By Michale Boss
The Daily Record Newswire
Aug. 9, 2010, marked the 15th anniversary of the passing of a great social media pioneer. I’m speaking, of course, of Jerry Garcia, the founder of one of America’s most iconic rock bands, the Grateful Dead.
If it seems strange to credit Garcia with anything more than the “long strange trip” that was The Dead, consider the number of business books that have been based on equally implausible sources, including the characters from Winnie the Pooh, a long-dead Chinese general, and a misplaced hunk of cheese.
Debate if you will the genesis of social media, which many might argue as coincident with the creation of MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter. But for my money, I’ll wager that it was born in 1971 - the year the Grateful Dead’s self-titled live album, known affectionately by “Dead Heads” (including yours truly) as “Skull (F-word)”, issued the following proclamation in the album liner notes: “Dead Freaks Unite. Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us you name and address and we’ll keep you informed.”
This exhortation might have seemed like just another fan club invitation, but for Jerry and the boys it was the beginning of perhaps the longest-running social media community in the entertainment industry — a community that evolved along with the personal computer and the Internet to include the Whole Earth “Lectronic Link (The WELL), described by Wikipedia as “one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous existence.”
More important than its early embrace of technology to build a community around its brand, the Grateful Dead understood that their community was not just a collection of consumers of its brand — it was, in fact, a critical element of the brand itself. Remove that community and you still had the music and the requisite iconography that powered a merchandising machine, but without the vitality with which the Dead Heads imbued it. Absent the music, it would have been mere marketing contrivance. Jerry Garcia understood this, and that understanding offers a number of useful lessons to contemporary social media marketers.
Lesson One: Authenticity is Bestowed, Not Created
In a world where consumers are used to being manipulated through carefully crafted media messages, people respond powerfully to authenticity; and when they perceive a sense of passion and honesty behind a brand’s vision, that brand is perceived as authentic. For most of his career and that of his band mates, no one could accuse Jerry Garcia as “being in it for the money.” The Dead took it as a sacred trust with their community to never “sell out” — to put financial gain ahead of artistic impulse. Of course, they were also lousy businessmen for a good part of their career, as Garcia impishly conceded on a number of interview occasions.
Lesson Two: Trust Your Community
The Grateful Dead did something unheard of as performing artists. While every other band outlawed the taping of their shows, the Grateful Dead actually created special places in their concert venues where “the tapers” could set up their equipment, record the shows, and then trade those recordings through unfettered networks (such as The WELL) without fear of copyright infringement. Industry “suits” thought The Dead were crazy for allowing this. After all, if they could get the content for free, why would anyone pay for it when it came out on an album? Garcia’s answer clearly demonstrated that he not only understood his community, but also trusted it implicitly. “The people that tape our shows are the fans that are so devoted that they’ll buy every album we put out, regardless of how many times they’ve heard the songs live.” Garcia understood that from his community’s point of view, there was a clear distinction between the Grateful Dead as studio artists and live performers - and the true believers wanted both experiences.
Lesson Three: You Can Own Your Brand, But Not the Experience of It
This gets us into some Zen-like territory, but when your community is an integral part of your brand experience, you have to let go of how it is experienced. Or, as Jerry Garcia used to say to the Dead Head community, “We put the music out there — what happens after that is your trip.” There are any number of recent brands that briefly enjoyed the serendipitous success of having a group of consumers adopt them for their own particular reasons, only to fizzle when the companies that owned them made the mistake of thinking that they, and not their customers, were responsible for the brand experience. Jerry understood that the Grateful Dead community, not the Grateful Dead, ultimately decided just what the Grateful Dead brand signified, regardless of how he perceived his band’s artistic mission. As a consequence, The Dead never tried to exercise control of their brand beyond basic copyright protections. They respected the fact that the brand experience was the sole domain of their community.
Lesson 4: Provide a Venue, then Get Out of the Way
This lesson is a corollary of the previous one, but it is important to point out that whether a Grateful Dead venue was a concert hall or a chat room, people showed up just as much to engage one another as to seek engagement with the band. This was obvious to anyone who ever attended a Grateful Dead show, where the extent of the band’s interaction with the audience might be, “We’re gonna take a short break, so hang loose”, or “Thanks, and we’ll see you again soon.” One notable exception was at an outdoor show in Monterey, Calif., where the Grateful Dead front office set up a booth to pass out flyers to the audience letting them know that if reports of property damage following recent shows continued, The Dead would be forced to reconsider future gigs. “We’re responsible for the music, you’re responsible for your trip.” That was all the Grateful Dead community needed to hear to more diligently police itself. The Dead respected their community, but they didn’t mollycoddle them - and their community respected the trust that implied.
In creating one of the earliest social media communities, Jerry Garcia and his bandmates also created a marketing and merchandising juggernaut that continues long after the last dulcet notes faded from Jerry’s guitar. But in nurturing the community they created, the Grateful Dead never lost sight that its vitality depended on the same epiphany that guided their music: the realization that the organic will always outlast the contrived, and that a song from the heart will always speak to the heart. I miss you, Jerry. Thanks for the inspiration.
