Lessons To Learn From Digg

Kevin Rose is on the cover of this month’s INC. magazine, discussing the phenomena of Digg (aka the anti-Google) and why he is a poster child for the new kind of media mogul. Besides making me wonder whether or not killing Rose will let me become him (a la Tom Waits), the article described four easy steps to becoming an Internet mogul:

1)    Get a platform

2)    Own a platform

3)    Leverage the masses

4)    Stay independent

There is a lot to be gleaned here for those of us who are looking to build the next great American b(r)and.

The first step, or get a platform:

Rose started out as a host on Tech TV, where he honed his image as a nerd who had managed to find a life outside of his basement. Simply put, he found his idiosyncratic niche and made it palatable for a larger audience. It used to be that being a tech geek was for those who existed in some untouchable stratosphere or for those who couldn’t get dates. Rose and others like him have altered that perception. Bands can employ the same trick, focusing on what makes them different and turning that into the focus of what makes them appealing.

Step two, own a platform:

Rose took a leap and started something that he could own in its entirety, investing everything he had into the project at the startup. Digg now commands 30 million unique hits a month, and there is one fact about those 30 million uniques that bears repeating: almost all of them are 20 to 30 something males, just like Rose himself. The lesson here, for bands anyway, is to focus on your core audience and stick with what you know. If your true believers like songs that run into sixteen-minute jams, then do that. If your fans love the fact that your bass player has a massive handle bar mustache and your lead singer refuses to come out of the shadows, then don’t force those things to change in order to make yourself more appealing to the mainstream. The people who love you for what you do are the ones who will make you great, not the ones who might love you for what you could do if you get GQ’d or fire the lead singer.

Step three, leverage the masses:

Or, to put it another way, give the masses ACCESS to what they want. Kevin has wisely taken his fan base and stayed actively engaged with them while at the same time creating businesses and properties that will help and be helped by his popularity. As an example, he hosts Diggnation, which is distributed over the web by Revision3, a web-based tv company which he is a part owner of. The core audience of Digg users tunes in every week and subscribes to the feed through iTunes, which increases his new startup’s visibility while at the same time giving the core audience more of what they want. This direct line of communication feels like charity for the fanbase, when really it is another clever way of parlaying their fascination into revenue streams. Does a band have to start its own web-media company? Absolutely not. But they can contact their fan base directly via personally written emails, start a Twitter feed that gives their fans a direct connection to their daily activities, or poll fans to see what the setlist should be at their next gig before they get there. You want proof that this works in the music industry? Trent Reznor says hello.

Step four, stay independent:

The logic in this one is easy to see. Digg remains what it is today because Kevin and his co-founders have refused to ‘sell out’ to more powerful interests and compromise what makes Digg special (the fact that it is a direct reflection of the people who started it). We talk about mission, vision, and values all the time as they relate to business, and this is a perfect example of how sticking with your principles can pay off handsomely. If you are doing something right, then the offers will come, and that is the best time to ignore anything that tries to take what you’ve built away from you, because as soon as your guiding influence is gone it will fail. Bands in today’s music business would do well to heed that lesson, because building something true often begets building something powerful, not the other way around.

In reality, step four is a summing up of the mentality that will cause you to be successful in the preceding three steps, even if it is the most cliché sounding. Remember, however, that there is a reason these things become cliché. Generally, it’s because they are, in some sense, true.