Shamelessly lifted and edited from blog.hubspot.com is an excellent article illustrating the meteoric rise to fame that Justin Bieber has seen in the last year. Well worth reading the full version but if you can’t be arsed then I’ve summarized it here.
Justin Bieber is the most searched for celebrity on the internet and has the most viewed youtube video in history. His debut album, My World, was the highest grossing debut by any artist in 2009 and he is the first artist in history to have seven songs from his debut album reach the “Billboard Hot 100.”
At this point you’re probably asking yourself: “Who is this kid and how did he do it?”
Scooter Braun, who discovered the child star and is now Justin’s manager, offers some insight:
1. When Justin was discovered, he had 5 videos on YouTube, with the highest viewed having about 70,000 hits. Justin opened a Twitter account and with a year interacting with fans and uploading home-made videos to YouTube. He already had millions of fans when his album launched.
2. Justin’s appearances see uncontrollable crowds flocking to see him. A video of a 3 year old girl crying over Justin has over 13 Million views on youtube! As Braun says, “Kids would rather discover something on the Internet than hear it on the radio… there’s a sense of ownership. People feel more connected to Justin, and they deserve to, because they made him.”
3. Justin’s dedication to social media tools like youtube and twitter give him unprecedented insight into his fan base. When asked about next steps Braun remarked, “the next step is to figure out what the fans want and give it to them. We know a lot of kids want to see Justin in a movie and now we’re preparing for that.”
4. In order to prevent Justin from becoming another soon-to-be-forgotten child star, Braun researched former child stars who had fallen from grace. What he found was that “the talent was always there, but their heads got too big and swollen and they forgot that without the fans you’re absolutely nothing.”. We often see companies get so big and removed from their consumer base that they have no idea how to interact with the public (BP?).
Comment
Most of this is:
a) Fairly obvious and
b) Simple to do
but requires a will to stick to a plan and make sure you adapt your social media content to the needs of the audience. You probably think that the story above does not apply to you or your company but as all of us start to live our lives in public then we are responsible for our own brand.
Justin has crafted a beautiful brand around what the kids want, why can’t you carve out a brand around what your customers want – that is assuming you know what your customer want!
