MyCityRocks, where the Audience Works

Cliff Kurtzman helped create MyCityRocks to give its members a chance to enjoy life in exceptional ways while also helping them represent and get involved with the things they are most passionate about, including their music and their pride in their local community.

According to Cliff, "It’s all about thinking globally while acting locally, and using technology to enable people to do it. There seems to be a natural tendency for people to want to take pride in being a part of their local community, and MyCityRocks was conceived to leverage on this desire. We also wanted to be able to create a community that functions both online and offline, and that is easiest to do when members are in close geographic proximity. This also allows us to target events, sponsors and advertisers on the local level, and eventually to allow members in different geographic areas to challenge and compete against one another.

"The MySpace social network provided the initial backbone and much of the inspiration for MyCityRocks. MySpace has built a very successful network for allowing people to interact and express the things in life which they are passionate about. But MySpace only provides the infrastructure to allow the interaction. Our concept with MyCityRocks focuses on providing content and activity over the social networks in order to affect people's behavior and enable social action and change. It seemed the next logical step in using the technology.

"We’ve been very surprised at how strongly the brand seemed to attract people wanting to get involved and help, even in our earliest days. When we put out a call for a Street Team to help us with all our activities, we had fifty people volunteer to support the company, even though there were costs associated with doing so. The support we have received has been extraordinary."