Social Media Monitoring Blog Post #1: Lady Gaga

Credit: http://ladygaga-fanpage.com

For my social media monitoring project, I decided to follow Stefani Germanotta, also known by her stage name as Lady Gaga. I am sure that you have heard of this name, since she has exploded in popularity throughout the past few years as an American pop singer-songwriter. I wanted to follow her trends in online conversation and other social media because of her incredibly rapid success into fame within the competitive music industry. To monitor Lady Gaga, I utilized a variety of social media monitoring resources such as IceRocket, Social Mention, FameCount, Trendistic, Twitaholic, Google Blog Search and Insights for Search, Facebook Lexicon, YouTube, and Twitter.

Born and raised in New York City, 24 year old Lady Gaga’s success skyrocketed after the release of her debut studio album The Fame in 2008. Her two singles “Just Dance” and “Pokerface” garnered international attention and the album reached number one on the record charts of six countries. She then released the follow up extended play The Fame Monster in 2009, which included two more global chart topping singles, “Bad Romance” and “Telephone.” She just recently released her second studio album in February 2011 Born This Way.

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Credit: http://blogs.wyomingnews.com

Lady Gaga is not only the queen of pop, but she can be seen as the queen of social media through her effective usages of the various platforms Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. When looking at FameCount which generates statistics across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to help track the trends and rank the stars, Lady Gaga is the overall leader in all categories.

Credit: http://www.famecount.com/facebook/lady-gaga

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I wanted to look at how much Lady Gaga’s social media popularity increased immediately after her appearance at the 53^rd Grammy Awards show on February 13, 2011. Her grand entrance down the red carpet captured an enormous amount of attention since she arrived inside of a giant egg carried by four men, like an avian Cleopatra! I have to admit that this topped her past outfits such as her Kermit the frog ensemble and meat dress. By using Trendistic, it is obvious that Lady Gaga created the most buzz on Twitter during the Grammy Awards Show; a successful social media marketing tactic.

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Credit: http://trendistic.com/lady-gaga/_30-days

Of course, Twitter was not the only site that generated so much discussion regarding Lady Gaga’s grand entrance onto the red carpet. When looking at the bigger picture, the blogging world as a whole drastically escalated as well, illustrated here by IceRocket:

Credit: http://trend.icerocket.com/trend?query1=Lady+Gaga&days=30

While looking more closely at Lady Gaga’s various uses of social media, it is critical to understand how she uses Twitter to expand her success, since this is where the majority of her attention has been centralized. Twitter is a brilliant way for Lady Gaga to build and maintain relationships with her fans. Moreover, it allows her to promote her latest work and give fans a peek into her everyday life. Lady Gaga joined Twitter on March 26, 2008 and made history on February 4, 2011 as the first person to ever reach 8 million followers! As of February 25, 2011, she had 8,415,409 followers!

Lady Gaga utilizes Twitter to keep her fans aware of what she is currently doing and to keep her name buzzing within the news. She even regularly Tweets to her audience from backstage! Clearly, she has been doing an effective job using Twitter since she is currently ranked first by followers on Twitaholic, as well as ranked first in location (New York, NY). On February 23, 2011, she tweeted:

It is equally imperative to look at Lady Gaga’s valuable usage of Facebook. According to Facebook, the human with the most “Likes” in 2010 was Lady Gaga with 24.7 million. Currently, she has 29,889,907 Facebook “Likes.” In addition, Lady Gaga also made history on July 3, 2010 when she became the first living person to score 10 million fans on Facebook which surpassed President Barack Obama and pop singer Britney Spears (Michael Jackson is the only other artist who has achieved this honor).

Just like her Twitter account, Lady Gaga effectively utilizes her Facebook page by constantly updating her wall with upcoming news, events, and thanking her fans for all of their support. On February 11, 2011, she posted: 

To further illustrate a progression of how Lady Gaga’s online presence has increased since the Grammy Awards Show, it is helpful to look at Social Mention. This site analyzes a person’s strength, sentiment, passion, and reach.

• Strength = The likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media
• Sentiment = The ratio of mentions that are generally more positive to those that are generally negative
• Passion = A measure of the likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly
• Reach = A measure of the range of influence

By looking at the progression from last month/last week/last day/ last 12 hours, we can see that Lady Gaga is mentioned pretty often (strength), the general tone is positive with every one comment being negative (sentiment), users are not really talking about her repeatedly due to a steady decline (passion), and she is reaching a decent amount of users (reach).

Credit: http://socialmention.com/search?q=lady+gaga&t=all&btnG=Search

 

Additionally, it is essential to acknowledge YouTube in correlation with Lady Gaga’s successful online presence. On February 28, 2011, Lady Gaga released her world premiere hit “Born This Way” on YouTube before anywhere else. “A YouTube video is really about letting go of control and trusting that your creativity will engage the groundswell” (Groundswell, 198). Lady Gaga joined YouTube on May 15, 2008 and became the first musical artist to reach one billion online video views. As of February 25, 2011, she has 48,394,063 channel views, 134,914,998 total upload views, and 411,567 subscribers to her channel.

Lady Gaga undoubtedly knows how to use social media successfully to connect with her fans and build relationships. This in turn, keeps them devoted to her music. By analyzing various metric resources and trends, it proves that she connects to her audience and constantly keeps them coming back for more. I will continue to track Lady Gaga's social media presence and will report back in Part 2!