Thursdays with Amanda: Organizing Your Street Team
Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
So, we know the reasoning behind why you need a Street Team and then the basics of building one, but once you have your tribe of minions, what do you do with them? Before you send them out into the world (which will probably be next week’s post), you need a home base.
Street Teams are all about communication–that is you communicating with them and them communicating with each other. Now a simple (and lame) way to handle this is to send out mass emails. BUT we all know how annoying those can be, and there’s always a guy who hits “reply all” EVERY FREAKING TIME even though he has nothing to say except for some stupid joke that no one finds funny.
So, your other options are to form a private Facebook or Yahoo! Group (or something similar). You can even make the space fancy by adding pictures and files and other items that you would normally email everyone. In turn, using such an outlet will encourage your Team to actually interact with one another…which reminds me…
WARNING!!!
I know it’s great to believe that your peeps will all get along like one big happy family, but let’s be real. There are going to be personality clashes, competitiveness, overwhelming personalities, and maybe even a few street brawls. So be clear about group etiquette. Make sure everyone plays nice.
Some other ideas include…
You could go one step farther with your group (if you have a big enough team) and create regional groups. This way, if you have a handful of people in, say, the Chicagoland area, you can get them together so that they can organize their strategies and not overlap.
You could also use the group to create HEALTHY competition. Maybe do something like announce that you’ll be in Chicago, and each Chicago Street Team member that gets you into a local church/school/place of business gets to have coffee with you the day of the event? Things like that can really energize people and when you start having Team Members succeed and share that success with the group, it can encourage others to give the challenge a try.
The possibilities are endless, really. A designated space for your Street Team opens up a world of options and generates energy and excitement within the group.
Okay, next week we’ll get into the nitty gritty of what to DO with a Street Team. So, stay tuned…and in the meantime, if you’ve got a question, share it here!
*Love my marketing advice? Check out my $5 ebook, The Extroverted Writer.
Here’s what readers are saying: “I have started to see results with my Twitter account in just a few weeks and with very little effort.” – Les ey, Amazon review
14 Comments
Amanda, I have a question unrelated to street teams. At your seminar at Blue Ridge, you talked about contacting radio stations and ask for the opportunity to be interviewed on air. My Christian Living book (my first) will be published in January. What is the right time to contact program managers? How far in advance of publication is neither too early nor too late?
Thanks,
Jim
Amanda, I’ve seen 2 different forms used: blog combined with email Using Pinterest) & a closed FB group. The latter has tended to build greater intimacy within members of the Street Team as we’ve all been able to interact with each other. It’s also been a lot of fun when authors have met their peeps at book signings and taken photos/videos of the occasions then sharing them with the rest of the group.
Thanks again for this insightful series.
Interesting that some use Pinterest…I personally haven’t found the site useful for authors, and so I wonder if it’s working as a Street Team tool? But yes, I would go with the private Facebook group. It really creates a great vibe!
I’m a street team that uses a private Facebook page. I really like that…interacting and sharing with other members. For example, someone may make a super cute picture/quote/whatever for the book. Then, those of us on the team can share that picture on our blogs/facebook pages/etc.
Yep! Great example of why it works!
Why wouldn’t the “home base” be your website? Are you wanting more of an interactive component?
It’s hard to make sure that your team members actually check your website for the updates. I think Facebook makes it easy. They see the notifications and can hop on over. And yes, I’d look for a much more interactive relationships. They’ll have questions for you and ideas for each other. FB encourages that. Now, you could have a JOIN MY STREE TEAM button on your site. But I’d advise the actual team to be held elsewhere.
Hi Amanda!
I’m really enjoying this series and taking a lot of notes! ;~)
Take care,
Donna L Martin
Hi Amanda! I’m a new follower and I’m reading your book, hoping to meet up with you at the ACFW conference. I do have a question on Street Teams, I guess for your Q&A. Your last post mentioned screening people and making sure they’re committed to helping you promote. The question I have is where you find these people? How do you recruit them? I’m assuming it’s from the platform that you’ve built, but I’m a practical person so more details please! 🙂
Thanks for reading! You pull these people from your current platform. So, friends, family, readers, supporters. If you’re unpublished, your team could consist of 10 people who spread the word about your blog posts, etc., to help boost visibility. If you’re published and have a larger pool to pull from, your team could be 50 people or more.
OK, that makes sense. Is there such a thing as having too many people on your street team? 10 seems like few for an unpublished author but I guess we all have to start somewhere.
I think everyone has different levels of what they can handle. As long as you’re in control and the team is profitable, you can have as many as you want.
Profitable is the key, isn’t it? At some point, it might just be people trying to score free books. But that goes back to your post dealing with selecting people. Lot’s to think about. Thanks! Really enjoying your book, too!
Excellent! I’m hanging on your words as I prepare to assemble my baker’s dozen. 🙂