What social brands can learn from
Lady Gaga
Seth Porges
Pity the big brands. No matter how much money they toss
at digital-this and social-media-that, it’s rare that even the
biggest and most beloved get a fraction of the traction of the
Gagas and Biebers of the world.
celebrity brand feel realistic. This is especially true when
communication trickles down from social media strategists—
or even interns—who may not have direct lines to the personas
they are representing on social media.
Of course, this is pretty predictable: Celebrities have
personalities. They’re relatable. They’re people. They’re
engaging.
“You have to create and be something that is believable,”
Michelsen says. “If Lady Gaga tried to promote camping
gear or tractors, it’s just not believable. It has to be authentic,
it has to be real, it has to feel like her.”
Isn’t this what every company wants? To exhibit personality?
To be engaging? Surely there’s some lessons that big brands
can crib from social media-savvy celebrities in order to drum
up user engagement?
To dig in, I called up Matt Michelsen, founder and CEO of
Backplane, a company that produces the social backend
used by celebrities such as Lady Gaga to build their online
communities (Backplane powers her popular Littlemonsters.
com site, and recently announced deals to bring their
platform to Coke, Nike, and Cirque de Soleil.) My simple
question for Michelsen: When it comes to building community
and engaging audiences, what can big brands learn from
social-media savvy celebrities?
Personality Matters
With celebrities, it’s often easy to nail down just
what their personality is—after all, they are
living, breathing humans who live very
public lives. With brands, the idea of a
“personality” is often overlooked—
but no less important in terms of
driving engagement.
“When Lady Gaga is talking
to her fans, she leads by
example,” Michelsen says.
“Her fans connect with her
persona. They feel like they know
her, they relate to her, and want to
emulate her. When she tells her fans
that it’s important for them to be kind
to each other, they take that to heart.
She’s anti-bullying so they’re anti-bullying
too. Brands can learn a lot from that. It’s
important that a brand or an organization
has a personality, and that everything they
do is tied to that personality.”
“Authenticity” May Be A
Meaningless Word… But It
Totally Matters
Building off the need for personality, it’s important
that any nudges given by a corporate or
Understand The Shortcomings Of Social
Networks
Facebook and Twitter give brands lots of useful data, but
they’re shortcomings make it difficult for brands to engage
with individual users.
“Brands pay a lot of money
to build social communities,
but then they aren’t able to
directly reconnect with those
members,” Michelsen says.
“So if they want to target
users, they have to pay social
networks to segment, target,
and engage them. They can’t
actually go into the backend of
the platform to target users for a call
to action. Instead, they are posting to
social networks, and hoping that a user
will see the post in t he stream.”
Converse, Don’t Sell.
One reason it is so hard for brands to engage
consumers: The second people see a logo, they assume
they’re going to get a hard sell, increasing the odds
that they’ll either tune out or run away.
“Don’t sell—have a conversation,” Michelsen says.
“You’ll sell more by engaging users around topics
and interests that they care about than if you just
tell them to buy a product.”
Because celebrities are, in essence, selling
themselves and their personalities, engagement
for the sake of engagement tends to be a
more organic process. And one with a major
longterm payoffs. There’s no reason brands
can’t also engage customers for the sake of
engagement. Loyalty and sales will follow.