and concepts into the site to spread his music and tour dates around the net.

Reznor does have one thing going for him: His audience is by-and-large technically savvy so this single type of medium would have good results for him. But regardless, there’s a few things we can learn from Trent at the agency level.

• Social media isn’t about you publishing content, it’s about you releasing compelling enough content for your audience to circulate

With “Lights in the Sky Over North America” there were standard ad banners for use on fansites (as well as some backgrounds and even chat avatars) included alongside 4 MP3s. Like most things that come out of Reznor and his team these banners & wallpapers were stylish pieces that most NIN fans would happily use.

• The promoted content is small, focused and clear

The entire purpose behind the promotion was very simple: Make people aware of tour dates. All the media is based around this. There’s a site setup with the core information about the tour dates and the shareable packages.

• External social sites are already in place driving to the main informational site/system

In addition to the microsite there are also sites set up at YouTube and iLike driving back to the main NIN site. By promoting on all of these sites Reznor has increased his frequency and likelihood of being found. This is a well thoughtout network with a good microsite strategy in place.

Overall the concepts promoting the “Light in the Sky over North America” are a good model that has many applications in agency level marketing. While the concepts are certainly not new, they are elegantly executed meshed overtop a long running marketing strategy. The fanboy in me wonders if Reznor knows he’s been campaigning for the last 2 years.

Tagged with marketing, social media.