Interview with John Davie

Fantourageis a site that allows fan, celebrities, and companies to become more interactive. Fans earn points for things they do on Fantourage and celebrities are able to reward their top fans with awesome rewards for becoming top fans. It is win-win for both the fan and the celebrity or brand. The fans earn points and get the celebrity or brand higher on the list creating an avenue for the celebrity to become noticed by others and garner new fans. The fans are in turn rewarded for doing things that are fun and that they probably do elsewhere anyway.

I spoke with John Davie founder of Fantourage and he gladly shared with me why he started the site, how it benefits the celebrity or company and how the fans are rewarded. He also shared the plans to make the site even better and more interactive and some more exciting news for the future of Fantourage.

How did you come up with the idea for Fantourage?

John - I was at Face Book and I was on the Dane Cook site. I was following him as a fan. I was following what was going on and he was doing some interesting things to try and leverage Face Book with his fans and at the time he had like 1.3 million fans and he was offering a random drawing type of thing if you responded to something. Then he was offering something like a Black Friday promotion and he said for my loyal fans I am going to offer 25% off for my loyal customers. It was a weird response thing he was getting. Some people were like that's great I just got a hat but then some other people were coming with Dane you are such a sellout, what are you doing hocking your merchandise on Face Book, then other people would come back with no this is for Dane Cook fans.

So what dawned on me was he was trying to identify who his really loyal fan base was and reward his loyal fans. However Face Book is not really set up to capitalize off that and allow the celebrity too easily, identify who their most loyal, diehard fans are, that are willing to put the time and effort into promoting them in a positive way and purchase their merchandise.

That is when it hit me that a loyalty system, if you could combine a loyalty points program with a Face Book type of application it could be very powerful for celebrities and brands.

Was it hard getting that kind of page set up?

John - It was tough to find someone capable of building it. I talked to large developing companies that quoted me hundreds of thousands of dollars to build it and told me it was going to take six months to do. Since I was financing the venture by myself I obviously couldn't afford to hire a big firm.

But I found Jeff Durso who is an MIT graduate and a entrepreneur himself and has built a couple of very successful companies and he had the skills and ability to do most of the heavy lifting himself and then we hired a secondary developer, so right now we only have two developers. The site has still a lot that we need to build. There are still a lot of features that we are working on and we need to launch in the next few months but I think it was the right decision to find the people in house and not try to find some company to build it for us.

What is Fantourage all about?

John - It is about allowing the celebrities to reach out to their most diehard fans and also gain new fans and allowing the fans to compete in a fun way to become a Top fan. It is for fans to be recognized for their loyalty to the brand. It is for celebrities and brand to offer rewards and build loyalty with their best fans. The Top fans in turn earn rewards. It is kind of the old marketing adjective, the 80/20 rule; twenty percent of your customers generate 80% of your revenue. I think the same thing goes for celebrities and their fans. A fan is really no different than a customer. If you don't keep the top twenty percent of your customers happy you may lose them and they may fade away and loose interest. If you can engage with them and offer them something you are more likely to keep them active and committed.

The second stage of Fantourage, which we are building, is people are building connections and relationships on Fantourage and they interact in a way similar to the way that they do on Face Book. We are eventually going to be able to reward them for that as well and you will get points for interacting with your friends and relatives and you will earn gift cards and different rewards and stuff like that for spending time on the site and uploading pictures and all kinds of different things with the next phase that we are building.

When did you first launch Fantourage?

John - Mid-March 2010

Were you surprised that Fantourage became popular so fast?

John - Yes we were. We had just went out as a Beta launch to get some good feedback from users. We didn't really do any promotion or any advertising or anything like that. So to see the users climb and people get excited so early on, when we had some really big pieces to be built, but we got some real feedback and learned what fans are looking for and what features they wanted. It has been a really good ride so far and we are really excited about the growth.

How many users do you have on Fantourage and what is the average time they spend on the site each time they visit?

John - One of the most exciting stats we have is the average time on the site. The average user spends an average of twelve minutes per session on the site and whereas in contrast the average Face Book user spends about eight minutes per day on Face Book. That is an exciting stat that people are sticking to the site and they are spending time on the site. Right now we are closing in on 10,000 users. That is pretty good for just a couple months out of launch and we have got some really active users on the site.

How many Celebs and Companies use Fantourage?

John - I don't have exact numbers of official ones but I would say we are in the neighborhood of fifty Official Pages. As far as all the pages in general, fans create the pages initially and it is a fan sponsored page and eventually the celeb gets involved and offers a reward and get engaged and takes it over and that is what we call an official page. Actual pages are in the thousands, I want to say close to 2000.

One of the exciting ones that just got involved is Taylor Hicks; he has been a Top celebrity on the site for a long time and we finally got the commitment from his team and his people to offer two tickets to the show and a backstage personal meet and greet with Taylor for his show at the Highline in NYC on Sunday night, July 25^th for the number one fan. I was excited to tell you about that.

We have been working on that and hoping they would take notice for a long time and they have been to the site. Taylor Hicks himself has been to the site and looked at the traffic and looked at what is going on and they are offering a really cool reward. It has been pretty amazing how his fans have kept him in the top considering there were no rewards and no payoff. Now that there is an actual payoff it is going to get people even more excited.

That was the next question I had for you with Taylor Hicks being the # 2 Top Celeb Site after also being #1 for a couple months and Casey James being the #4 site.Does it surprise you that these are not official pages yet and no prizes are being offered but yet the fans have put them in to the Top spots?

John - That is awesome! With Taylor committing here and getting involved it should enable our PR woman to be able to get in touch with Casey James people and maybe get him involved. Maybe that can be an announcement in the future and we can land some Casey James tickets.

But yes it really did. We didn't expect that. We thought it was just going to be the ones that were offering rewards or something cool. What we are seeing however is if people are really a diehard fan they are willing to just talk and engage and really compete celebrity to celebrity. We didn't think about the celebrity against celebrity. We thought it was going to mostly just be fans competing against fans.

It is very interesting to see the collaboration between fans working to push their favorite celebrity up to the top of the ranking and that is definitely something we did not foresee. It is so cool. It is not something we even thought of and it is great for the celebrity as well because it gives them that front page placement.

Taylor Hicks may not be able to be on front page of Face Book or Twitter but if his fans are pushing it he can be on the front page of Fantourage.

What is the advantage for a celeb or company in using Fantourage verses MySpace and Face Book?

John - There are a couple of advantages. If you are a fan on Face Book for let's say Taylor Hicks, you do not have any motivation to send out to all your Face Book friends to push them into the Taylor Hicks fan club. Whereas on Fantourage, especially when this reward goes up. If you use the Face Book invite feature and you recruit fifty of your fans to the Taylor Hicks page, you are going to earn a significant amount of points and you are more likely to win those tickets and the meet and greet to meet Taylor Hicks.

Now those fifty people you recruit are maybe not diehard Taylor Hicks fans like you are but they are willing to become fan of his to help you get those fifty points and that might psychologically trigger them to be more conscious of him and they see tickets go on sell in their city and they say oh I am a fan of Taylor Hicks on Fantourage maybe I should buy tickets to his show or maybe he has a new album coming out maybe I should buy that album.

So maybe they weren't that diehard of fans but because somebody from Fantourage recruited them they are much more likely to feel that they are a fan of Taylor Hicks. So what we have done in a sense for Taylor Hicks is #1 identified his diehard fans, he is able to identify them now and reward them but he has also grown his fan base by his diehard fans introducing other fans to him that maybe were not diehard fans before but now are a step up.

Another thing we are going to be doing for these celebrities is they will be able to sell their tickets and merchandise and their music through the site. Fans are going to be able to earn their greatest amount of points for purchasing the merchandise. It is not built yet but eventually you are going to be able to click on that Ticketmaster link and buy tickets and earn say 200 points, if you download one of his songs you might earn 20 points per song downloaded or if you buy the whole album you might earn 150 points. It will help them sell more merchandise

So you are planning to add more features then?

John - Yes definitely we are working on more features. Such as a music player, where fans will earn points for listening to music, you might earn five points for listening to a song and then twenty-five for purchasing the song. There is a whole list of stuff that we are going to be building. There is going to be fan to fan interaction, where if you share photos and you tag people in photos. Something like stuff you do on Face Book but at Fantourage you will earn points for all those types of things. You also might earn let's say a fifty dollar Duncan Donuts gift card for interacting with your crew. There is also going to be more gaming features where there will be many games you can do to earn more points and be able to bounce around and do more things on the site. We are coming up with a lot more ways for people to earn points and become more competitive and get more involved. We are also working on a way that if users keep other users involved and coming back they earn points. There is a lot of stuff we are working on to keep them more involved and not losing interest. It is high on are priority list to create more of a reason for fans to communicate with each other not just the celebrity.

At one time you had it where the pages showed how many fans were on each page, will you be adding this feature again?

John - We have talked about that but the reason we decided not to is because Face Book and pages like that, their ranking for celebrities is based on the number of fans. We feel that our way to rank is by the number of points. If Taylor Hicks has super diehard fans that are really generating all the points, that is the number that we want to be the vocal point. How many points he has is a better indicator of how loyal the fans are that he has than the number of fans. You will find people on Face Book or on Twitter that have millions of fans but they are not that diehard. They may not be that engaged and responding and interacting and purchasing the products. So that is why we took it down because we want to focus on the points.

Can you tell us some about the current awards being offered?John - Sure we have Kimberly Cole Tickets, tickets for Hypnogaja, signed photograph of Matthew Morris from Glee, we have two tickets for Electric Daisy Carnival which has been very popular lately, and we are going to be launching Lollapalooza tickets and a few other summer concert festivals. Also Justin Bieber tickets are coming and Black Eyed Peas Tickets and the Taylor Hicks tickets I told you about these are good ones coming and should be launched soon.