What AllHipHop Needs to Do to Win

Photo by Jordan Hollender for Inc Magazine

This week, Inc Magazine published an article about Allhiphop’s real state of affairs on its website: Allhiphop.com’s Founders Thought a Weeklong Event Would Raise the Company’s Profile and Boost Growth. Written by Kermit Pattison, the article goes into great detail about how 2006’s AllHipHop Week almost brought the business to its knees. Of course they turned it around, but the questions remains whether the company has done all it can to stay afloat? The magazine article also offers advice to AHH, provided by three experts.

One expert talks about partnering to extend the brand, with an example of going into the clothing business. (Oh yeah, we need another hip-hop clothing line). Another talks about getting back to basics in terms of defining the business, and appointing an advisory board. The third expert offers the advice of the company capitalizing off of what it already does well and investing in some real Web marketing.

Perhaps expert #2 and expert #3 are a lot more on point with recommendations for how AllHipHop could and should be a successful business. There’s really no reason at this point, given the amount of page views and unique visitors the site has, and even the number of active participants in its ill community, that the site hasn’t gone on to surpass revenues of sites managed by mainstream hip-hop magazines. The basics are there already — the content and the community. What AllHipHop has to do is figure out how to monetize that very active community that wants to consume and share all that content. Sure UGC (user generated content) and SM (social media) would prove themselves a likely mate for the business, it’s already there. It’s just not well thought out or well played. And does AHH need to reinvent the wheel in those areas so much, or could the company better benefit from partnering with like-minded business to offer better experiences to its community? (This is where Inc’s expert #1 makes sense). Of course it would be as easy as slicing melted ice cream for AHH to jump on the social media bandwagon and go checkbook-first into creating its on social network, but the fact is, it’s not entirely necessary for the site’s survival. It seems like it would be the easiest business model, yet if offering and delivering the same sort of insider content remains the primary premise here then it becomes more about strengthening the current brand with minor features of UGC — features that will encourage the community to still interact with the brand and not just one another.

At the end of the day, AHH has to look at its business long and hard. Define its mission and vision and remodel it’s business by determining what it’s USP (unique selling proposition) is. Why does it still slaughter many other sites in its competitive purview? These are the things that matter. But what probably matters most is how the company sees itself. A lot of the way it’s been conducting itself is like a print magazine that happens to have a website, instead of like a Web business. The importance of looking at what works in Web marketing vs the historical marketing plan it has been executing. There’s definitely a win in here for AHH somewhere.

On another note, it’s kind of nice to see more than just Black Enterprise taking a look at a really valuable urban products/businesses. Let’s hope we see more articles like these coming from unexpected places. Though there are lots of blog sites cropping up to cover the business of hip-hop, there’s still a lot more reporting and analysis that goes on in magazines and magazine sites (or just straight up marketing/business blogs). Even when the business of hip-hop bloggers don’t agree with the business magazines, at least they realize that the business magazine is still an important entity.