10.07.09 
Articles 
AnnaBy Cortney Harding
In this age of oversharing, it seems strange to think that until 10 or 15 years ago the most a fan could hope for in terms of communication from a famous artist was a signed picture from a fan club or a few minutes outside a tour bus after a show.
When Pete Wentz and his band, Fall Out Boy, started making noise in 2003, the band was noted not only for its emo-pop music but also the way it used e-mail and blog postings to forge closer relationships with fans at a time when most acts were still getting online.
Millions of albums later, Wentz and his bandmates stay in touch with Twitter and use the Web to engage fans with such quirky online games as “Fall Out Boy Trail,” a play on the primitive computer game “Oregon Trail,” and viral promotion campaigns like Citizens for Our Betterment, which promoted the band’s latest album, “Folie a Deux,” under the guise of a political organization.
1. HOW DO YOU DEVELOP YOUR DIGITAL STRATEGIES?
Ninety-nine percent of the time we come up with the ideas, like the takeoff on the “Oregon Trail” game or the Citizens for Our Betterment campaign. Obviously we don’t have any programing skills, though, so we don’t do any of the back end. But we go through all the bugs of everything before they come out and speak up if we don’t like the way something is presented. There are times when we are approached by different people or companies. We are open to cool ideas from other people, for sure.
2. FALL OUT BOY WAS ONE OF THE FIRST BANDS TO EMBRACE MYSPACE AND SOCIAL NETWORKING, BUT NOW EVERYONE USES THOSE PLATFORMS. HOW DO YOU KEEP UP WITH NEW AND DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES?
We were lucky in a weird way because we came in at the tail end of the era when bands still had videos on MTV and were still selling records and made money touring, and we had peer-to-peer downloads on MP3.com and MySpace and all of that. So, we had the best of all those things and were able to establish ourselves as a band so that if one platform disappeared, we still had other outlets.
In terms of new stuff, I’m pretty much a total insomniac, and I’m up all night looking around. I follow the kids. My brother was the one who told me to switch everything to Facebook. He was way early on it and he is younger than me. I think that you get into trouble when you stand still. You got to be like a shark.
3. SPEAKING OF NEW THINGS, WHEN CAN WE EXPECT THE NEXT FALL OUT BOY ALBUM?
I think that there’s nothing worse than when you like a band and you get their record and you can totally tell that their music is uninspired and they just felt like they had to put out a record. We have been grinding so much that we haven’t had the time to kind of figure out what we want to do creatively.
4. THERE HAVE BEEN REPORTS THAT FALL OUT BOY IS BASICALLY DONE. THAT’S NOT THE CASE, RIGHT?
We put out a video (“What a Catch, Donnie”) that people can interpret as the final thing or they can interpret it as a celebration of what’s going on or whatever it is.
We are going to stop doing Fall Out Boy when Fall Out Boy stops being fun. I think that the world needs a break from Fall Out Boy as much as Fall Out Boy needs a break from the world. They need to embrace some other bands out there and you can’t always be shoving everything in people’s faces all the time. To that extent, it is calculated.
Maybe we will start recording again in two weeks; maybe it will be three years. I don’t really know. There is no plan in motion at all and no one has said the “H” word (hiatus) no matter how many times people try to get us to say it.
5. BUT YOU WON’T DISAPPEAR FROM VIEW, SINCE YOU ARE SO ACTIVE ON TWITTER.
Yeah, although sometimes (toddler son) Bronx tweets for me. I was on UberTwitter and (my wife) Ashlee (Simpson) came in the room and asked if I could watch him and he just went in on Baby Twitter. It was whatever numbers or letters he put down went out as the tweet. I was like, “That’s pretty cool.”
6. AS MUCH FUN AS IT IS TO HAVE YOUR SON TWITTER, YOU MUST HAVE A BROADER STRATEGY FOR USING IT.
You use Twitter two completely, vastly different ways. It could be the ultimate tool of narcissism. Yesterday I said, “I am using Twitter in its most narcissist way possible. I am tweeting in the mirror while I have another mirror set up so I can read the Tweet forwards.” It can be so narcissist and selfish, but at the same time we used it to get $1 million for an organization called Invisible Children by asking followers to each contribute $1.
One of the greatest things about Twitter is pointing at stuff. For instance, Music Mondays is awesome because you are able to let people hear music that they wouldn’t be able to hear otherwise.
Source: Reuters
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