How Lady Gaga Changes the Celebrity Game with Social Media

Lady Gaga aka Mother Monster with her Little Monsters via

No other pop stars has ever reached the stardom and success that Lady Gaga has reached. No other celebrities has ever reached out to their fans like she does. Lady Gaga and her team are marketing geniuses.

How Lady Gaga Dominates the Social Media and What Community Management Lessons We Could Learn

With over 25 million Twitter followers and over 50 million fans on Facebook, there’s no doubt that Lady Gaga and her digital team are doing a great job with building a community of loyal fans and cult-like following.

However, getting a lot of followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook are not enough. Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, wanted more. Thus, the LittleMonsters.com

Funded by, among others, Google Ventures, Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures and TomorrowVentures, the Backplane-powered community, LittleMonsters, aims to transform how the entertainment industry interacts with consumers. Currently, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and the other outposts of a celebrity’s digital career are separate. The Backplane aims to gather content and interaction into one hub, which could completely alter the economics of Hollywood: revenue that once flowed to corporations will flow to artists.

Review of LittleMonsters – A Community-Powered Hub for Lady Gaga Fans

Today I got the beta invite for the LittleMonsters.com and got a chance to play around with the interface and have seen the content generated by the little monsters, of the loyal Lady Gaga fans. There were three choices to sign in on the site – through Facebook, Twitter and Email.

The community has an interface that is similar to that of Pinterest. Every member could create a content by posting a video or a photo. Little Monsters could also collaborate with each other through the Chat feature.

Every member could customize their profile with their Profile Photo (which is automatically derived from the platform connected – e.g. profile photo from your Facebook account), Bio, Interests, Music, etc.

The Backplane is among the most high-powered and heavily funded entertainment-based social-media ventures in the marketplace, and an exemplar of a movement sweeping the industry. Beckett and his collaborators have built a platform that allows celebrities to plug their existing brand into an online framework; he describes it as “a mini-Facebook built around a lifestyle brand”. His clients can interact with their fans in a way that wasn’t possible two years ago. “Most celebrity websites are Flash sites that don’t even load on the iPad,” he says. “They look pretty but don’t build community.”

Unlike any other celebrity websites, Little Monsters, powered by Backplane, aims to highlight the fans and the community-generated content instead of the usual one-sided broadcasting of updates from the celebrity. In this case, Lady Gaga and her digital team are truly changing how celebrities reach out to their fans and provides a great example of community building.