The How And Why Behind The Melfest Community Strategy Written by Ben Robertson on February 12, 2022

It is one thing that Melodifestivalen is such a big show in Sweden, but it’s the fringe events that normally surround the show that truly separates out Melodifestivalen from those elsewhere. My journeys in the past to Tallinn, Espoo, Ventspils, Chisinau and others in search of that National Final buzz previously were great, but more akin to being in town for a big concert, rather than a major cultural event.

That’s especially notable when the touring circus visits small town Sweden, when the Melodifestivalen regalia dominates the high street and the city links as many fringe events as they can to maximise the event. One of my highlights of visiting Luleå in 2020 was hanging out at Navet, the council-run youth centre, with teenagers huddled round singing ‘Alla Flickor’ on a karaoke machine.

The Coop Norrbotten Arena, host venue for Luleå’s heat of Melodifestivalen 2020 (Photo: Luleå Kommun)

There isn’t that this year, with the Melodifestivalen tour being cancelled. Instead we are Stockholm where there is plenty going on every hour of the day. And we are here because of CoVID-19 restrictions over the winter, meaning the focus on just making sure the core show can take place, and in turn no preparations for fringe events around the shows have understandably been made.

Like with most things over the past two years the move within Melodifestivalen in these times has been to move online. What can we learn from Melodifestivalen about how to create an online community?

Interactions and conversations

It shows the scale of Melodifestivalen and the importance of this within SVT’s strategy that a position of Community Manager exists for Melodifestivalen. The community manager is responsible for being connected to the audience and community following Melodifestivalen, keeping track of what people think, say and interact with.

To learn more about this I spoke to the current Community Manager, Elina Cederfeldt Vahlne.

Elina has academic and practical roles in communication on her CV before moving into SVT’s Melodifestivalen team.

Now you may be expecting much of Elina’s role to be making TikToks, writing Tweets and all that jazz. Yes, it is no surprise that she is one of the team running the social media accounts that SVT offer to follow the show (a full list of these will be at the end of this article). You will be far from surprised to know these are extensively used, and the strategy is to enable communication opportunities that aren’t just one-way traffic, as Elina explains.

Instagram is Melodifestivalen’s biggest social media platform with over 150,000 followers.

“Asking questions and letting people answer things is key, finding out what your thoughts and your opinion are, and making sure that everyone gets heard. This show wouldn’t exist without the audience that it has, and it is important to acknowledge that and acknowledge them.”

This is social media 101, successful content is content that is interacted with and allows for the audience to express their opinion with their reaction. Ensuring that you are able to acknowledge the audience in this way helps to create content better adapted for the community you are serving.

This interview and article isn’t so much about the use of social media, which is commonplace within every delegation from Lisadell to Latvia and everywhere in between. It’s the other spaces that Melodifestivalen exists that is fascinating.

A Platform You Can Control

Let’s start with that part so spoken about here in the past week, the Melodifestivalen App, due to many users being unable to vote in Saturday’s show.  Melodifestivalen first had a dedicated app in 2015. The main attractive feature is of course those free votes, which entices so many to log in during the show. However it’s also home to news updates which come from both the artist themselves and SVT in a flow resembling your front pages on Instagram or Facebook.

Creating an app has this big advantage for SVT. At the same time as the app was building up the excellent Melodifestivalen website run by the broadcaster was shut down. The policy dictating that decision was that no sub-section of SVT should run their own website, and thus new methods were needed to get their information out to their fanbase. Elina explains that the app is “incredibly precious” to SVT, as “the place for our digital community to come together.”

“One of the reasons for the app in the first place was that in social media you can’t really control what people are seeing. You don’t know how they will change their algorithms and it is hard to form a strategy on that.”

The features of the app are more than just voting and content, and they also promote interaction with others, you can see how your friends have voted, creating groups to interact with each other, and tip who qualifies from each heat in turn. However the one feature most striking and creative is the introduction of the All Stars cards, that keeps the hardcore fans coming back for more. This is a digital card collecting feature, where each hour you have the chance to collect new cards featuring classic acts and moments from Eurovision and Melodifestivalen history.

Example collector card from the All Stars section of the Melodifestivalen App

The buzz about the cards is two fold. Firstly, for a relatively trivial part of the app, the historical information is plentiful – even the biggest Eurovision quiz kings and queens would learn something on the back of some of these cards. Secondly because some of the cards are rarer than others to appear on the app, there is an active card trading community within the Melodifestivalen fan base. It means that Sweden’s national final becomes something that is considered more than just six nights a year.

How much more Melodifestivalen content are SVT aiming for? Elina explains that there is an effort to make Melodifestivalen a “continuous experience throughout its run, to allow people to step into the Melfest world at any time they choose”. In practice this means that people can go onto the Melodifestivalen app on their phone and flip their screen into landscape mode. That will activate Melodifestivalen themed videos to play – for example at quarter past nine on Sunday night the content was a video mix of Melodifestivalen entries of the past, a visual version of ESCRadio.

There’s a diverse schedule of all-encompassing content being created for different purposes. Taking inspiration from the successes of neighbouring broadcaster NRK in Norway, there are different slow TV videos created, one a live stream lasting three days showing the stage being built in Globen, and another of voting moments in Melodifestivalen history designed to talk those who live and breathe all things schlager into a peaceful sleep. Further content this year includes the ‘Så funkar Mello’ series of behind-the-scenes coverage and parties both before and after the show starts to keep the crowd there for longer. All this can be found on the dedicated Melodifestivalen section of SVT Play.

When we talk about the Melodifestivalen app, technically we actually should be specifying which of two apps we are referring to. That is because a second app has been created called Mello United which is designed to be used on tablets. This app was released last year during the social distancing times of the time when it would be immoral for many to meet up with their friends and family to watch the show together with friends. The trick is that this app integrates a chat function with streaming the show on the same screen, allowing for interaction between friends and bringing people together.

For the 2022 relaunch of Mello United an extra feature that has been added is the opinion to have text commentary alongside the show’s broadcast. Furthermore, for extra outreach, this text commentary is offered in both the Swedish and English languages, so even if you are alone you can have the sensation of watching with others and having the show explained to you.

Managing A Community

There’s one more thing to mention that SVT manages that on the one hand feels so incredibly out there and different, but on the other hand fits into all the rest of the community projects we have mentioned before. They manage a Discord server.

Discord allows for anybody to create a separate space for their friends or on a certain theme/topic, and since the 2021 edition Melodifestivalen has had a dedicated server on the platform. Here it is set up to have different conversation topics in both English and Swedish languages discussing the show, tips and of course a way to share what All Stars cards you desire. While far from a huge server at around 1500 users currently, the number of active users has more than doubled in the last week as fans search for somewhere to discuss the show.

For a public broadcaster to be engaged in the running of a Discord server is a significant challenge. As an extension of SVT’s activities is it important that the server follows public broadcasting guidelines. This means in practice that nobody may advertise on the Discord server, and that posts must always follow the 21 rules that forbid certain types of content that can be harmful or discriminatory. Not following these rules can result in warnings, temporary bans from the server, or permanent exclusion.

As discussions come in thick and fast on the Discord server, especially during the live shows, moderation to ensure this platform is a safe space is a challenge. It is not a challenge that SVT is able to run alone. Discord is a community space and SVT has been advertising positions within the server to find new moderators, especially looking for those who can be active during the live shows when conversations are their most intense. These moderator positions do receive some internal training but are voluntary.

While running such servers is a huge undertaking for Melodifestivalen to manage, it is part of the mantra that Elina as Community Manager possesses that means such plans are essential. “People exist on all platforms we we have to exist on all platforms,” she tells me during our interview. And sometimes this means trying the next big thing to see what sticks. Last year SVT experimented with the invitation-only Clubhouse application, designed for voice communication, as it grew in popularity last winter. It isn’t being used this year as SVT follows where the people are heading to.

Re-imagining the Eurovision Community

What a luxury it is in the world of the Eurovision Song Contest that there can be a role that is so dedicated to keeping the community who follows it informed.

And what we gleam from this journey through the output from the Melodifestivalen team is that it isn’t just their production of content and information that is key – but our interaction with it. The ability for us following the show, the community, to comment on, interact with and invest our time and interest on the show is far more here than it is anywhere else in the Eurovision world. That the public broadcaster has this goal that, should we wish, we can consume Melodifestivalen content 24/7 is as intense as it sounds, but the diversity of their output is commendable and shows off the all-encompassing power Melodifestivalen has on Swedish society.

What I reflect on with this is the question of what community is in the world of modern Eurovision. For myself as an 33-year-old hack of many Song Contests, the easy and obvious association of the Eurovision community is to that of OGAE, the world’s largest Eurovision fan club. OGAE has many collaborations with the European Broadcasting Union over tickets, accredited media access and planning of events in the host city. Here in Sweden there is a similarly good relationship between Melodifestivalklubben, the Swedish branch of OGAE, and SVT, in normal years getting options to buy tickets in advance, media access each week for the new songs and access to all 10 of the ‘F’ accreditations that SVT receives each year for Eurovision.

Indeed there has been overlap and collaboration between SVT and Melodifestivalklubben in content this year. In a small change to the drip-feed of the Melodifestivalen songs for this year the first reveal of this year’s songs came on the Tjuvlyssna show – a 15 minute web broadcast where Melodifestivalklubben members get to rank the songs, with listeners able to hear about 15 seconds of each song there.

While they may work together, the gap between the community that is Melodifestivalklubben, and the community that SVT creates is only growing larger. In a world that has moved community building online, and open to all, the ability to connect with others without having to be a member seems more natural. Being a member of Melodifestivalklubben requires a commitment of 400 SEK (about £32) per year, paid each year from July to July, barriers that increasingly seem obtuse in the modern way of community building.

Now of course voluntary organisations like Melodifestivalklubben, bound by their democratic structures and need to be self-sufficient, need some financial income from membership. But when placed side-by-side with broadcasters who are now entering this space to build community, as well as other platforms and communities like on Twitter or Reddit, we are diversifying the worlds and spaces where one can be a Eurovision or Melodifestivalen die-hard fan away from paid-up memberships.

There are so many ways to follow Melodifestivalen, but more than just it being a content producing machine, it is the engagement and the facilitation of conversation that drives so much of the strategy. Should this continue the next generation of Eurovision fans won’t need to join unofficial networks of fan clubs to be considered a die-hard supporter – they may exist in a whole plethora of spaces that are no less worthy.

Arguably, we are already at that point today.

Where To Find Everything

Below please find links to follow Melodifestivalen on all their different spaces, as well as to join Melodifestivalklubben, OGAE Sweden.

Snapchat: Melodifestivalen