From The Rolling Stone.
By: OSCAR RAYMUNDO
After several months in invite-only beta phase, Lady Gaga‘s fan-based social network Little Monsters has gone public. Borrowing popular features from Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook and Ticketmaster, the extensive website allows fans to post photos, share memes, chat with other Monsters and purchase concert tickets.
Little Monsters was created in collaboration with Backplane, a Palo Alto-based startup specializing in online communities. Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, cofounded Backplane, and the pop star herself is a major investor.
“You can go on somebody’s Facebook profile and see they like Lady Gaga, but you don’t know to what degree,” Backplane CEO Matt Michelsen told Rolling Stone. “Little Monsters shows how many concerts they’ve attended and their overall level of participation around a common interest.”
Intuitively, every registered member automatically becomes a fan of Lady Gaga, and so far the site counts over 180,000 members worldwide. One distinctive feature of Little Monsters is multilingual chat rooms. Backplane’s proprietary instant translation feature facilitates dialogue among Gaga’s international audience.
Michelsen believes that the Backplane community experience can work for other artists such as Guns N’ Roses and Green Day. In the fourth quarter, Backplane will unveil a product that merges interests across different communities, thus allowing fans to tailor their individual identity.
“So a Christian Little Monster from New York who likes Nike can be connected to all his interests,” Michelsen explained. Coincidentally, a Backplane community for Nike is expected in the next few weeks. A Backplane mobile app is also in the works, with early screenshots of the product suggesting a similar look and feel to the mobile social app Path.
Category: Apps, Bands, Content, Design, Digital, Facebook, marketing, Music, Online, Social Media, Twitter, Web
Tags: App, Backplane, chat, community, empire, facebook, Lady GaGa, like, Little Monsters, meme, Mobile, online, Palo Alto, Pinterest, pioneer, post, public, Reddit, Rolling Stone, share, Social Media, Social Network, Ticketmaster, Tumblr
Facebook Has Updated Your News Feed Options – Pages Only
Facebook has been under fire by both brand and fan in recent months, most notably due to their inability to keep both happy, harmoniously. As a result, Facebook has rolled out a new feature that allows users to view a separate News Feed compiled with only the updates from brand’s Pages they have liked. Point your eyes to the menu bar on the left hand side of your Facebook News Feed and see ‘Pages Feed’, to check it out.
This undoubtedly, is a response to the growing brand dissatisfaction with decreased post reach as well as to the increase of fans reporting brands’ posts as ‘spam’ . As it currently stands, brand pages are only able to reach a rough 10 -15% of their fan base with status update posts on any given day. This percentage is obviously influenced by how successful a brand’s voice is at engaging their fans [likes, comments, shares] etc. If a brand is offering up diverse, engaging and interesting content frequently they are much more likely to have a fan base that remains tuned-in to posts and promotions alike. But 10% is still 10% so Facebook has offered the ‘pay to play’ option as Mark Cuban puts it, which asks brands to promote their posts if they want to increase their reach.
With brand pages that account for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fans this option ends up costing from $500 to $2000 and up, per post. The contention around this has been made more public this week when Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, voiced his issues on Twitter and threatened – excuse me, promised – to move the Mavericks online hub away from Facebook entirely.
As a regular Facebook user, a fan of brand pages and the Social Media Manager of a national brand page myself – I’m caught in the center of the argument. As a regular user I would prefer not to have my eye balls bombarded by brand promotions when I’m just interested in what’s going on with my friends. But as a brand, I want my status updates, creative custom photos and brand messaging to reach everyone I got to click ‘like’ in the first place!
Will the ‘Pages Only’ News Feed be the solution? From the brand fan’s perspective, I appreciate the opportunity to catch up on industry news, trends and promotions in one spot because I value the digest but how are these posts filtered, and what about those who never check it? As a page Manager, does this new Feed option create a greater opportunity to reach more of my fan base or cost me less to promote my brand?
Facebook rolled out this option Wednesday morning so your page should be updated – check it out and let me know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter: @RTAJennifer
Are you into the ‘Pages Only’ News Feed?
Category: Advertising, brands, Content, Design, Digital, Facebook, Industry News, marketing, Online, Web
Tags: brand, comment, facebook, fan, like, Mark Cuban, News Feed, Pages Only, share, Twitter