Due to the rise in internet and digitalization, the revenues of the music industry had fallen from $15bn in 2000 to $10bn in 2007. While music industry was being hardly hit by the internet, Troy Carter took Lady Gaga in his talent agency “Coalition Media”. He knew he could make her a huge star like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Boy George and David Bowie. Troy Carter, Lady Gaga and her producer Vincent Herbert, used the power of social media to build Lady Gaga’s online worldwide presence. They used online marketing firms, conducted interviews of online bloggers, maintained her website, established her social media brand “MySpace” and established the twitter account. Constant updates, special features and interviews, personal touch to the social media websites and her effort to connect with the customers gave Lady Gaga 5.7 million followers by Aug20 2010, more than Britney Spears. Lady Gaga was named the artist of the year in 2010 by Billboard, her album “Monster” was a global best seller and “Born this way” was the fastest selling single in the history of iTunes. It sold 1million copies in 5 days.

Questions

1. Do you think the social media is an effective way to promote a product or a company or is it over-hyped?
2. Do you think a small business should hire a third party firm to handle their social media sites or hire people themselves and manage their own sites?
3. Imagine a business idea that you would like to launch. Design your social media strategy keeping in mind the 4Es mentioned in the article.

Source: Martin Kupp, Jamie Anderson and Joerg Reckhenrich, “Case Study: Making money from music” in Financial Times (Retrieved online from http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fee9a408-e430-11e0-b4e9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Z06PI9R7