I just got home from performing two w00tstock shows in Chicago and Minneapolis. w00tstock is a sort of nerd variety show that I produce with Paul and Storm, and Adam Savage. We and an ever-changing lineup of invited guests perform geek-related material for people who are just like us, in an environment we hope feels like the This American Life stage show meets Coachella. (On these last two shows, we had Bill Amend, the creator of Foxtrot, join us in Chicago, and Professor James Kakalios of The Physics of Superheroes joined us in Minneapolis.)
As I sit here today, my voice almost completely gone, every muscle in my body aching, and so tired I don’t want to do much more than grab a bunch of comics and spend the day with my feet up, I am once again grateful to live in The Future. As recently as five years ago, w00tstock could not have existed the way it does today, and we owe a lot of that to our audiences, who have promoted and supported us, and helped us grow so fast, we just announced a show at Comic-Con.
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Cory Doctorow famously wrote about the implied endorsement when a friend hands you a book, or a movie, or a CD. There is tremendous value there, that we artists simply can’t get from publicists and interviews. I know that w00tstock wouldn’t be nearly as successful as it is if we didn’t make it easy for our audiences to share our shows however they want, and that’s what I wanted to write a little bit about today.
* Twitter.
There’s no getting around it: Twitter has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with friends and strangers. For performers, this means that we can share glimpses of the show from backstage, which is awesome for a show like ours with so many interesting and Twitter-connected people in it. For the audience, this means that they get to tell their friends what they’re missing, which has the added benefit of helping build demand for future shows (provided we don’t stink up the place, of course.) Don’t fight it; encourage it!
And while we’re talking about Twitter from the audience, let’s not forget how cool it can be to Twitter from backstage during the show. In our Portland show, Adam said something to Molly Lewis like, “you haven’t seen a penis until you’ve seen it on an iPad.” I was checking the #w00tstock tag on Twitter to see how people were enjoying the show (a lot, it turns out) and I saw that … so I immediately went backstage to get some context. I added it to my own Twitter feed, and the people in the audience and online got to share in something that we all thought was hilarious. The relationship between performer and audience has always had a certain intimacy to it, and pulling back the curtain – just a little bit – like this was a lot of fun for all of us.
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* Recording and rebroadcasting of the show.
I understand why some performers are uncomfortable with this. Back in the old days, if I had a bad show or screwed something up on stage, it didn’t go beyond the theater much faster than people could talk about it. These days, the whole world knows about just about everything seconds after it happens, usually from multiple sources. Initially, this freaked me out and made me stress a lot about being even more of a perfectionist than I already am, but I’ve since learned to embrace it. Every performance is unique, and the mistakes – especially during a show that’s comedic – are usually the best parts. I understand that some performers are sketchy about live bootlegs, but are they really cutting into our bottom line? Making it easy for people to see what a live show is like makes it easy for them to make an educated decision about seeing us.
And look, let’s be practical here: every cell phone in the world has audio and video recording on it now. An entire generation has gotten used to having their cell on them all the time, and taking that away from them so they can get into a show is pointless and serves only to alienate them. People are going to record parts of the show, and if it’s memorable, they’ll want to share it online. Why fight that?
Also, it could be useful. I accidentally deleted the only copy of my intro for the show after Los Angeles. I needed to refer to it for Seattle, so I found an audience recording from Largo and transcribed it before I rewrote it for our show at The Moore.
* Encourage instant feedback.
w00tstock is supposed to be 3 hours long, but we’ve had two performances that ended up closer to 5 hours. I was *really* stressed backstage in Portland and Chicago because of the length of the show, but I was able to look at #w00tstock on Twitter and see that for every one person who said “please God, let it end,” there were a hundred who never wanted us to stop. Knowing that helped me relax and enjoy the two additional bonus hours.
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A friend of ours, Len Peralta, drew limited-edition posters at both shows this weekend, using themes from the audience suggested via Twitter. At intermission, I noticed hundreds of requests for something called “Bus Plunge” to be on the poster. I had no idea what it was, but I told Len that the audience wanted it, so he should probably work it in, some way. He was nearly done with the poster, but was able to add a word balloon to Paul … which ended up being perfect, because “Bus Plunge” was the title of a song that Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm made up on the spot at their last Minneapolis show. It may seem like a small thing, but it was important to nearly 20% of the audience, and because we made it easy for them to talk with us, we were able to deliver.
So I think this all comes down to embracing and facilitating communication with our audiences, and making it easy for them to spread the virus about our shows, to steal an idea from Seth Godin. Think about this, musicians: you have a potential army of passionate marketers just waiting to tell their friends why they should invest their time and money to see you. Why in the world would you do anything that gets in their way?
Wil Wheaton is an actor, best known from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation and the movie Stand By Me. He also runs a weblog called Wil Wheaton Dot Net. He is a new bi-monthly columnist for Techland.
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