Trying Something New: What Social Media and “Beatles Rockband” Have In Common

Over the Christmas holiday, I found myself eagerly trying out the “Beatles Rockband” music game on the Nintendo Wii game system. With my decades-long familiarity with Beatles music due to my teenhood love of FM radio in the 1970s, I figured: “Maybe it’ll be enjoyable (and perhaps even easy) to jam along with the Fab Four.”

Almost. It was enjoyable but not quite easy. But I learned some lessons nonetheless.

A skilled (and younger) relative let me play the Rockband drums while she played guitar. As a kid, I often dreamed of playing drums, but was sentenced by my Mother to six months of piano lessons (which I dropped as soon as I could, since they took place during after-school playtime in my neighborhood). Another problem was that I have a short supply of musical talent, but that’s probably why I’m sitting at a computer keyboard and not a piano keyboard.

Anyway, for those not familiar with Rockband, this game gives you visual and aural cues that prompt you to play the drum beats on a drum pad, pluck notes using a faux guitar, or sing with the microphone to classic Beatles songs.

I set the drum pads to the easiest level on the Rockband game. It took a song or two to get acquainted with the color sequence that cued the drum beats for me. Then it took a couple more songs to recognize that each song had different beat patterns, and that I should try to remember the beat patterns so I could repeat them later in the song. Then I learned that I could do a repetitive beat pretty well on one drum pad, but had trouble doing sequences of different drums.

With each successful drum beat (the game gives you feedback so you know if you’ve hit the correct drum pad at the correct time), I gained a bit of confidence. With each missed beat (there were many), I got a bit more determined to learn from what I’d done and get it right the next time. I got scores in the high 80s (Rockband tells you the percentage of correct drum beats or notes that you hit) and even in the 90s. After about 15 songs, my arms were tired. Five more songs later, I’d had enough.

I found myself thinking later that trying Rockband was like learning to use social media: There are elements of the familiar (in Rockband, the Beatles songs; in social media, the person-to-person conversations) and the new (in Rockband, the game itself and the Wii system; in social media, the systems and cultures of social networking sites Facebook and Twitter).

It’s the familiarity that enables us to try social media. But it’s the new stuff that can hold us back.

A recent American Agent and Broker survey showed that independent insurance agents are mostly stuck, either not yet bothering to try social media or struggling to get over the hurdles (and there are many, as our Aartrijk Brand Camp research showed). Laura Mazzucca Toops’s study in the December 2009 issue of the magazine found that 20 percent of agents/brokers in a reader poll said they are considering using social networking for marketing. But fewer than 25 percent currently use it.

That’s not a criticism, by the way, since many are already in patterns of success in their business and may not be motivated to change or try something new.

A few other lessons learned from my holiday fun, which might apply to both video games and social networking:

– Ask the young for help. My young relatives both laughed at me and guided me. I caught on to a key Rockband tip (you don’t have to smash the drum pads, just tap them) after about five or six gentle reminders from a niece.

– It might be fun to try, but you’ve got to have success to keep going. It took about two drum beats to realize I was not going to replace Ringo Starr on the drum kit in a Beatles reunion. I realized that success was something different: just trying to play along and doing my best while enjoying the music and the camaraderie.

– Learn your style. In Rockband, after a few songs I recognized that I was focused on the visual clues on the screen, and less on the audio part of the game. It’s probably in line with my skill set of writing that I work more visually that verbally. The others playing the game seemed to operate more on the audible parts of the game. To each his own. That probably applies to social networking, too: Some like to interact a lot and with long posts; others are briefer and less frequent.

– Charles Wasilewski