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{{first_name|Dear reader}}, I write to you tonight from Minneapolis, where I’m attending and sponsoring TWO conferences at the same time:

I’ll be immersed in each conference and then jog the half mile in between the venues to pop into the other one. Gonna be either super fun or totally insane.

The part I’m most excited about is the opportunity to be in the room with prospect customers, at their respective industry’s biggest conference of the year. As I keep writing about here, it’s been a weird time in our field. Frequently I respond to that by going deep in my head and trying to come up with the answer of what to do next, as if that answer is just somewhere to be found inside me, if only I could focus in on it.

But the better move is to get closer to customers, because the answer of what to do next is most certainly to be found with them.

Since going to Nashville last month I’ve been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift, as one does.

Taylor has had many “eras,” of course. But looking back there seems to have been one especially crucial turning point in her career: the “retreat” of 2016-2017.¹

Up to that point she had played the game in exceptional but still relatively traditional ways: early ambition and talent, crossing genres with Red (2012) and 1989 (2014), leaning into celebrity, stadium tours, etc. And then as she became one of the most famous people in the world in the mid-2010s, all of the shitty parts of fame started to come for her. She was groped and then dealt with an ensuing sexual assault trial in front of a jury. Kanye came out with a lyric asserting “I made that bitch famous” which led to tremendous debate on the internet about if that was true or not.² She watched as her record label uploaded her catalogue to Spotify, which paid her a tiny percentage of the royalties she had been previously earning.

Her reputation was dramatically outside of her control. She retreated, going essentially dark in the public sphere for about a year. But during that time there was one place where she did show up, in a big way: Tumblr.

This was where her true fans lived, writing about her music in community with each other. Taylor made her own account and started exploring, and then she made 27,000 interactions on Tumblr: liking and commenting on her fans’ posts about her at an average of 30 per day, every day for two years. She also used the platform to invite a few of them for private listening sessions at her house, without members of the press.

Away from the maw of the general public, Taylor was able to see what really mattered for the people who really mattered to her. And what happened next?

By getting closer to her customers fans, Taylor gained knowledge on where she could go next. And she gained power to make those moves herself, independently of her record label.

More reading:

I’m holding that idea with me this week: instead of taking a retreat deeper into solitude, how can I instead “advance” into connection - the connections that really matter?

How can I build a closer relationship with my customers - to increase their trust, and to gather the knowledge and power and reputation to be able to make a confident move toward whatever comes next?

They say you should Always Be Closing…

But before that, perhaps you should Always Be Close.

Hope you have the chance to get closer to someone who matters to you this week!!