#7 WE WANT YOU!
It’s been a while since the last announcement. Well, there won’t be any big announcements this time, just some ideas I want to share. Since there are no announcements, it’s obvious that nothing has changed on IdolOnChaos in these past weeks. But I’d like to make some changes, or actually, some improvements of this project.
Let’s start by the main problem: great ideas are cool, but usually require people to get developed properly. Right now, I’m handling almost everything on IdolOnChaos, except for the two collaborations (Idol Underworld and JROCK’N’ROLL) which, incidentally, helped me create some of the most interesting content on this website. In any case, I’m working almost daily on the site, whether it’s to add news, videos or writing articles and stuff. There are already some sections which are kinda neglected, which made me realize that if I want to make this project bigger, I can’t do that alone. And I believe there is some potential in IdolOnChaos.
So the big idea is to get some help from you. Yes, you, human being who is reading this announcement. I wanted to make the classic we want you poster with an idol instead of the good old Uncle Sam, but I’m too lazy to do that, so try to imagine it.
Are cats still popular on the internetz?
There are many big and small activities you can help with, and any help — even the tiniest — would be appreciated. Even if you don’t have that much free time to spend here, but would still love to help out, it’s ok, as long as you put the basic effort to do it right.
Depending on the activities you want to do, you would of course be required to have certain skills. The only basic skills absolutely required is speaking a somehow understandable form of English. So, even if the website has an Italian section, you don’t need to be Italian; especially because probably soon I will make the website English-only. So just tell me you love pizza and you can work with me.
The cool thing is that you’ll be even more into the whole idol thing. Depending on what you do, you may also get the chance to do something with your favorite group (like an interview). For interesting activities like interviews and similar stuff, anyone in the team who wants to contribute will be free to do it.
Another important note: as much as I try to work professionally, IdolOnChaos is still a hobby. So I’m not earning anything, at least for now (who knows, in the future…). Of course, I’d like you to consider this as a hobby too, meaning that there is no chance of getting paid. However, I’m putting some money in this project, but I won’t ask you to contribute — this is my project, after all. Of course, if you’d like to do it I’d be grateful and it would allows us to do more stuff, but it won’t be required to join the IdolOnChaos team.
So I’ll try to list the current activities and the ideas I also want to work on in the future (or even now, if someone can handle them). If you think you can help out, just send me a message anywhere; even if you don’t have any experience in this kind of stuff, don’t worry: after ten years in another webzine, I guess know how things work and I’ll help you learning how to do your job.
Current Activities
- Reviews & Articles: this kind of stuff takes some time, and you would surely need to speak English decently to do it.
- Photo galleries creation and update: this is something that would need to be done quite often, or at least more than once every three months like I’m doing. It’s a simple activity, when you don’t have a lot of other stuff to do.
- Spotify playlists: again, this one is quite simple too, and it’s not even something I think that needs to be done that often.
- Translations: right now, doing written interviews is a pain, especially since my Japanese is not that great. Of course, you’d need to know both Japanese and English to do this.
- Idol-Tube videos: especially for the live category, it would be cool if you could add some videos every now and then. It takes literally five minutes to add one.
- News: it takes a bit more than five minutes, and it needs to be done daily (or at least whenever something interesting happens).
- Social Media: 99% of the posts on social medias are automatically created, but posting more stuff (especially on Twitter) would be great.
- E-mail management: this would consist mainly in contacting idol groups to work with them on interviews and stuff. Of course, you need to speak Japanese.
New Activities
- YouTube: well, I have this YouTube channel and right now I’m using it only for the Know Your Idol interviews. How about creating more content? Just to list some ideas: weekly/monthly updates on the idol scene, in-depth videos on certain groups, other kind of videos, etc. Also live streaming stuff may be another option.
- Know Your Idol 2.0: what I can say here is I don’t even know. But I’d like to expand the concept of “Know Your Idol” and create more videos with idols to help people know more about them.
- Instagram: probably the social media I hate the most, since they made it impossible to automate anything, but that’s another story. Anyway, creating stories, reels and that kind of stuff may be a good way to attract more people, but I still don’t know what kind of content we could put there.
- Podcasts: I thought of this one literally five seconds ago, but people love podcasts recently, so why not?
- Translations (yes, again): we are dealing with Japanese artists, which means that there are lots of ways to use your translation skills. First that comes to mind, interviews aside, is lyrics translation. But I think there may be other things we could do.
- Your ideas: if you have any idol-related idea you would like to develop but don’t know how to do it by yourself, let’s talk about it. Even if you have an idea and would like to suggest it without actually contributing, tell me about it.
Regarding The Future
Ok, so let’s talk a bit about the future of IdolOnChaos.
The main focus of this project is and will always be spreading idol culture outside Japan, especially (but not only) in Europe. After one year and half, many interesting things happened, among which the collaboration with Idol Underworld and the written interviews, mostly made together with JROCK’N’ROLL.
Having a team of passionate people will surely help this project to grow. One single person can do only so much, two people can do a lot more stuff, just think what ten people may be able to do.
Some other people already proved that bringing idol in Europe is possible, so how about we think of doing it in the future? Yes, it’s expensive for everyone and this damn virus is not really helping, but there is also the easier option of live streaming idol shows sponsored by IdolOnChaos. It would have been cool to sponsor some idol shows now that they can’t do them, but right now it’s kinda impossible for me.
Just some ideas, but in any case, if we want to think bigger, we need to make IdolOnChaos bigger. That’s why your help may be the key to do many great things in the future.
So that’s all for now. Hope that some of you will be interested in doing something together; otherwise, the site will keep going as usual, don’t worry. I’ll leave a contact form below, but you can send a message anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram) if you prefer.
