Lady Gaga: A Social Media Phenomena

Love her or hate her, Lady Gaga has the world’s attention – online and off. The 24-year-old New Yorker has quickly set phenomenal music and social media records since the release of her debut album in August of 2008.

In just two years Gaga has…

  • Sold more than 50 million albums and 40 million singles
  • Been nominated for six Grammys and won two
  • Received more VMA nominations (13) in a single year (2010) than any artist in MTV history
  • Is the only digital-era artist to top the $5 million sales mark with her first two hits Just Dance and  Poker Face, according to Yahoo Music
  • Was deemed the fourth most powerful celebrity and second most powerful musician in the world in 2010 by Forbes magazine
  • Was named one of TIME magazines 100 Most Influential People in 2010
  • Was named by Barbara Walters as one of 10 most interesting people of 2009
  • Also check out this list of Gaga’s record-breaking Billboard chart achievements

Lady Gaga is as much a phenomena to the social media world as she is to the music industry. Although this begs the question, how many of these records are due in part to the viral power of social media? Check out these social media records she has set, as of today:

FACEBOOK: 16,496,176 fans

YOUTUBE: 334,052 subscriptions

TWITTER: 5,805,964 followers

MYSPACE: 1,364,817 friends

  • While MySpace continues to phase out, I wanted to also point out her lofty fan base on the once popular social networking site.

Gaga’s unique style, which has been compared to that of Cindi Lauper, Madonna and Motley Crew; and musical talent has drawn international attention and praise. According to Famecount, Gaga is the most popular celebrity in the social world. Now that she has the world’s attention, it will be interesting to see what she does next in order to keep her dominance over the social sphere.

What do you think of Lady Gaga and how long do you think we can expect her social reign to last?

Posted on August 25, 2010 at 2:59 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: 

Have You Seen the New Tweet Button?

Twitter announced today the release of their first plugin the Tweet Button. Until now, site owners had to use third-party plugins to share content from their site with Twitter. Now Twitter has joined the ranks, and through their partnership with TweetMeme they have created the first Twitter plugin to allow people to share information from other sites with Twitter without having to leave the site they are on. Watch the video below to see how it works:

Anyone can add this button to their website by simply adding a few lines of customizable code that can be found here: Twitter Goodies – Tweet Button. If you want to add it within Blogger, check out this post from Blogger Plugins. If you are using WordPress check out this handy tip for adding the button from The Next Web. The button is simular to others, however here are two differences.

Suggested Accounts to Follow: This is most unique part of the plugin. After the user clicks the TweetButton and sends their message, another box will appear suggesting two other Twitter accounts to follow. The owner of the website gets to choose these two accounts. I’ll be interested to see stats on how this affects followership.

Twitter URL Shortener: Twitter finally got it’s own URL shortener http://t.co. I’m not sure how, or if, users will have access to the analytics and it doesn’t appear that they will have the option to switch to a different URL shortener within the TweetButton. Twitter says they are using this shortener to protect users and determine Tweet relevance:

Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue:

Our link service will also be used to measure information like how many times a link has been clicked. Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting.

Are you planning to install the Tweet Button? What do you hope to see Twitter bring us next?

Posted on August 12, 2010 at 6:02 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: 

One Year and 40 Blog Posts Later…

I graduated last year from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism with an ABJ in Public Relations and started working in the Digital Innovation Group (DIG) at Engauge as a social media associate in November 2009. Since then I have learned more than I ever expected to learn about social media and digital marketing, and feel even more passionate about the work we do here.

One of my favorite things to do is get together with other recent or soon to be grads and share stories, tips and our general experience of working in the real world. Yesterday I had lunch with Katherine Melick, who has been working as an account coordinator at an agency in Birmingham called Lawler Ballard Van Durand. Later she e-mailed me three questions that I thought I’d share here, in case anyone else wanted to join our discussion.

1. What is your favorite thing about Engauge?

My favorite thing about Engauge is the culture. I had six internships in college at large and small companies, agencies and startups – and each of those places had a very different atmosphere and way of doing things. Engauge is full of young, intelligent and very forward thinking people. Everyone loves to learn about and share new ideas/tools that make our lives/jobs easier, help our clients or are just cool things to know about.

My boss, Jeff Hilimire, Chief Digital Officer, is a huge advocate of getting everyone in our company to blog. He even “requires” everyone in DIG to blog “twice” a week about emerging tech. We host a weekly podcast (DIG:This) where we interview senior marketing executives from Fortune 500 companies, tech startups or tech bloggers. He also regularly brings in tech startups and businesses to demo their platforms for possible client partnerships. I have met lots of interesting people through these podcasts and demos.

All in all the office is a really fun creative place: we have lots of great lunch n’ learns, internal education meetings, meetings with innovative startups, organization memberships, team outings, holiday parties and even a beer cart on Friday!

2. What is your biggest challenge at the agency?

My two big challenges are figuring out the best ways to manage/prioritize my workload – and determining responsibilities and boundaries on different accounts.

The first is pretty typical. I work on several accounts and I also manage the interns in our department, so I can get them to help with big projects. But they all come from different backgrounds and have strengths in different areas, so figuring out who is best for what accounts and projects can be challenging. If I don’t plan right, I end up having to do it all myself on an even shorter deadline. Between teaching them how to do something, checking their work and keeping them busy when there isn’t something they can work on – I can get a little stressed out. And just about the time I think I’ve got them all figured out – their internship ends – and I have to start all over again:) I really do enjoy working with them though. I’ve learned so much from all our interns and love to hear about where they’ve been and what their goals are for the future.

The second is something I think all agencies and companies are struggling with right now. Who should be in charge of coming up with and actually writing for Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Who has the final say – ultimately the client, of course, but convincing them to trust and allow you to interact with fans and followers in real time, experiment with different outreach/messaging techniques, and play around in new spaces is a constant struggle we have.

3. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

I asked Ryan Holmes the CEO of Hootsuite this question the other day during one of our DIG:This podcasts, and he said that question was so unfair.

If you had told me five years ago that I would be running Facebook, Twitter and blogs for brands – I would have been scared because I didn’t really know anything about them then – and would‘ve had absolutely no idea how to get there. All these platforms have changed so much over the past few years, and I can guarantee you they will continue to change even faster in the next.

I do really like the fast past environment of an agency though and expect that I will stay in this kind of environment at least for the next five years. I could see myself eventually moving to the corporate side, and if I did that I would definitely go back and get an MBA. I’m still trying to figure out how useful an MBA is to an agency.

Would be interested to see how similar or different other recent grads are having working in social media over the last year?

Posted on August 4, 2010 at 9:22 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media · Tagged with: 

How to Find Your Brand’s Influencers

Last week I wrote about how Hootsuite had recently integrated Klout scores into their dashboard, and went on to explain how Klout scores work. I got an interesting comment from Laurent Pfertzel saying:

I think those influencer scores are okay, but lack one very important factor when considering influence: Context. You can’t be an influencer on everything. An influencer in computer security will likely not be an influencer in fashion (well, I should say low probability). So a flat influence score is very meaningless in my view.

I completely agree with this, except that I believe Hootsuite has solved this problem, because now you can search by keyword (context) and Klout score (influence.)

In the example below, I created a keyword search column in Hootsuite for Chick-fil-A, which is a really popular brand on Twitter. Then I used the “Filter By…” feature to sort the people that mentioned Chick-fil-A by Klout Score. Chick-fil-A was mentioned hundreds of times, so if I only had enough time to respond to 20 people I could adjust the “Klout score bar” and set a lower limit. Meaning that I could focus my time on responding to the most influential people talking about Chick-fil-A.

Posted on July 19, 2010 at 3:44 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: , ,

Old Spice: Raising the Bar

I know it’s been over 24 hours since the Old Spice campaign ended, so in the digital world that makes it ancient history, but I still want to write about how genius the team was that created it.

In case you missed it Wednesday, the Old Spice man, Isaiah Mustafa, filmed dozens of short personalized YouTube video responses to comments about Old Spice across networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more. The campaign team had a search engine pulling in comments from all over the Internet and looked for one’s that either:

1. Were written by an influential celebrities or bloggers; and/or…   2. We’re something that the creative team thought they could have fun with…

The result was 87 YouTube videos, of Isaiah Mustafa standing in front of a shower in a towel, on the OldSpice YoutTube Channel giving the most ridiculously hilarious answers you have ever heard.

Responses went to everyone from Allissa Milano, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Peter Shankman, Twitter, Gillette, George Stephanopoulos, Guy Kawasaki, Perez Hilton, Starbucks, Gawker, Pete Rose and dozens of regular people across the Internet. Choosing a favorite is tough, but I really liked his response to Ashton Kutcher – who was responding to the Pete Rose video that preceded his.

Everyone has been talking about the bar this has set for social marketing campaigns. Obviously I agree, Wieden + Kennedy has always produced fantastic campaigns, but I have to give Proctor & Gamble props for stepping back and giving W+K the breathing room they needed to let a rapid viral campaign like this take place. Most companies put up so much red tape that something like this would never be able to happen, but when it comes to the social space agencies everywhere are trying to impress upon their clients the importance of responding in real time. It will be interesting to see what other campaigns will spawn from this.

What did you think of the Old Spice campaign? Do you have a favorite video? Do you think other agencies may have tried this before but got caught up in the red tape?

Posted on July 16, 2010 at 9:48 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: ,

How Klout Scores Work

Hootsuite released new social CRM tools this morning that allow you to filter your keyword and search columns for Twitter by keywords – and even more importantly by influencer. Recently Hootsuite also integrated Klout Scores, a score that measures your influence across the web, into their dashboard metrics. So now, for instance, if you manage a Twitter account for an ice cream brand you can do a search across Twitter for people talking about ice cream and sort these people by their Klout score or influence. This is extremely helpful because community managers no longer have to spend half their time searching for influencers – now audiences can easily be sorted by Klout score and more time can be spent reaching out to people most likely to help you spread your message.

Determining who your brand’s influencers are in the social space has become an increasingly difficult task. The company Klout has come up with one of the most popular ways to measure the influence of users on Twitter with what they call the Klout score. They have a great post to help you better understand the Klout Score, but basically they explain:

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score. We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link.

So How Does Your Klout Score Stack Up? The majority of Twitter users have relatively low Klout scores (0-20.) I tweet everyday and share information with my 1,500 followers on a regular basis and only have a Klout score of 32. So I thought it would be interesting to see where the big Twitter celebrities ranked:

I thought it was interesting that Lebron James had such a high score (85) seeing as he created his account a week ago, has only 11 updates and is only following one person. Justin Bieber is dominating with a perfect Klout score of 100. Ashton Kutcher and Kim Kardashian are not too far behind him although they have always been major players on Twitter.

What do you think of the Klout Score formula? Do you think it is a good judge of influence or do you use another process to determine who will best share you information?

Posted on July 13, 2010 at 7:11 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: ,

2 Helpful Things to Know About Hootsuite 5

Woke up this morning to a new and improved Hootsuite 5! I’ve been playing with it all day and love the new features. Although I had trouble with a few things at first – I think I have it all figured out now. Noticed a lot of others having the same issues, so save yourself some time by checking them out below.

1. “RT” vs. Native RT: Hootsuite added the Native “Auto” RT functionality (in addition to the original “RT @username”) to their platform. However as of this morning the RT button defaults to Auto RT instead of the original ”RT @username.” Hootsuite addressed the RT Settings issues. The screen shot below pretty much sums it up though. So just make sure to uncheck the box marked below in red if you want to go back to the original settings.

2. How to Add Links to Your Facebook Page Posts: One of Hootsuite’s most requested features was finally added. Now you can schedule AND add images to your Facebook page posts. I love this feature, but it was a little difficult to figure out how to get the images in the post at first.

There are lots of new features available thanks to the new HTML5 user interface, including:

Posted on June 24, 2010 at 7:29 pm by Kathlene · Permalink · View Comments
In: Blogging, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter · Tagged with: 

NASCAR Drivers on Twitter

If you work with brands in social media you are going to have to get involved with NASCAR at some point. NASCAR is all over Twitter – the drivers, driver’s girlfriends, teams, sponsors, races, tracks, NASCAR pundits and fans make up thousands of influnetial accounts and Tweet millions of Tweets each day. Here is a list I put together of all the different accounts, starting with the drivers. If the account below is not verified it is the most legit account I could find for the driver – otherwise I didn’t list one. As always let me know if you see anything missing or outdated.