3 important things Taylor Swift can teach your startup about building a community

Remember that time eight seconds of silence became Taylor Swift’s top song, hitting the top of the iTunes charts? That happened because Swift has a great community of passionate users, says Kristine Lauria, country manager for Singapore at Upwork (the new name for Elance-oDesk).

Swift’s community is no accident. Lauria posits that Swift uses some “genius” tactics to engage with and encourage her fans – and startups and businesses of all sizes should learn how to do this.

Before condensing those points into three vital lessons, Lauria (pictured below) gives a bit of context. Speaking yesterday at our Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 conference on the theme of community building, she says that a fanbase is about shared passions and interests – whether you’re Taylor Swift or a startup looking to raise your profile in an affordable and viral way.

Learning to do this is important because of the old biz adage that 80 percent of the value of a company comes from 20 percent of users. Except that the internet has changed the dynamics and shifted the ratio even further. These days, Lauria explains, a startup will likely find that one-tenth of one percent of users will generate 95 percent of revenue – as is the case with eBay. “So you better make sure those people love you,” Lauria says, because those power users, the ones at the top of the pyramid, are driving revenue. “Understand where there’s friction, what they want to see in your product.”

All of this is best exemplified by the way Taylor Swift makes friends with her Swifties on the social networks they use most, like Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram. It gets even better when you see how Swift surprised and delighted her most passionate supporters by sending them hand-picked gifts last Christmas – gifts that she requested they open whilst recording their reactions. Swift also included a hand-written note for each recipient.

Now that we’ve seen how the maestro does it, here are Lauria’s three lessons a startup can learn from Taylor Swift about building a community of loyal users:

Lesson 1

Know the user. This is, of course, the first step towards engagement. It’s at this stage that you can learn precisely who your users are, what they need, what they’d like to change, and what issues they experience with your product.

Leverage existing communities. This is how you can evolve your product into something that’s so good that it’ll attract power users who might become fans. “When people understand the rules of your product,” Lauria explains, it’s the start of a community.

In case you’re not convinced yet, remember that communities become even more important as the “collaborative economy” reshapes the internet and web services – especially ones like Uber, Upwork, etc – become things on which people depend to make a living.