The World According to Mitch Fanning

I recently went through this year’s “Fast Company 100 Most Creative People” List and was surprised (at first) to see Lady Gaga at the number #1 spot amongst the corporate CEOs and Internet start-up celebrities.

Now, before all the Little Monsters out there (a nickname Gaga gives to her die-hard fans) start sending me nasty emails, let me explain…

Like I said, I’m no Little Monster, but I admit over the past few years the ‘Lady’ known as Gaga has been ubiquitous.

Since her debut album, The Fame, was released in August of 2008 almost every time I flipped radio stations I heard either the song “Poker Face” or “Paparazzi” (or both).

It got a bit ridiculous.

What’s even more ridiculous (in a good way) is five years ago Lady Gaga (both the entertainer and the brand) didn’t exist. Then 19, Stefani Germanotta was waitressing and perfecting her craft in dingy New York clubs.

It’s obvious (now) she had bigger goals in mind.

The Lady and The Brand

Last year, those lofty goals were realized as Gaga became a global brand and phenomenon.

According to the write-up in Fast Company, some critics still feel she lacks originality and is nothing more than a carbon copy of Madonna’s ‘glitter-glam’ fashion with a dash of Alice Cooper’s ‘shock-rock’ antics.

Since I’m not a fan I wouldn’t know.

I am, however, impressed with her ability to navigate the digital and social landscape with ease as it pertains to her fans and business empire that was both built in record time and on a diversity of web platforms.

The Numbers

“No other artist commands the kind of attention that Gaga does, If she does something with your brand, it’s like bam! — a million eyeballs.” – Gabe McDonough, an exec at the ad agency DDB

Now 24, Gaga reigns over a brand that spans over music, the web, product design, and lucrative sponsorship deals.

Here are the numbers:

1. 10 million-plus albums sold

2. Video (1 billion-plus Web views)

3. Product design (Monster headphones, Polaroid cameras)

4. Marketing (HP, MAC Cosmetics)

Her impressive stats don’t end there.

Her army of ‘cult-like’ fans mimic her dance moves and sing her songs (can anyone say Grayson Chance) on YouTube, uploading 15,000-plus user-generated videos.

They also voraciously devour her content on Twitter, where as of June 7^th, @ladygaga currently has over 4.3 million followers, and Facebook, where over 8 million people have declared themselves fans.

How She Did It

Sure it helps if you have talent and a bit of luck.  No one is an overnight success, but here are 4 crucial steps Gaga took over the past 5 years to build an empire.

1. Be a Trailblazer

Lady Gaga made a name for herself with wild, theatrical, and often tongue-in-cheek “shock art” performances.

Risque?  Maybe, but her crazy fashion sense was tailor-made to attract ‘eye-balls’.  She was the most-Googled image of 2009.

Coincidence?

2. Engage Your Community (in real-time)

I often see brands enticing fans and followers with some “carrot-on-a-stick” only to forget about them once they’ve opted in to their social program.

Gaga doesn’t collect fans she engages them.

How?

On Twitter, she thanks her fans in real time and shows her appreciation by posting a photo of her tattoo that reads “Little Monsters” (again, her nickname for fans).

3. Create a Team of Trusted Advisors

In 2008, Gaga handpicked several friends to form a creative team that she calls ‘Haus of Gaga’.  Together, they produce the ‘look-at-me’ fashions that define her concerts and her controversial videos, which drive a full 25% of the music site Vevo’s traffic.

“Bad Romance” alone has racked up some 200 million plays on YouTube; it’s the site’s No. 1 clip of all time.

4. Understand Your Audience (and show them you care)

When Virgin Mobile, a sponsor of Gaga’s U.S. tour, created a shrine to the Little Monsters (ladyvirgin.com) giving show tickets to fans who did community service,  Gaga had two conditions that had to be met:

The shrine had to involve her fans and her causes.

She also wowed Polaroid CMO Jon Pollock in the boardroom by offering insights on digital strategy.  Specifically, how to position Polaroid that would effectively reach her generation.

Impressed, Pollock asked Gaga to serve as creative director for a specialty line of Polaroid Imaging products (see official press release here).

The enthusiasm was mutual.  Gaga proudly posted a photo of her “creative director” business card.

Today, it’s not enough to be just good at what you do.

Are you blazing your own trail?  Are you compelling (enough)?  Are you really engaging your customers?  Do you understand them?

Original article in Fast Company written by: Dan Macsai

Photo credit: LadyGaga.com

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About the Author:

Mitch Fanning is an “available-for-hire” online marketing and social media practitioner.  He runs three6media, a “new marketing” publishing and consulting firm that advises small to mid-sized businesses how to use content marketing and social media to encourage members of their target audience to become advocates and join their tribe of loyal repeat customers.

He’s spent 10+ years (and put in his 10,000 hours9) working with businesses of all sizes, from global brand (NBC.com, Nestle) to Canada’s fastest growing Internet companies ranked in the PROFIT 100, creating, selling, implementing both traditional and digital marketing opt-in strategies.

Click here to contact Mitch directly.  Or skip right through the garden and grab Mitch’s RSS Feed right here.

It’s ironic how as things change, some things remain the same.  I was reminded of this valuable, yet simple lesson recently while reading one of Jeremiah Owyang’s (@jowyang) insightful posts on his blog – Web Strategy.

The lesson is one you’ve probably heard a thousand times before (god knows I have).  In fact, 10 years ago, one of my first mentors (Bill Bishop) engrained this principle in me, which he elegantly referred to as The Relationship-First Formula and even wrote a book about it. His philosophy was simple – design your business and/or strategies around a specific customer and their needs, not the latest marketing medium or tool.  Simple, but not always easy to implement.

To Twitter or Not To Twitter? – that IS NOT the question

If you or your clients have asked this question or anything similar to it then you’re asking the wrong questions.  The problem…drum roll please…is that we as marketers, entrepreneurs, and product developers (including myself) can be too focused on the “latest shiny digital product, tool, and tactic” – from crowdsourcing, to the iPad, to the launch of Google Buzz, to the latest upgrades in Hootsuite.  While there’s a need for this type of focus, it should be at the end of your strategy or planning process, not the beginning.

The thing we need to keep reminding ourselves with is – business has not changed, just the mediums in which consumers now use. Don’t throw out the baby (strategy) with the bathwater just because new media channels have emerged.  Instead of focusing on a specific product or technology first, develop a strategy based on a specific audience, their behaviours, and needs – rather than a “Facebook” or “iPhone” strategy created in a vacuum on its own.  Focus on building a place for customers who want to come interact with each other, and your brand (if that’s the goal).

I like Owyang’s analogy of approaching your web strategy as you would to build a house. In other words, focus on who you’re inviting to come over to your property (website) and what they want (needs).  Next, think about the different rooms in your house, and how they all serve a different purpose, from the decor (branding), front door (advertising), living room (community).

These tools are used in different ways, some are great for attracting visitors (traffic generation) others encourage them to stay and to something (interactive media and content), while others are great for encouraging them to interact with you (social networks). In any case, the value of each of these on their own is weak, and the real value is all of them together in context.

Methodology For Integrated Strategy Development

There are PLENTY of ways to develop your strategy.  However, one that I’ve used recently, is a little acronym called POST (invented by Forrester), which focuses on people, objectives, strategy, then tools (and only in that order).

People: Don’t start a strategy until you know the needs, social behaviours, and capabilities of your target audience.

Start by asking the following questions, “Where are my customers online?  Who do they trust?  Who do they influence?  What are they doing and why?” (i.e. watching, sharing, commenting, producing, evangelizing)

Objectives: Are you planning to build an application, program, product or campaign to collaborate with your best customers in order innovate and evangelize others?  Listen to your customers or to talk with them?  Whatever, your plan is, make it actionable.  Based on your research, if your customers are commenters, allow them to comment.  If they rely on friends, encourage sharing.  If they are trusted by others, highlight them as advocates in front of their community.

Strategy: Decide on what you want to accomplish.  Do you want to get people talking about your products? Do you want a permanent focus group for testing product ideas and generating new ones?  How will things be different afterwards? Imagine the endpoint and you’ll know where to begin.

Technology. An online video? Social media campaign? Widget or two? Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, your marketing efforts and technology choices will naturally unfold.  This may sound simple to the sophisticated reading this blog, but it works. Try it. Think your strategy through.

Putting it all Together – A Fictional Example

The following is a fictional example of how understanding your customer’s social behaviours can lead to better results using the above methodology.  Since the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics are going on, I’ll use a fictional snowboarding company in the example.

Situation: After White’s repeat gold medal performance, a snowboarding company would like to leverage this “buzz” by reaching snowboarders who ride halfpipe and introduce them to their new snowboard they just launched called “Amptitude” (fictional).

1. Where are the snowboarders online today?

• Using monitoring tools and surveys (prior to the games) to find hot spots in conversation and specific URL locations the data found that 75% of the targeted snowboarders visited Facebook daily (fictional).
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• Find out what they are talking about.  Brand monitoring found out that the most talked about topic when discussing snowboards was price, quality, and ability to improve a riders ability to perform tricks.

2. What are their online social behaviours?

• Survey results showed they are mainly watching and sharing, very few producers.  But those who are producing are very active making recommendations, blogging, uploading pictures and videos of them and their friends riding half pipe (perhaps even @shaun_white).

Findings & Actions

The company was able to identify who the influencers (producers) were, how to reach them, and introduce them to their new board by providing them with interactive content and social widgets that would help them reproduce and spread the word to the rest of the “passive” snowboarders who watched/shared to friend in order to reach a greater segment of customers.  This example, of course, is an oversimplification of how to begin brainstorming strategy, but I think you get the idea.

What About Strategic Partners?

This philosophy should also apply to your strategic partners who specialize in emerging digital marketing technologies and platforms. Look for partners who focus on customer behaviors and client goals.  As the technology landscape changes at an even faster pace than ever before, brands must have criteria in selecting the right partners.  Again, my compliments to Owyang who came up with this review scorecard to see how your strategic partners stack up.  You can also use this as key criteria in finding new partners who specialize on emerging technologies.

Are You Approaching Your Digital Strategy Backwards?

Again, if you started by asking the question “should we Twitter?” or “Should we be on Google Buzz?” the answer is probably yes – you are doing it backwards.  In any other business initiative we start by figuring out what we want to accomplish.  Interactive technologies work the same way – they accomplish things.  It’s time to stop going digital because it’s cool or because everyone is talking about it.  It’s time to start doing it because it’s effective and measurable, but first develop your customer strategy.

Upwards and Onwards!

Mitch

Excerpt from R.M. Vaughan‘s article in Globe & Mail

CLICK IMAGE ABOVE TO WATCH MOVIE TRAILER

Ted Remerowski’s documentary traces Google’s rise from its establishment in 1998 to its confrontation with the Chinese government in January, 2010, and wonders whether it’s living up to its corporate motto: Don’t Be Evil.

According to filmmaker Ted Remerowski’s new documentary Google World (debuting on  CBC – TV’s Doc Zone on Feb. 11 at 9 p.m.), the corporation has a mind-bending 300-year plan to put all known information into digital “clouds,” virtual warehouses run by its  spooky, HAL 9000-like mega computers. And that plan gives Remerowski reason to pause,  because when  Google says “all information,” it means everything about you and me as well.

R.M. Vaughan: Google’s 300-year plan sounds monomaniacal, to say the least, but is there anything inherently wrong with wanting to create a “world library”?

Ted Remerowski: Absolutely not. It’s a great concept. The difficulty is that you’re talking about all intelligence, [but] held by whom? And how is it being used? Google claims that it is transparent and open, but what I discovered is that when you’re talking about their intellectual property, they are not transparent. They keep everything very close to the chest. What happens when they have all the knowledge at their disposal? That’s the question. Now, it’s not going to be a question we’re going to have to answer, because it’s 300 years away, but they are moving in that direction, and as they keep getting more and more information, you’ve got to ask yourself: Are we getting access to that information? Are they doing something with that information that we don’t know? Who knows? What do you do when you have the smartest guys in the room holding such enormous clout over data?

Read the entire article on the Globe & Mail website here: