What’s with the run of exclusive community events? I know what you’re thinking – “what’s an exclusive community event?” Yeah. I just made that up. The term, not the exclusivity. Though it’s really less of a term than it is just traditional string of adjectives. This stands in contrast to the time I tried to coin the term ‘metata’ – which you longtime readers may remember and which I still think rules and is totally workable. Case in point: NBC shows Olympics time shifted to the evenings, people flip out about it and immediately take the conversation away from the games and make it about the coverage of the games. Two years ago the NYT would have written a story about how people were using twitter to bitch about the time shifted coverage – a full frontal metata: talking about how people are talking about how the networks are covering the games. Though now that twitter isn’t “omg look!” news anymore maybe metata stories are dead? Hmm. Did anyone write a story about someone tweeting about how innovative it was for DeRusha to use a webcam to host a debate about the coverage of the games? Hope not.
But to get back to my exclusive community event, here are two examples. Ha. I gotta look up how to do numbered lists in HTML, it’s been awhile. Standby.
- Nice!
- The Current Birthday Party – Was I the only one kinda shrugging my shoulders about the Current’s birthday party bash thing at First Ave? The one that sold out in 2 minutes, crashing servers and breaking ticketless hearts along the way? And how you had to hear on-air reminders like 4000 times a day about how amazing it was going to be and how tickets were impossible to get? Because why? Because after spending 5 years building a community and engaging with their listeners and pledge driving for distance and for speed all alone in their time of need they go and book their birthday party at a historically cool but unquestionably undersized rock club. Which just seemed weird. And for the record, I’m not bitter. I didn’t even try and get tickets. I’m sure it was a great time, but that’s not the point. The point is WHAT A GOLDEN opportunity it would have been to really get a bunch of that Membership and/or omg Sustaining Membership and/or just a bunch local 89.3 fans who feel like they’re part of something because they follow rss feeds and tweets and post comments on websites and send emails to DJ’s and MOST IMPORTANTLY LISTEN TO THE STATION together for a party and TOTALLY they’re part of something duh and to inflict that type of exclusivity (size constraints) on a community so carefully crafted and ACTUALLY SINCERE seems boneheaded and unfortunate and phony and sad. Learning opportunity, I guess. (Full disclosure: my mancrush on Bill DeVille grows stronger by the day. It’s like a force of nature at this point. The Sunday morning show? I mean come on.)
- The local Ignite thing over at the Bedlam. Last time it was at Solera and it was packed and rowdy and fun and communal it got a lot of buzz and people -again – start to feel like they’re a part of something and it’s getting awesome word of mouth and hey, I’ve got an idea, let’s book it at the frickin’ tiny Bedlam and watch tickets sell out instantly and then make people write poems and answer silly trivia to try and win tickets DANCE MONKEYS DANCE!!! Seriously, one of you social networking genius kids out there should take this one down as a ‘what not to do’ case study and/or explain to me why you book your big buzzworthy event in a venue that holds less than 10% of your rabid fan twitter following* Because doing that doesn’t make people feel like they’re part of something, it makes them feel like outsiders or – worse yet – duped. Or maybe it doesn’t? Like maybe it brings more credibility to the event – and the community?? – because people are getting shut out? That notion really feels old fashioned. This isn’t a Zeppelin show, right? I didn’t get up and sleep in a lawn chair on the sidewalk outside of Dayton’s to get tickets or anything. That’s a different kind of community for sure. I think this is just a fun local community event with bad planning and then a splash of insultingly bad/weird community interaction after the fact see also: dancing monkeys. See also: learning opportunity. (Also fd: didn’t try and get tickets, would have, but have conflicts.)
That’s probably enough. Mainly because I kinda forget where I was going with this. I think I had other thoughts about ‘deliberate’ and ‘virtual’ and all kinds of other stuff, and I’m sure I could go on and on over beers and tator tots if I had to. And not just because beers and tator tots go with everything even though they totally do. Book it.