Offline — The Best Way to Connect with your Online Community
For the past four weeks, my work day at Soundwave has consisted of phone calls and emails to music management, bands and photographers. We had decided to host our first ever live music event with our office as the venue!
We teamed up with Sofar Sounds — a brilliant group of people who’s mission is to bring the magic back to live music. They organise pop-up gigs in obscure places and for one event only, I joined the team to organise the biggest Sofar Sounds gig in Dublin yet!
Let’s put this into perspective. Soundwave is a music discovery app which allows users to track and share music.
Being a mobile application startup, it’s easy to get bogged down with the tech side of things. Everyday our development team are tackling technical challenges, working out algorithms and chasing bugs (not real bugs, mind!) Even I have needed to up-skill fast with a crash course in HTML and CSS for marketing purposes.
With all this focus on tech, we needed to bring the music back to Soundwave and remind ourselves why we come to work every morning — because we love music!
A love of music is something which we have in common with our global Soundwave community!
However, as they are all online, we have been limited to social media and email as our means of communication with them. Being personable in our approach and by placing a huge focus on customer service, we have actually created strong bonds with some of our power users (Shout out to Jay Lewis — I know you’re reading!)
That said, it’s unrealistic to achieve this with every customer and so establishing a real connection with your community online is still a challenge!
At Soundwave, we’ve been trying to bridge this gap through our brand ambassador programme. Our ‘Soundwave Roadies’ consist of over 40 power users on the app and are located in 19 countries worldwide. This works really well for bridging the gap between online and offline as they actively promote Soundwave in their local area, help out with customer queries and even host events in places where we physically cannot be.
We wanted to take it a step further and reach out on a personal level to some of our community here in Dublin. Hosting a live music event seemed like the perfect way of doing this!
So Wednesday night, we literally cleared out the office and opened our doors to over 100 guests. These were a mixture of our app’s power users, our brand ambassadors, friends, family and some new faces from the Sofar Sounds community!
With brilliant perfomances from My Tribe Your Tribe, Toy Soldier, White Chalk and Heathers, our run-of-the-mill office was completely transformed into a buzzing live music venue!
We have always wanted Soundwave to be the place where people go to chat and share music and we definitely achieved this with our community on Wednesday night!
Make sure to check out the full social story of the event here for some more great pictures.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. ;) If you enjoyed this post, please recommend, share or leave me a comment below!
Community and Digital Coordinator @Soundwave
