I will open this post with a disclaimer, anyone who knows me knows I love Lady Gaga. I’m just a little obsessed with her, so the release of her Telephone video (featuring Beyonce) last week was a major event for me. Luckily, the video has caused controversy, not for it’s risqué content, but instead for it’s “over the top product” placement, giving me the excuse to make a blog post about the Lady and her marketing team.

First of all, lets look at Gaga’s ascension to fame. The first time I became aware of her was late 2008. I saw a post about her on Perez Hilton’s celebrity gossip blog (I know, shoot me) and she was hanging out with Paris Hilton. That was enough to make me hate her with the fire of a thousand suns. Around Christmas time her video for Poker Face was out and I detested her further using the age-old “she’s not even pretty” as my main ammo. Girl on girl crime, anyone?

Over the next year, not only did she become the darling of the music, fashion and celebrity scenes but she also became an icon, a brand and an inspiration. I fell in love with her slowly at first and then all at once, as so often these things happen. And it seems I wasn’t the only one. The graph to the right shows Google’s Trend data for the Lady Gaga compared to Beyonce. As you can see, the interest began to kick off in a big way in early 2009 and has continued to rise ever since.

An interesting article from Ad Age summarises her influence as follows:

“How did a 23-year-old singer/songwriter achieve so much in so little time? Two words: Social Media…she’s put a new-media spin on her distribution strategy. The November premiere of her video for “Bad Romance,” for example, debuted on LadyGaga.com before MTV or any other outlet could play it — resulting in a Universal Music server crash, a Twitter trending topic that lasted all week and a cumulative 110 million (and counting) views on YouTube to date, more than any viral music video of yore could ever claim. Vevo, a music video site co-founded by Universal Music Group, also recently reported a whopping 20% of its traffic came from just Lady Gaga videos — as in 1 in 5 videos streamed on the site was likely to be a song such as Poker Face, Just Dance or LoveGame.

Gaga has already had a similar halo effect on her Mac Viva Glam lipstick. Less than a week into its launch, the lipsticks created by Gaga and her campaign cohort Cyndi Lauper have outsold any launch in Viva Glam’s 16-year history, said Estée Lauder Group President John Demsey, thanks to a groundswell of Social Media impressions. The launch day of her Viva Glam lipstick ad campaign alone generated nearly 20 million unique views in traditional media, including print and web buys and an appearance on “The Today Show,” as well as an additional wellspring of Social Media hits per Gaga’s tweets to her fans.”

Which brings me to the Telephone video, released on 12th March. Within two days the video has had more than 15 million views on YouTube. It has been written about by The Guardian, Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine amongst others.  The video is a massive 9 minutes long and features an all girl prison romp, smoking cigarette glasses, Beyonce saying the F word and a mass Gaga-induced homicide.

However, the bulk of the chatter so far has been about the insane amount of product placement. A vast array of brands such as Virgin Mobile (sponsor of Gaga’s Monster Ball Tour), Diet Coke, Plenty of Fish.com, HP, Polaroid and Miracle Whip make conspicuous appearance in the video. Gaga’s manager states, “We have a lot of fun with it [product placement] now. If Michael Jackson was making ‘Thriller,’ he would do this too. These million-dollar music videos have to have partners to be produced.” The interesting thing, however, is that while some of the product placement was paid, some were included on Gaga’s own request. Her take on the videos is “the idea that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology…[she wanted to turn then video] into something that was more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are”.

Whichever way you look at it, as usual Gaga has got us talking. U Talk Marketing claim that her approach “illustrates a shift in music marketing” and “that brands are happy to sign up and be associated with a top star and appear in a video that will be seen by millions and remain in circulation online forever”. On the other hand, Jezebel blogger Dodai beseeches “I already got the headphones, okay? Stop selling them to me!”

My thoughts? To paraphrase a Jezebel commenter, “I just like awesome things. And this was awesome.”

What do you think? Is this the “future of music marketing” or has Gaga sold us all out?

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Jonathan Eaton, New Business Account Executive at Quba. You’re probably wondering who I am and what I do-so here’s a bit of background, some witty banter and a window into my enthusiasm for all that’s fine online.

Born in mid 1980’s Wales to a Canadian father and a Scottish mother I learned quickly I was never going to be a sportsman. I immediately looked for different ways to be creative…I’d always had plenty of interests but it took an old PC and a copy of Theme Park to give me that sense of respect and status I’d always wanted…

Alas, as my careers advisor told me at the time, “this is not a job that is commercially viable”.

On a serious note my miss-spent youth did open my eyes to the creative potential of computers and the internet- and this discovery proved to be hugely important later on.

Having left school I went on to do a Social History degree at the University of Glasgow which involved lots of group discussion and research-playing with data to deliver concise and clear messages. I found quickly that my best skills were understanding and communicating messages both from myself and other people. I became very interested in different methods for communicating, especially online, so I did a Masters in Web Journalism at the University of Sheffield in 2008-9.

What I loved about working in online newsrooms was learning about how you could use a combination of media types to deliver interesting and thought provoking messages. At the Sheffield Star I enjoyed a stint as a multimedia/ video-reporter which gave me access to marketing and media teams at large organisations. Using video as a medium is very revealing and I became very aware of where messages were working well and falling flat….and I’m hoping understanding those errors will help me avoid similar mishaps in the future!

I’ve also learned while working online that new technology and software are here to help-even when bugs, system errors and basic usability leave us fuming like Sir Alex Ferguson in a 2-1 defeat to Man City.. I’ll always try and see a positive like Steve MacClaren would do, though I’m sure things will never get that desperate. With social media booming and the digital revolution set to change our world forever there is plenty to be excited about.

I hope you have found this biopsy informative and maybe even entertaining and I leave you with my promise to everyone who I work with:

I’ll keep my cool in giving you the benefit of my experience, fearless of whatever medium you want to use and always eager to see you succeed.

Thanks for reading this blog and if you think there is anything I could help you with please do not hesitate to contact me (jeaton@quba.co.uk) and you can also track me on Twitter (jeaton_Quba)

However, there’s no doubt that next year Simon Cowell will adapt. He’ll take the hard lesson he has learned about the power of social media this year and tweak the X Factor format (and Britain’s Got Talent) to include social media more towards the centre, rather than on the periphery as it has been to date. And there’s no doubt that he’ll be well equipped to fight the battle for hearts and minds online.

This is perhaps self-evident in the fact that he has already offered Jon and Tracy Morter, the couple set up RATM campaign Facebook, a job. Though they have not taken him up on it, this is sign of how savvy Simon Cowell actually is.

It’ll be interesting to see next season  if he will allow votes to be cast via Twitter, or Facebook where making a share of the revenues will be less certain. Will this increase the voting or dilute revenues made from the existing audience base? That’s the tricky question he’ll inevitably face. I for one am looking forwards to seeing how he deals with this, as will many TV producers trying to navigate the change in audience participation and engagement that the mainstreaming of social media is signalling.

So is this a sign of a tipping point in the adoption and acceptance of social media in the public psyche? Probably; but what does everyone else think?

If you’re lucky, they may turn out to be the Michael Palin of story tellers and have a never ending supply of interesting tales and adventures. In reality, the person may only have a handful of interesting stories to share and you will soon realise that you’re hearing them regurgitate the same set of yarns time and again.

This may be a problem in a small social circle, but does it matter if your audience is mobile with a short attention span? In fact, can it actually be beneficial to repeat your best stories?

To put things into perspective: I’m currently following a meagre 56 people on Twitter and yet in the past hour I’ve been notified of over 50 new Tweets, of which I’ve probably read about 3. With some people following hundreds of others, there is no guarantee that they’ve received a Tweet, let alone read it (no matter how important or useful the original Tweeter may think it is!).

This poses an obvious dilemma of how to you reach your following if a large percentage of them will never see your Tweet.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been programming a simple Twitter analytics program which analyses a Twitter account and the messages that are being sent from it. I randomly selected some Twitter accounts for testing purposes and I discovered an interesting trait in one of the more successful ones: they were constantly repeating themselves on Twitter.

In one instance, @Openzine had tweeted the same message 131 times over a period of 4 weeks which had resulted in constant exposure and 222 retweets of the message (and the link to their website). These tweets were sent at varying times of the day which increased the likelihood that different demographics of their followers would see the message (and decreased the likelihood of people seeing it twice).

Retweeting yourself gives you the opportunity to ensure maximum exposure for your most important messages or content, and if carefully planned and tracked, it won’t have a negative impact on the number of followers you have.

To get you started, here are some rules for retweeting yourself:

• Understand your followers – discover where they are located so you can see which times would be best for tweeting (and retweeting) –there is an interesting Yahoo Pipes mash-up which does this
• Don’t overdo it – a maximum of 4 retweets per day depending on your follower demographic
• Automate your retweets using services such as Easy Tweets or Twuffer (free)
• Monitor people who stop following you – if you find that retweeting a message is causing followers to drop off, adapt your retweeting campaign to fit (Qwitter is a handy tool for this)
• Write interesting tweets between retweets – you don’t want people to look at your profile and see a long list of tweets with the same content
• Only retweet useful and relevant content
• Mix it up a bit – keep the message fresh by giving it a new twist every couple of days
• Keep retweeting for as long as the message is relevant

All in all, use a bit of common sense and you can’t go wrong (famous last words).