In honor of the BET Awards this wknd – 2011 SXSW Panel Pic from BET’s “Baby I’m a Star Panel” – Melanie Fiona and I represented for the Girl Power balance…
Generally, when people think of “social media,” they envision the platform side of things, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Path, Foursquare, Tumblr, etc. Well, when working on the “Born This Way” release, we were responsible for having a much broader view of things, at least, those of us ‘riding the bench’ at social media and digital strategy agency.
While most of the larger “all hands” meetings were dedicated to reviewing the major touchpoints of the album, which I’ve outlined in previous posts, and which have been discussed in the Mashable article, amongst other features, I think that some additionally interesting work was being done in the break out sessions that my team was responsible for. I thought that this information might be particularly helpful for you and your own pursuits in social media marketing and branding.
If you had the chance to read “Life as a ‘Bench Player’ on Lady Gaga’s Team – ‘Born This Way’ Launch Edition,” you would see the word “touchpoints” listed very frequently, as I personally felt like that was a key element to the campaign. The objective was to create as many touchpoints as possible, or places and ways in which fans and potential customers could interact with the album on their turf and (mostly) on their terms. We wanted to bring the album to them.
Well, another element that fits into the concept of touchpoints, which is very, very important, is blogs (awkward construction, but yes grammatically correct “is blogs” – go figure). A large part of a digital/social media marketing agency’s job is to have their finger on the pulse of the universe of blogs in existence, classified across all of the various possibilities of lifestyle verticals. We had and actively developed and maintained robust lists or indexes of blogs for unimaginable segments, from as broad as fashion and pop music, to fantasy book readers (because we had some early information that a unicorn would in some way be involved in the album and its graphical elements).
The idea was to find as many different lifestyle intersections as possible with the album and essentially create windows into the project from that lifestyle perspective. The unicorn example is a great one – ok, so there will be unicorns? Who would be interested in that? Fantasy book readers? Ok, let’s find out where they live online. Now, who else? With that information, we were then armed to super-serve those people, where they reside, with content relevant to them, but that also tied into the larger project. In this way, you give the audience an authentic and personalized entry point, but still maintain the integrity of the project. Think of an octopus with specially-themed tentacles.
This can work for you as well. The beauty of social media is not only just the ability to get your message out there, but it is also to be able to better understand (first) and then specifically target (second) potential customers (or employers, fans, listeners, viewers, etc.) by bringing relevant tentacles of your project directly to them, where they normally reside online.
If you want to learn more about this “tentacle” approach in the aspect of social media marketing and brand development concerning blogs, my book “Piece of the Fame” contains a great interview with Paul Brunson (star of OWN Network’s new show Lovetown) as he discusses building his brand in 18 months nearly exclusively via the Internet.
