Digital Diva helps the famous and their fans come together over the Internet

Ruth McCartney's first true exposure to the needs of fans came while growing up around the McCartney clan. Stepsister of Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Ruth earned her pocket money as a child helping her mother sort through Paul's fan mail. That experience grew into the idea behind McCartney's business. She is the CEO and co-founder of McCartney Multimedia and iFanz.com, a company that helps clients track who and where their fans are, and what those fans want and need. McCartney recently spoke at the "Achieving Innovation through Collaboration" symposium hosted by the Center for Advancing Business through Information Technology at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

Ruth McCartney's first true exposure to the needs of fans came while growing up around the McCartney clan. Stepsister of Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles, Ruth earned her pocket money as a child helping her mother sort through Paul's fan mail — packs of it. Women would write in saying that they were in the row six wearing a red dress, McCartney said, and had Paul noticed them, because they were convinced he had, etc. "It sounds crazy, but these fans really wanted a real connection with their favorite Beatle," she said.

That experience grew into the idea behind McCartney's business. She is the CEO and co-founder of McCartney Multimedia and iFanz.com, a Los Angeles-based company that helps clients track who and where their fans are, and what those fans want and need. McCartney, whose business card reads "Digital Diva," addressed a roomful of business professionals and academics attending the "Achieving Innovation through Collaboration" symposium hosted by the Center for Advancing Business through Information Technology. CABIT is a think tank at the W. P. Carey School of Business. Ruth McCartney herself has had a varied career. Like her famous relative, she has been a rock musician and singer, and was a fashion model in Eastern Europe during the 1990s with a huge following in Russia. Last year, thanks to her fame as a singer and model and her generous donations to victims of the 1999 Armenian earthquake, she was named Russia's Woman of the Year. But McCartney is a media consultant, too, and her clients include Fortune 100 companies — some of them in the entertainment industry.

Beatles fan mail

At home in Liverpool, Ruth and her mother dealt with seven bags of Paul's mail each morning and four in the afternoon — six days a week, rain or shine. First they organized the letters geographically: mail from Australia or New Zealand was Down Under and therefore sat under the table. U.S. mail sat on the west side of the table and Asia sat eastwards. Next, they read every letter and sent some form of reply. Initially this amounted to letters. Later it was memorabilia like strings from George Harrison's guitar. What they realized through sorting through this copious mail, and later from forming the Wings Fan Club in 1972, was not only how overjoyed fans were to get a response, but how close fans felt to musicians they'd never personally met. McCartney also realized that stars themselves never knew who bought their movies or music. They were aware of how many fans they had, but knew very little else about them.

Building a company around the needs of fans

iFanz.com spawned many years later from this insight. McCartney and her husband, Martin Nethercutt, formed the company 13 years ago with the goal of immortalizing a celebrity and creating a digital persona online. Their data management platform and reporting software allows users to manage their customers or fan base directly online. When fans join the website, they cite how many concerts they've been too, their music taste, recent purchases and other helpful gems that allow celebrities, book authors, musicians, speakers or actors to customize the information they send out. Celebrities can also instantly publish any excerpts of their music or book or films and alert fans of upcoming performances worldwide. The iFanz.com client base today handles 1,200 clients, including British comedian John Cleese (who performs in the introduction to their website), British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg and sailing legend Dennis Conner. Entertainer David Cassidy was their first customer when they launched in 1995.

Customers use the site to keep track of important information about their fan base, like fans' birthdays, their likes and their dislikes. A polling feature allows the customer to ask fans for advice. And it works. When David Cassidy was planning a new greatest hits CD, McCartney suggested polling his fans on a prospective song list. Only 40 percent of the songs that David had wanted to include were actually cited by his fans. "This precious feedback made the CD more successful than it might have been otherwise," McCartney said. The site is used to sell wearable promotion (something she views as offering a lifetime of loyal revenue). Cassidy wasn't sure which memorabilia would sell well but after posting some to his iFanz site, he could monitor that fans responded almost exclusively to Partridge Family lunch boxes and mouse pads. "Had we done this the old way, we would have had much environmental waste and financial loss," McCartney added.

iFanz is also used for spontaneous public relations exercises (through customized e-mail blasts) and to beef up security. When an unnamed classic rock band was on the road promoting their box set a few years ago, iFanz created T-Shirts with a bar code embedded in its sleeve and sold them online. The T-shirt gave the purchaser access to a personal signing event organized by the band. The shirts were a huge success, with 3,000 sold for $40 each, and they are now collector's items. Best of all, McCartney added, the promotion rolled so fast that bootleggers had no chance to sell rip offs.

Who are the masters of collaborating with fans?

America offers excellent examples of successful collaborations with customer or fan bases, McCartney said. Oprah Winfrey, for example, has cultivated a relationship with her fans such that viewers feel like the talk show host is speaking directly to them. Meg Whitman, who helped grow eBay from 47 million users in 1998 to 7.6 billion in 2002, also understands the value of a "fan" connection, McCartney said. eBay's phenomenal growth was the result of "listening to their fans." The dot-com bust taught lessons about what happens when fans are ignored, the Digital Diva added. Many of these companies folded because of inability to execute a vision, McCartney said, but failure to learn about customers through collaboration contributed, too. "It takes work, but it pays off," she insisted.

Could the medical profession learn from what the musical industry has already mastered? A majority of doctors do not respond to e-mail and many patients remain fearful about their health care visits. "If [patients] could have a support group that addressed them as a community in a way that rock stars addressed their fans, then this would be effective," suggested a symposium attendee. McCartney agreed. Unless doctors adopt technology, she said, the medical profession will be held back. But what about negative feedback from fans? Julie Smith David, an associate professor of information systems at W. P. Carey School of Business and the director of CABIT, said that hearing the negatives is as helpful as praise: "Without negatives, you blindly produce things that people don't like." McCartney agreed. She said iFanz delivers hundreds of daily e-mails from users about what is working, and what is not. "If you get three questions on the same thing, such as people wondering how to upload files, then I know it's broken and needs fixing."

Bottom line

• Ruth McCartney is a singer, a marketing and music consultant and co-founder and owner of McCartney Multimedia — a conglomerate of small businesses including iFanz.com.
• iFanz.com has 1,200 clients, who use the site to monitor their fan/client base to distinguish fans' likes and dislikes and poll them on what CDs to release or books to launch.
• The idea for her company has its roots in McCartney's youth, when she earned her pocket money sorting through her stepbrother Paul McCartney's worldwide fan mail. She later helped her mother Angie establish the Wings Fan Club in 1972.