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How Lady Gaga Moves More than Just her Body

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Pop sensation Lady Gaga has managed to sell 8 million albums since 2008, in a time when no one is buying CDs. How did she do it? By leveraging social media and developing creative partnerships to sell product, albums and singles.

She is the first artist to score four consecutive number one singles from a debut album and the video premiere of her “Bad Romance” video lead to a Universal Music server crash and over 110 million views on YouTube. Not only is Lady Gaga scoring in the singles and album sales department she is also reaping the benefits of creative partnerships. With the success of Lady Gaga’s career, big brands are reaching out to Lady Gaga for her help in selling their products. She has been named creative director for Polaroid in the hopes of reigniting the brand and the Estee Lauder Group is seeing record sales of Lady Gaga’s and Cyndi Lauper’s Mac Viva Glam lipstick.

Lady Gaga boosts 2.8 million Twitter followers and over 5.2 million Facebook fans that are more than eager to hear the latest Gaga news. This army of followers is gaga, well, over Gaga. In the February 22 Ad Age issue, Steve Berman, Universal Music’s president of sales and marketing states in the article “GAGA, OOH LA LA: Why The Lady is the Ultimate Social Climber”, “Gaga has worked tirelessly in keeping up daily if not hourly communications with her fans and growing fanbase through all the technology that exists.”



Her Facebook page features a merchandise store, events calendar, and gift shop of Lady Gaga images to send friends. Her Twitter page is filled with tweets which encourage users to watch videos and tweet with the singer. “Check me out on the Today Show with Cyndi” and “Any scousers gotta video if “the living dress” so happy I could die? Tweet me!” However, for someone not down with the lingo (as in me), more than 140 characters would help translate her tweets.

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Social Media comes to the Age of Aquarius

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Hair - "The American Tribal Love Rock Musical" - is going to try a new way of reaching out to its audience. Starting tomorrow, the show's finale number where the cast and audience mix and mingle and dance to "The Age of Aquarius" will be recorded in high definition video and posted to the show's web page. The camera, controlled from the show's light booth, will follow a pre-programmed path to pan across the stage and zoom in on cast and audience members. Anyone visiting the site can then download the video, post it to their Facebook page, or send out a tweet to all their friends.

Make no mistake - this is a first for the relatively stodgy Broadway theatre scene. Every new show these days has a web page, and some have videos of scenes or musical numbers from the show but Hair is about the only show where cast and audience actually interact during the show.

What's in it for Hair? The best possible publicity for a show heading into its second year on the great white way - favorable word of mouth. Being able to spread the word about the show through social networks will probably give the box office a significant boost and keep the show running (and profitable) for many months.

Here's link to a story in today's New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/theater/02hair.html?hpw

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Rage Against the Machine Saves Christmas - Facebook Campaign Leads to Surprise Viral Victory

posted by Nick Cifuentes @ Sunday, December 20, 2009 - 9:59 PM
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The ageless metal-rap rockers, Rage Against the Machine, are making noise again, and this time it's by pure accident. The political-driven rock group hasn't released an album since retiring back in 2000, however, they surfaced last week on the UK's biggest radio station, BBC Radio One, to talk about how they suddenly emerged on the UK pop music charts for the much fought over "Christmas Number One" title for 2009.

The UK "Christmas Number One" title has normally been held by the UK series, X Factor, winner - a version of American Idol produced in the UK. For four straight years, the "Christmas Number One" winner has been held by the X Factor winner, and this year it was Joe Mcelderry, who was expected to win the title for singing the Miley Cyrus song "The Climb."

However, a Facebook inspired campaign that was launched by UK resident Jon Morter as an entertaining (joke) protest against the mainstream pop that in most ways does dominate music charts across the globe these days. Morter's Facebook group "Rage Against the Machine for Christmas Number 1" quickly grew to 800,000 fans, and was overspread with users who pledged to buy the track to help push the band to the top of the charts. The Facebook Group currently has more than 970,000 members as of Dec. 20.

The mainstream news picked up the story after the first two weeks of December when the Facebook group, which launched in the beginning of December began to grow quickly, and while going offline many times during the beginning days of December, prompted some to make several claims of foul play - however it didn't slow the Rage Against the Machine victory.

And once Joe McElderry's track was released in a hard copy on CD, unlike Rage Against the Machine, the X Factor winner from the UK began to close the gap on the suddenly popular American rock band and their 1992 produced single "Killing in the Name Of."

On December 20, BBC Radio One announced the final winner, and thanks to a surge of downloads via blog posts, Facebook comments, and Twitter tweets - the infectious campaign influenced social media channels and led to a Rage Against the Machine victory.



As announced in an interview with BBC Radio One before being announced winners, the band said if they did end up winning, they would play a free concert in the UK in early 2010.


Analysis Breakdown

Starting in the beginning of December, from Dec. 1 - Dec. 11; while the Facebook Group was going on and offline sporadically, the number of social media mentions among Twitter, Blogs and Facebook were small in numbers of original posts to users' profiles. However, after December 11 when the group went back up live, it kicked over dominoes that sent tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates soaring in numbers.

The mainstream news did not pick up the story until December 14; with social media leading the majority of the charge based on the following data:

(In the following charts, only the keywords "RATM" & "Rage Against the Machine" & "Christmas Number One" & "Joe McElderry" were used in this analysis. All data was taken from the social media monitoring tool Radian6. The dates of Dec. 1 - Dec. 20 were used in this analysis.)

Twitter, Blogs, & Facebook (46,337 posts):
Mainstream News Posts (3,565 Posts):
Twitter Posts (26,664 Posts):

Blog Posts (18,129 Posts):
**The charts above include only a limited set of data, due to a number of other keywords that could have been used in Twitter, Facebook Updates and Blogs; keywords like "Rage"; which were too broad to analyze more specifically at the time of this posting. The above posts do however represent the trending to their exact details.

Social Media Extras:

The campaign also led to the creation of a separate mini-site that housed the interview with RATM and BBC last week, a separate Twitter account and an already established YouTube channel that held the video seen above where the band performed their smash hit, "Killing in the Name Of" live Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009 on BBC Radio One.

Twitter Account: @RATM4Xmas; 2,698 followers
YouTube Channel: A user-created channel that garnered two YouTube awards during the week of Dec. 14 -20; #61 Most Viewed Channel in the UK & #14 Most Viewed Directors Channel in the UK


Conclusion

It is really nice to see the effect a viral marketing campaign that had no direction, but was more led by a crowdsourcing effort to push a final result -putting RATM at the top of the charts. It normally takes many dollars to create such a buzz in the matter of a few weeks, and this was done with nothing but spirit and passion for the push to the top - led by users with little outside influence, and all with the help of social media!


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