Richard Armitage fan or professional marketer: Why it matters

Richard Armitage as Chop rolls himself a cigarette. The first picture from the set, I believe, and one of my favorites.

Well, one obvious reason is that a professional marketer knows how to set her Facebook page to public. Since this is not that hard (FB makes it easy on purpose, to make its content more useful), and since the person in question keeps insisting that it’s some technical flaw in Facebook and not her own custom settings of the page, one tends to suspect that the main reason for not just doing it is hiding her real identity. Why not take the simple step that would make the social media campaign most visible to the most people? I’ve talked about my issues with this person’s marketing of Urban and the Shed Crew before, including the fundamental representations she’s made about herself. If you care about the film’s fate, it’s grating to watch that Twitter. On the one hand, its operator wants fan support; on the other, however, no fan support that doesn’t already fit in with her plans. There’s a hilarious paradox to using the most potentially spontaneous social media platform to center one’s campaign and then insist that everyone move in lockstep and no one do anything that isn’t already approved by the marketer! Hey, Urban fans: DON’T TWEET ABOUT THE FILM! WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T USE YOUR OWN HASHTAGS!

Still, 90 percent of fans are not paying attention to the account seriously any longer, and it’s been a failure at non-fan social media (the only place in all of my streams that I see what it is doing is on Twitter — so not much broader social media penetration — everyone who blogs about Urban hits Google Alerts faster than that Twitter). The social media campaign isn’t going to sell the film; we hope that the film will sell itself when potential distributors see it.

So why should I care any more?

It’s interesting that the tweet that provoked this post has, in the interval, been deleted (I thought I made a copy of it, but maybe not). @AnglophileTV asked the question: why does it matter if to “some people” (the passive aggression is really wearing — you can just say who you mean, I’m a big girl, I can take it) if someone is “fan” or “pro”? In answering, I’m not going to pretend I’m ignorant of the reason why she asked that. For her, it’s crucial because she’s some kind of hybrid caught on the threshold, who makes her money, or at least her reputation, in that place, exploiting fan desires in what I see as a hugely negative way; as a consequence for me, it’s a matter of real concern.

The whole question of the lines between fan and marketer and crush is one that has concerned me more or less since Richard Armitage has been in a position to be professionally marketed — this is the first post about this topic that I remember writing, approaching four years ago. Very early on this blog, I stated my emphatic position that the crush should not spend too much time worrying about what his fans want. So this topic is not something that only concerns me now, on what now looks like it will have been a rather minor project of his, nor because I know who’s involved and I’m gunshy after what happened twice in 2014. After all, anyone should be able to learn from her past mistakes.

This is why — in a conceptual sense, apart from the people involved — it matters.

Fans love things; marketers and professionals sell things. Fans care about sharing their enjoyment of something with the likeminded; marketers care about finding more consumers for it among those not yet in the group of the likeminded. Fans want other fans to have fun however they do it; in contrast, professionals only want fans to participate in certain ways that support their sales projects.

And the combination of those two things threatens to destroy the world of the person who loves something for the sake of the experience of loving it. It turns everything we “lovers” do into something that’s for sale.

I. The difference between love and sales

A fan (on the whole) wants you to enjoy or at least experience something with her. One reason many of us blog and tumbl and tweet and facebook is for the purpose of enjoying Richard Armitage and his career with each other. In contrast, while a professional marketer may be sharing an experience with us, she wants us to buy (however we define that term; money isn’t always the currency) something. Professionals also hope that you enjoy what they put out there, but that is a means to an end; their fundamental goal is sales, even if they’re selling something that has no price.

Because of this fundamental contrast in their goals and motivations, fans and marketers care about different things; we share different kinds of information. We use different techniques, have different strategies, want different results. In particular, a fan doesn’t have to think about what might be attractive about her crush to outsiders, because her fellows all share that presupposition already. In contrast, a professional has to think about what people who are not already in love might care about, and say different things as a consequence. (This is part of what the Urban social media campaign has been so pointless. Richard Armitage fans already love Richard Armitage.) For those reasons, we evaluate what they say differently.

II. The difference between a labor of love and a product for sale

If what I want is fun and enjoyment, like fans usually do, then the skill level of the product doesn’t matter. This is why so much of fan culture is so amateurish. It’s why this blog has never sought to be a news outlet, but only to reflect the things that I found interesting in the level that I find them so. Did you know that the root of the term amateur is “lover / love”? The point for the fan lies in the making and collecting and trying out. This doesn’t mean there’s no great stuff to be observed in fan culture — there is. We’ve all seen really masterful fan vids, or stories, or art. But the point of it isn’t that it’s great — the point is that it’s made by fans.

In contrast, we expect more from a professional marketer or journalist. Since they want something from us, we expect them to be the master of what they do and to do it well. They want us to engage in a transaction of some kind (whether or not money changes hands directly), and in such transactions, we examine more closely whether the value of the exchange is fair. If I watch something I think is art and discover it was advertisement, most of the time, I feel disappointed, manipulated. The fan doesn’t ask anything from me in producing her work, so if I don’t love it, I can walk away; indeed, depending on the situation, it might be cruel to express my unvarnished reaction to it. In contrast, professionals want something from us in return for what they provide — even if that’s as simple as a tweet and ranging on down to some kind of purchase or action — so it’s legitimate to be critical of them in proportion to what they ask of us. If a fan gets a story wrong in transmission, that’s unfortunate, but on some level part of the risk one takes and maybe even expected, because fans have a particular kind of partisan stance. In contrast, when a professional gets it wrong, I have a reason to express my disgruntlement because I have the expectation of accuracy and that expectation is part of why I give them my attention. When a fan bungles a social media campaign, well, she was doing it out of love. When a professional bungles a social media campaign, it’s a wasted opportunity.

And, one might add, when a fan masquerades as a professional and bungles a social media campaign, it’s doubly frustrating because one imagines an opportunity that might not have been wasted, had a professional — by which I mean, not a fan, no fan, not any fan — done the work. Because as professional as a fan might be in any area, she’s not objective when it comes to her crush. Which means she can’t think clearly enough to consider how to appeal to people who aren’t already convinced.

III. The difference between fun and work

There’s this term used by fans and the people who study us: fan labor, which means “things that fans do and make in the course of their fandom.” Companies that distribute creative works have sought increasingly in recent years to benefit from fan labor as advertising, which is the effect that raises the question of why it matters if someone is a fan or a pro. Whatever you do, it’s all advertising!

Now, I’ve been responsible for complex organization of fans myself, in my own day. So I’m not against fans organizing to do things they enjoy, and I hope those fans enjoyed it as much as I did — or at least the feelings during the event. My resistance, rather, is to the suggestion that fans — who love something — rearrange their love for something in order to turn it into advertising. If I love something, then the labor I do is a labor of love, and if it has a positive effect in some other area, great, but that wasn’t the purpose of the fan labor. The purpose was the experience and expression of that positive relationship to the crush, and in some cases, the sharing of that feeling with others. When the primary purpose of the fan labor becomes selling something to people I don’t know in order to convince them that they should love something as much as I do, it’s not a labor of love any more — it’s plain old marketing. When the purpose becomes to get fans to do what I want them to do, it’s just coercion and shaming. To me, that’s the tail wagging the dog.

Fans don’t need to share the same hashtag for everything. We don’t need to organize ourselves into a single campaign or a market segment. We can tweet what we want at who we want; if we want to organize a hashtag campaign — or many of them — we should do that! If we want to alert people as to something, we should do that; if we want to make suggestions, we should do that; if we want to fundraise, we should do it because we enjoy participating and doing something kind, not because of counting the numbers of raising a huge amount of money. When the money or the participation rate become the point, instead of the pleasure — that’s the tail wagging the dog again.

A marketer cares about outcome, a fan cares about process. Tainting the process kills the enjoyment. My fan labor is not performed out of obligation, my love is not for sale, and it’s not a tool for marketers. I am not here to move markets, I am here to be moved and to talk about that. I give my fan labor freely for the purpose of loving. And if I’m going to be confronted by someone who — like the Urban social media “marketer,” who is really a fan who’s just using me and you, who is going to try to manipulate, abuse and exploit what I give freely, I want to know about that ahead of time so I can guard my reactions, so I can preserve what I love most about being a fan — the love I can be suffused with and spread to others.

~ by Servetus on November 6, 2015.