At: Guitar Center

I’ve been a Twitter member since early 2007. I managed to get myself on the invite list by being an early adopter of a podcasting site called Odeo, something I’d seen demoed by Evan Williams in 2005 at the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Ev’s company had invented Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs, so I figured Odeo was worth investigating. While it was cool and all, success was modest.  Later in 2006, as Ev and his partner, Biz Stone, were slogging uphill on the Odeo project, they allowed themselves to get distracted by a software engineer named Jack Dorsey who brought them a fascinating new text app. Twitter was born a few weeks later, and because I was signed up on Odeo, I got an early crack at membership, picking the Twitter name @venezia for my favorite city on the planet and my former home.

To be honest, for a while I wasn’t sure what to do with Twitter. Then in the early part of 2008, a social media consultant, Jackie Peters, turned me on to what companies like Zappos were doing with customer support via Twitter, and I saw the service as a sincere and intimate way for Guitar Center to solve our customers’ problems. I set up “Guitar Center” as a search term in what later became the Twitter search engine. I read 100% of all tweets daily that contain our company’s name. It’s addictive, especially for a marketing person, because you see pure, unvarnished truth in the tweets, literally as it happens. It’s like walking in the door with a couple hundred customers a day and hearing their inner thoughts, complete with pictures, movies and maps, some just seconds old. After a while, it helps build a kind of instinctual understanding of where we’re strong and where we need to be stronger. As I like to say, great musicians need great ears.

We watch for disappointed customers, contact them, and do everything in our power to delight them (our batting average is almost 100%). For a while, I made the contacts myself, but now that Twitter has exploded, Jeremy Cole (@iamjcole) and his team has taken over, and between us, we cover all but the most post-nuclear tweets.

I’m bringing the things we learn on Twitter into meetings constantly, including with the President and CEO. Reactions to new products, store openings, sales, events, commercials, special promotions, new policies, and much more: we hear it all and it helps make the chain better and better.

In the last month, we finally took an overdue step and activated the @guitarcenter Twitter account, which we’re using to push out news, special deals, sales promotions, blog updates and the like. Response has been great: at one point, we were logging better than 50 followers an hour. If you’ve got ideas you want to send us on how to make our Twitter presence even stronger, reach out to us at @venezia or @iamjcole. We’re all ears.

Last Friday night, Dustin Hinz and I had a wonderful dinner with blues legend, 77 year-old Hubert Sumlin, and his manager Toni Ann Mamary. Hubert was the grinding, burning force behind Howlin’ Wolf’s band for decades, playing on all their seminal Chess recordings like Back Door Man, I Ain’t Superstitious, Killing Floor, Red Rooster, Smokestack Lightnin’, Spoonful, Wang Dang Doodle and dozens more. He’s worked with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson and a list of icons that would fill a blues encyclopedia.

Hubert’s got a sweet and easy manner to him, with a flow of stories that surges like a rolling river. He clearly remembers the first “guitar” he ever played, which it turns out, wasn’t wasn’t a guitar it all. In the 1930‘s, his brother nailed some boards to the side of their house in Hughes, Arkansas, stretched 4 piano wires tuned with screws, and literally played the wall with a bottle slide. The whole house was effectively a giant resonator. (We’re going to try this in a hallway close to the Guitar Center marketing department, and we’ll post here when we get it working.)

Hubert also talked about his work on The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions record in 1971, playing alongside Steve Winwood, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ringo Starr and then 26 year-old Eric Clapton. Eric was a huge fan of Hubert’s, and fought with Chess records to make certain that Hubert wasn’t left behind in Chicago for the recording dates.

After the sessions, Hubert tells us that he was invited to Clapton’s house and escorted into a room that housed Eric’s extensive guitar collection. Eric told a wide-eyed Hubert that he could pick out any guitar in the room and keep it as a gift. Hubert spent some time opening cases and trying out axes until he came upon a certain black Strat he totally fell for. Unfortunately, it was love triangle:  Hubert had unwittingly picked out one of Eric’s most cherished go-to instruments. Still, Clapton kept his word, and Hubert left London and returned to the States, Strat in hand.

It wasn’t long afterwards that word got back to Hubert that Clapton badly missed his guitar. “I even got a call from Eric’s butler”, Hubert remembers. So Hubert reunited a relieved Clapton with the precious Strat a few months later backstage at a concert.

The Guitar in question? Turns out it was “Blackie”, an iconic instrument that Guitar Center went on to purchase for a record-setting $959,500 in 2004 at a Christie’s auction to support the Crossroads Centre, a drug and alcohol addiction rehabilitation facility founded by Clapton.

We badly wanted to reunite Hubert and Blackie, but alas, Blackie was “on tour” that  Friday night at Guitar Center Hollywood as a part of our series of traveling Legends Collection events featuring iconic instruments from our vaults. Next time for sure.

“Do the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games help turn players into real musicians?”

Honestly, I’ve heard that question at least a hundred times. Until recently, we always answered the question with an intuitive “yes”, though we had no real proof other than our instinct. If you’re a Guitar Hero player, you know that we’ve been in the game since GH2, so we’re clearly believers. (In GH4, we’re the virtual music store.)

Our belief has always been that while most video games sell fantasy, guitar-oriented video games sell an achievable dream. Piloting a Samopod Space Prodder and vaporizing a class-B planet system? That’s a fantasy. Learning to play a guitar so well, you’re gigging in front of adoring thousands? That’s a dream you can realize. And it’s driving instrument sales, or at least, that was our theory.

Late last year, we decided to put some hard numbers around our hypothesis. We surveyed 7000 gamers, both from our own large customer panel and an outside list. Here’s a little of what we found:

• Of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band players that do not currently play a musical instrument, two-thirds (67%) indicated that they are likely to begin playing a real instrument in the next two years.

• Nearly three out of four (72%) musicians who play games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have spent more time playing their real instrument(s) since they began playing these game.

The survey was picked up by a number of national news outlets and gamer sites/blogs. And over 300,000 people visited our — now dark — aRealGuitar.com holiday site. We hadn’t expected controversy, to be sure, yet some guitar gamers who weren’t interested in becoming guitar players took exception. So for the record: we think the guitar video games are great, even if you’re not ready to strap on a real Strat. Enjoy. But if you happen to be ready to make the world a louder place, we’re totally ready for you.

Guitar Center in-game shot: Guitar Hero 4

I’ve been changing guitar strings for decades. Smugly, I had always placed the degree of difficulty somewhere between tying my shoes and pumping gas. That all changed when I met Joey Brasler, now one of our top guitar merchants. He took a sad look at a Baby Taylor I brought into work, rolled his eyes, and sat me down for a restringing lesson. I indulged him, figuring he was just another purist with a mania for ritual. Wrong.  The result, actually, is that my guitars now all stay in tune. My old method (the chaos twist) caused the strings to slip rebelliously, creating unique and sub-musical surprises in the middle of solos and other moments of truth, especially with new strings. But no more.

Enter The Axesmith: a series of DIY videos we’ll be posting over the next few weeks designed to help you maintain, adjust and in general get the most out of your guitar. With that, here’s the first in the series. The topic: changing the strings on your acoustic guitar. (No snickering.)