How much can you learn from pop über-diva Lady Gaga about marketing your brand via social media? A great deal, as it turns out.
The past decade has not been kind to the music industry. Lured by digital music products, the convenient and comparatively low cost alternative to compact discs, consumers have abandoned music stores in favor of purchasing music online and downloading it to ever shrinking gadgets like iPods. In the wake of the digital era, many musicians, even the artists whose songs receive a substantial amount of radio play, have discovered that their chosen career path is not as lucrative as it was in years past.
Enter Lady Gaga. The singer/songwriter has mastered the art of leveraging social media to drive sales of her albums and digital singles — $8 million in album sales and $20 million in digital single sales, to be exact. Lady Gaga’s latest venture, as a spokeswoman for her own shade of Mac Cosmetics’ Viva Glam lipstick, has been wildly successful as well; the shade has already outsold any launch in Viva Glam’s 16-year history. Now companies that have nothing at all to do with music or the music industry are tapping her to market their products – not as the “face” of the products, but rather, as the “brain” behind the marketing strategies.
What is Lady Gaga’s secret? It is quite simple, and very contemporary. She has taken the medium that has hounded many of her peers – that is, digital media – and used it to her advantage. Social media in particular has been crucial to her success. The premiere of her “Bad Romance” video on LadyGaga.com generated a Twitter trending topic that lasted a week and a cumulative 110 million views on YouTube to date.
This is because Lady Gaga stays in constant contact with her nearly 2.8 million Twitter followers and more than 5.2 million Facebook fans. Though Universal, Lady Gaga’s label, occasionally supplement’s the singer’s online efforts with marketing firm partnerships, the vast majority of the time the musician maintains a hands-on relationship with her fans and marketing empire.
The lesson: Do not be afraid of the negative impact social media could have on your brand. Take a page from Lady Gaga’s book, and utilize it as a powerful marketing tool. Social media can also be leveraged for crisis management. In the wake of a massive recall, Toyota is attempting to restore its tarnished image via online social networks such as Twitter.
Social media is here, and its presence in commerce is growing. Soon, it could very likely become a necessary part of conducting business. You can fear it, but you cannot outrun it. So why not use it to your advantage?
In 1875, when Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone, people probably weren’t convinced that this new invention would even work. Now, telephones may have evolved into pocket-size devices that do more things than Inspector Gadget could shake his hat at, but the initial concept is the same, two-way communication.
Most people fill their tweets with links and their whereabouts throughout the day for tweeple across the world to see. Some tweets go unnoticed while others have headlines interesting enough to click the link that follows. There is one type of tweet that seems to always gets attention. No matter how long ago the tweet was sent and regardless if there is a message that follows, tweets containing a photo are irresistible.
In 1990, if you told CompuServe executives their 600 thousand subscribers would amount to less than 2% of daily messages sent on a social media network, they would have laughed in your face. CompuServe dominated online service in the 1980’s and continued to be a major player in the 1990’s. As technology continued to improve and companies merged and subsequently closed, CompuServe’s popularity eventually faded away.
