Site Spotlight: The House of Hair
Haylie McCort of DotcomCowgirl, Austin, Texas, is the web developer and marketing consultant for the nationally syndicated radio program, The House of Hair. Hosted by former Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, the show features ‘80s heavy metal and hard rock music. Airing on over 200 FM radio stations across the US and Canada, the House of Hair is celebrating its tenth year on the air in 2007.
How did you discover KickApps?
For the House of Hair project, I was initially looking for a plug-and-play flash video player and audio player solution. I had already looked at BrightCove, VSocial and VideoEgg, all of which were limited to video only and were each missing key features I needed for the site.
I read about KickApps on TechCrunch, surfed over to the KickApps site, and the moment I read through the feature list on the home page, I knew KickApps was the perfect solution for the House of Hair. I created a simple test account and had it up and running perfectly on my server in under an hour. KickApps is an insanely great solution in the video-oriented social networking space. It is YouTube in a box with audio, photos and blogs thrown in— and all white-label customizable for free!
What were your original goals when you began using the KickApps platform?
The initial plans for the HOH site simply included the need to upload and display band videos, songs and photos for special contests and to showcase our Band of the Week. I had also wanted to push some content—like funny videos and photos, and classic heavy metal videos that directly related to the HOH radio program—but hadn't found a good way to get all the pieces integrated into the HOH brand and the site as a whole.
After I found the KickApps platform, it totally morphed the HOH site to a new level, because it enabled me to give the client the media players and upload features, but with this entire feature-rich, ready-to-use web user community. All without having to spend money developing a cross-platform front- or back-end solution, and free of concerns about technical execution, overhead or bandwidth costs.
Because KickApps' widgets made it ridiculously easy to configure and deploy, we could instead focus on the design and marketing aspects of crafting the HOH community user experience.
How would you describe your KickApps-powered community today?
We've had a fantastic response from our House of Hair fanbase. Metal music fans in general are loyal, but our HOH fans are just incredible, and the KickApps platform has given the HOH producer and staff a whole new way to interact with them.
Pam Edwards, President of House of Hair / Bernadette Productions, LLC, was also very impressed with the results thus far. Here's what she had to say:
I'm a user of the site, just like our fans, so I was thrilled with how easy it was to use, and how seamlessly it fit into our content. KickApps is a no-hassle solution for augmenting our contests, giving our listeners/viewers a voice, and making our site fun and dynamic. We really couldn't be more pleased— and hey, the price is right!
- Pam Edwards, President, House of Hair/Bernadette Productions, LLC
How are you marketing your community and attracting new members?
The House of Hair website is promoted on the radio show, which currently airs on over 200 stations in the US and in Canada. The community is a central feature of our website, so it's basically a core part of our overall marketing effort. The new site just launched in March, so we're now starting our online marketing, and hope to link up with all the classic metal bands, labels, and related industries out there on the web and do a lot of cross-media promotion.
Give us three recommendations for other affiliates who want to build a successful community.
Make it Personal
Websites may have international reach technically, but by definition they need to be and feel local, upfront and personal. It's not about the technology—the tech is simply the enabler for people to connect. So take advantage of KickApps' ease of use and variety of widget functions— not just because they're cool tech (which they are!) but because they make it easy for your brand to interact in various ways with your users/site visitors/clients/potential clients/stakeholders or however you view your niche community members.
Give the community a human personality. The fastest way to do this is to create a webmaster/webmistress or moderator personality. If you have a cartoon or avatar-type company mascot, add a human as well. That gives you double the talking points, the ability to play good cop/bad cop if needed when reviewing user-submitted content, and you can have each ‘personality’ deal with different user types (newbies, veterans, lurkers, etc.).
The House of Hair actually has three distinct personalities: Dee Snider, our celebrity host; the BuzzChic, and the House of Hair brand itself. I created the BuzzChic webmistress for the House of Hair to supplement our host, Dee Snider, who, like most celebrity hosts, is extremely busy and unable to interact on our website every day. The BuzzChic fills that gap with a female rocker counterpoint that balances and supports our sizable female audience, handles everything from website questions to merch and our email newsletter, and allows us to post media and blog entries to our community that are just more edgy and fun. Official PR comes from our HOH voice.
Curation is Key
Curation for niche social media communities is critical to their success. You need to find the right balance of media and content for your community, letting users push media they want while also pushing the exposure of new, fresh and relevant itemst hat enhance the user's experience with your brand/website community.
KickApps' content moderation tools make curating for niche markets easy. As the House of Hair is actually a PG-13 operation, knowing that KickApps prevents any nasties from appearing on the site is a key benefit to us.
Set up some internal rules about what you want to see posted on the sites. Seed your site at launch with media that represents the type of community you want to create. Get your moderator/personalities involved on this; there's a web full of content out there, more relevant items than you will ever have time to upload or blog about, so just get the best ones up there. More is NOT better. Leave that to YouTube. In niche communities, go with quality and relevance to your target audience first. For example, our HOH fans don't want to sift through 20 uploaded versions of the exact same Iron Maiden song, so we filter out the duplicate postings. Again, it is critical to have media curation by prudent moderators who know your brand, and are both knowledgeable and passionate about the community issues, topic areas and the target audience.
Nurturing and Marketing
KickApps makes the tech side of deploying your own video social networking site "set-it-and-forget-it" simple, so take advantage of that and find new ways to use the KickApps widgets to enhance your content and your community experience.
Nurturing and marketing user communities go hand in hand. It's like a blog on steroids. No one wants to log into community and have the last blog post or video upload be a month old, or even a week old. Think daily. Work with your community "regulars" and encourage the newbies and lurkers to participate by tossing in some contests and promotions. KickApps makes this easy with one of my favorite widgets, the Spotlight Widget.
Do you have any plans for your community in 2007?
I'm really looking forward to making full use of the KickApps widget syndication features.
The House of Hair producer, Pam Edwards, and I both come from deep backgrounds in marketing and commercial FM radio, and we're huge fans of contests and promotions, so expect to see us utilize KickApps in some new and different ways there also.
In the end, it's all about the users! House of Hair has an awesomely creative and active fanbase, so I plan to do more outreach via polls and BuzzChic's blog to find more ways we can make their House of Hair experience even more fun and engaging. I can't wait to see the suggestions that they come up with!
Check out the House of Hair with Dee Snider community at http://www.houseofhaironline.com