What A Rapper Can Teach You About ‘Joining The Conversation’

I’ve read dozens of posts in the past few months discussing how companies and brands can build loyalty by “joining the conversation.” Raise your hand if you’ve heard this analogy before: “You don’t want to be the guy at the party who shows up and just starts talking about how great you are.”

Do you know why you’ve heard that analogy before? Because it’s true and extremely accurate. The problem is that it’s easier said than done. Or so it seems.

Add-2 is a rapper from Chicago. It’s possible you’ve never heard of him. I hadn’t either 8 months ago. But, due to a Twitter conversation I had with a different rapper, Add-2 (@ADD2theMC) apparently thought I was someone worth following and I decided to follow him back.

Now (sadly), I have a MySpace account. I’ve received the dozens of “HEy cheCk oUt my **NEW Album** over at myspace.com/GenERicRapperNAMe” messages you get when you’re “MySpace friends” with actually-talented musicians. But Add didn’t do that. He just listened (or read, I guess) and then he responded – with a REAL personality – to some my tweets. So I checked him out and clicked the link to his MySpace page in his Twitter bio.

Needless to say, I was impressed. Very impressed. Impressed enough to download his (free) mixtape, “A Tale of Two’s City: Volume 2.” And then I was more impressed after I listened to that. So I told other people to download his music (which he, smartly, shares for free…but that’s a whole different post to come in the future).

I’ve communicated with Add-2 pretty frequently online, but here’s the important thing: if he’d jumped into my Twitter stream with “DOWNLOAD MY MIXTAPE” tweets, I’d have unfollowed him after the 2nd 1st one of them. Instead, he cultivated an online conversation and let me discover his talent for myself.

Needless to say, I’ll be buying his first album whenever he does get signed by a record label (which is an opportunity I firmly believe he’ll have someday). I’ll pay the $9.99 or $12.99 or whatever it is when it comes out. And I’ll tell all my friends to do it too. All because Add-2 joined the conversation and developed a relationship that led to me becoming an evangelist for his music.

In the marketing/PR/social media world, we call that *BUZZWORD ALERT* brand loyalty. And brand loyalty is what takes your product or service (or your client’s product or service) from commodity to necessity in someone’s life. Don’t waste an opportunity to build that base of evangelists by trying to force your message into people’s heads. That won’t work. Let it develop naturally.

Add-2 never asked me to support him. And here I am, on my (work) blog, using him as an example of the proverbial “build a relationship” mantra that we espouse in social media. If you do things right, your product (or your client’s product) could build a loyal base of supporters in the exact same way.

And then you and your clients win.

How about you? Have you experienced a similar process with a company’s product or service? Do you think Add-2 could’ve done something differently as a musical artist in order to engage new fans or do you think he went about it the right way? Share your comments below or tell us your thoughts over on our Facebook fan page.

Oh, and I’ll go ahead and embed one of the many displays of Add’s talent here while I’m at it…