Lady Gaga, like her or not, has achieved an amazing amount of recognition across the globe, both online and offline. One would have to say that Gaga’s presence in social media is key to the ‘Gaga phenomena’.   Styling herself as a brand has proved bountiful for Lady Gaga and much like any brand, Gaga needs the right the promotion and as we can see she clearly has it. Here are some facts to show you just exactly how successful Lady Gaga’s online marketing really is:

Lady Gaga: More Than Just Downloads

• Lady  Gaga has sold an ever increasing  15 million albums and 40 million singles and countless Lady Gaga downloads are completed worldwide.
• Lady Gaga is the first living person to achieve 10 million fans on Facebook, which has grown by a  further 2 million in a fortnight
• Gaga has nearly 5 million followers on Twitter
• Currently and globally, on Google, ‘Lady Gaga’ is searched 151,000,000 times a month
• Gaga is the first currently producing music artist to reach one billion YouTube views, based on data provided by video analytics company Visible Measures
• Gaga is a huge hit on Vevo and YouTube. YouTube and Universal’s joint venture music video site Vevo attracted 35 million unique visitors in its first month of but apparently one-fourth of those visitors were for Lady Gaga, although this was greatly helped with Vevo’s affiliation to Youtube
• Gaga led Last.fm’s charts as the most listened-to artist of 2009, with 18 million hits, 6 million more than The Killers who were in second place
• A Facebook group of more than 100,000 people initiated National Lady Gaga Day on January 29th 2010
• If you type in ‘Telephone’ on google instead of seeing endless results on communications devices as you would expect  the top 10 results are 5 of pertain to Gaga and Beyonce’s video hit ‘telephone’, comparably Katy Perry has a video called Fingerprints, type this into Google you get only one result
• As we can see below ‘Lady Gaga’ is  consistently one of the top searched contemporary figures. Searches for Ronaldo and Michael Jackson, peak respectively during the World Cup and the anniversary of Jackson’s death, however ‘Lady Gaga’ as a search term consistently outshines them all

What are the reasons for Lady Gaga’s ever growing fame and success in the world of Social Media?

Lady Gaga as a Brand

Reasons cited are comparable to Madonna’s early and continuing success:

• Madonna was a marketing tour de force and trademarked her own name extremely early in her career, thereby establishing herself as a brand, much like Lady Gaga has done.  This recognition of themselves as brands has proved integral to their success.
• Both Women maintain control over all aspects of their image, music and management
• Both Madonna and Lady Gaga have relied on chameleon-esque images, readily packaging themselves as something to be idolised and followed
• Gaga and Madonna alongside many other rock/pop stars have utilised controversy both with their image and actions. For example, both Gaga and Madonna used religious iconography in their videos, which has played a great role in creating discussion, therefore brand awareness and in turn record sales

Facebook and Twitter Success

• Gaga’s constant engagement with fans on Facebook and Twitter creates a feeling of ‘friendship’ which is reinforced by pet-naming her fans, “Monsters” thereby familiarising them and creating a definite loyalty to her brand

• She named her second album “Fame Monsters” in tribute to her fans thereby further compounding her brand loyalty

• Gaga is so popular in social networks such as Facebook because the greatest source of Lady Gaga content is Gaga herself. She will tell fans anything worth knowing first.
• Before Lady Gaga premiers any of her videos she uses her Twitter and Facebook accounts to tease all her fans with photos and clues, creating the feeling that they are receiving something exclusively

Lady Gaga: A Youtube Phenomenon

• With 1 billion YouTube video views Lady Gaga is doing something right.
• Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter said that he and Gaga, “create music videos for YouTube”, and that “GaGa is a digital baby… There can’t be any layers between the artists and their fans.”
• Others speculate that Gaga understands the global nature of the internet, that social media is created by an international community and therefore she has deliberately written her songs to be simple to sing to in any language, with videos that appeal to any age gender or nationality.
• By creating a new, enticing and immersive story world, with each video, Lady Gaga has made sure that each new release is a different package to any other, her audience does not get bored.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, Gaga is wisely doing what is called, a 360 deal, “in which a label invests more money up front, for marketing, for example, in exchange for a piece of merchandise sales, touring revenue and other earnings that artists had long kept for themselves”.
• Gaga’s video’s also feature product placements, but her record label is quick to point out that most money does not come from video and record sales revenues, it comes from concert tickets. Understanding that marketing the Lady Gaga brand in order to achieve concert sales and endorsements is key to her success and utilising every avenue of social media marketing possible has proved bountiful for this one woman brand.

Lady Gaga – Telephone ft. Beyoncé Video

Sources:
The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Ali Magazine, TechCrunch, suite101.com ,The Social Robot

Internet usage in China

Reading a recent report by McKinsey on China’s Internet obsession, I was not surprised to read that people in the country’s sixty largest cities spend seventy percent of their leisure time online. In the smaller towns it is averaging fifty percent. In terms of actual users of the Internet China has a mind boggling 384 million people. That is greater than the entire population of the USA, which currently stands at 309 million. (see also Global Internet Usage)

The Dragon’s Inquisitiveness

This gigantic Internet usage echoes the Chinese people’s deep inquisitiveness. Since the move from a central, state run, economy towards a more liberal economic model, the dragon’s almost manic search for knowledge has dramatically accelerated. A desire to know more about the world outside of China is only part of the story.

Chinese Commercial exploration

The computer is replacing television as the main entertainment in Chinese households. They shop online and use the Web site Taobao to participate in online auctions. In 2009 the volume of e-commerce increased by over 100%. Online advertising is growing at 30% per annum with $3 billion expenditure. This makes Google’s decision to exit China as brave.

Chinese Search Engines

This departure will ensure that Chinese search engines will become more important. Baidu is the most significant with an index of over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. It also is the first in China to offer WAP and PDA based mobile search.

The Dragon has many heads

Due to its ethnic diversity China is not like entering a single country. It has a complex and inconsistent rule of law, which differs within regions and because of its size; potential entrants would be advised to treat each region individually. A “one size fits all” strategy is not to be recommended. A careful exploration and understanding of the differing regional Chinese characteristics
can pay great dividends.

Opportunities and Threats

Unless you have lived in a bubble for the past few years you will be well aware of the size of the opportunity in China. Put in perspective, it is rather like considering entering the USA market in the early 1900s with its immense potential and challenges. Over the past ten years the growth in China has been considerably faster and greater. The challenges are perhaps more considerable, given the language differences: speech and writing in China span six language families. With the wrong tonality, a few words of praise can turn into an insult. That is why entrants need to proceed with caution.

How we can help with Chinese SEO

Intelligent Positioning is well placed to meet the needs of companies seeking a reliable and effective SEO/SMO service in China by searching in local language. This, coupled with the extensive experience of living and working on international and local brands in China and Asia of senior Intelligent Positioning executives, means that the complexities of entering into China doesn’t have to end in tears.

Breathtakingly, economic development and consumer power in China has only just begun. Entering China with a bite-size approach will ensure an indigestion-free feast full of surprise and delectable delights.

Garry Titterton
CEO
Intelligent Positioning

This is great for the existing established brand and is a good measure of brand equity. For example vastly more people search “eBay” than “online auction” and more people search “Skype” than “VoIP”. But for brands that are emerging and even for the development of new brand concepts the thought of building a brand “through the line” and not putting a target’s search language at the core is missing a huge opportunity.

However, in the traditions of good advertising if you spend enough on media and that your idea sparks imagination and engagement with your customers, then the market will adopt your language and this will lead to strong SEO benefits.

There are undoubtedly many good examples, but here is one.

Brands in The Insurance Market

In the insurance market comparison sites can offer brands good referring traffic but at the same time they compete in search engines for the acquisition of the searcher and positions.

Chart 1 – Here we can see a range of comparison sites, brand sites and product sites positions in Google over a 4 month period on the search term “Home Insurance” in 2009. There are some good performers but on the whole the category is very volatile and competitive. We see Halifax drop from a page one position to page 5 in just one day, a massive drop, and we see Aviva emerge successfully to take over where Norwich Union left off (good redirecting work).

Chart 2 – Here we see an interesting tussle between www.confused.com and www.comparethemarket.com over a 9 month period with both site getting to page one.

So while the dog fights continued with each site competing for position on the core category terms www.comparethemarket.com is working on a creative idea that has nothing to do with Insurance language. “Compare the Meerkat”.

Chart 2 – This Google Insights chart illustrates how during the “compare the Meerkat” advertising campaign search popularity on the term “compare the meerkat” was equal to that of “home insurance”.

While the market is competing for the share of 10 page-one positions on “home insurance”. www.comparethemarket.com enjoy 100% real estate on page one for an equally competitive term.

In this case the old brand principles have resulted in a definable, unique and all encompassing SEO performance. – Simples.

Is this the End of Gaming Hardware?

The purpose of Onlive is to eradicate the annual purchase of the latest hardware such as a Playstation or Xbox (the PS3 launched in the UK at a RRP of £425), reducing the cost of games by ‘renting’ games through the service, improving development cost and time for dev companies by only having to develop for one system, use a cloud service to offer ‘save games’, friends list, multiplayer and other social networking goodies.

During the development of OnLive, due out 17th of June 2010 (initially US only), specialists have raised several possible problems to such a system in our current technical environment. I will mention three of the largest problems facing the service and possibly leading to its downfall.

1 Internet speed

Or more accurately, internet latency. Game input data has to now travel from your wireless device (if using the micro consoles Wi-Fi controller), to the console, forwarded through your local network, to the server cloud a number of miles away. The server then runs the game code dependant on your actions, converts the display to a compressed video and sends the signal back to your micro console which then forwards the display to your television.

Bandwidth may now be large enough for HD video to stream down a broadband connection. However, the fear here is that the time between inputting a command to the game and seeing the results on screen, maybe too large for most gamers and hinder the experience. Considering that a lot of current gen games software alone lag at around 50ms, that doesn’t leave much overhead for further delays.

2 Server Horsepower

A single computer required to play today’s ‘hottest games’ would be a large expense for an individual. This new company is looking to purchase a huge array of servers, each machine capable of supporting multiple players simultaneously. Onlive have so far kept very quiet about their pricing structure and cost of installing their cloud. I personally will be very interested to see how low they can get their monthly subscription fee.

3 Image quality / data compression

Everyone today is talking about HD and this is no exception in the gaming market. Onlive, however offers sub-current generation output. Although Onlive does offer HD gaming, the compression needed to get the data through your broadband connection will affect the final output image in terms of quality.

However, with all that said, Onlive have demonstrated their system working at GDC last year within a ‘controlled environment’ using an external server to the building where games were being played. Also I am sure to excite our own Director of Search, Jon Earnshaw, by highlighting that the iPhone was also recently demonstrated playing Crysis via Onlive to a group of Columbia University students by Onlive founder, Steve Perlman. No doubt then that the service will smoothly transfer to the iPad.

Also BT has just purchased a 2.6% stake in the company, promising to host servers which would vastly reduce game latency.

Although with an Xbox 360 now costing just £160 RRP, will a service offering lower quality output, with slower game reaction speed really be able to compete?

Firstly, let me point out that I am not a Lost fan, I am still yet to sit through an entire episode and as a result was left bewildered this morning at the fact my colleague felt compelled to wake up at the crack of dawn on 24th May (on a Monday of all days) to watch the globally aired last ever episode at 5am – Then sit on a Lost Forum for another few hours.

After partaking in some universal questioning of his sanity, one thing has become clearer as the day has progressed…- I appear to be part of a minority on this one. If search traffic and trends are to be believed that is.

“Lost Forum” – high impact on Google search

‘Lost forum’ has risen to be the 35^th most popular search term in Google by lunch time on Monday, a phenomenal achievement and indicative of the vast online community this series has created over its 6 seasons:

Google trends data indicating search traffic during the past 24 hours (Pacific Daylight Time) for “Lost Forum”

This huge surge in online activity surrounding the last Lost episode is evident throughout Google  – when using Google Trends earlier a persistent theme was apparent in the Hot Searches from the USA.

Five of the ten results displayed here are centred around the Lost finale, even considerably eclipsing the news of a celebrity death. (that of Brittany Murphy’s husband)

A similar scenario occurs in Google Insights, this time concerning UK data, with searches for ‘Lost finale’ rising by a huge 200% today.

How has Google Performed for Lost?

So has Google delivered on this mass surge in Lost related searches, even after some slightly iffy search results recently? Let’s take a look at the Google UK (The Web) results using the first keyword term examined here, ‘Lost forum’:

Google searches for Lost

It appears Google has served the grieving Lost fans well with a 10 out of 10 for relevancy here in the Serps, though a slight slip with www.officiallost.com returning a rather unattractive ‘This account has been suspended” page. Bad luck to them for the biggest day in their history, and no page is available.

The forum www.4815162342.com appears to have been overcome by the surge in traffic today and as a result in temporarily unavailable, though many other returned results, such as www.losttalk.net and darkufo.blogspot.com, offer threads addressing theories, explanations and general counselling following the finale of Lost.

Overall a good job from Google here (if not so much the returned sites in some cases), allowing a global nation of Lost fans to mourn as one as yet another long-running series goes to the great box set in the sky.

Lost – Long Term positions in Google

P.s. To see who else has been benefitting from this traffic surge results from January 1^st to the present (24/5/10) are illustrated below for the term ‘Lost’:

Article By Kim Shepherd

As Andy posted a while ago in “Has google shot itself in the foot over UK serps?”He mention that the search “Southbank Restaurants” returned not restaurants in London’s south bank as you would imagine, but Melbourne results. This included a map of the Melbourne southbank – even when you did a search in Google UK, UK search only.  So what’s the update on this almost a year on:

No change then. Interestingly Google are still getting money for this from UK sponsored links for Toptable et al. We’ll keep you posted.

So I stopped.

Actually, no I didn’t.

I ordered mine on Monday at 05:19am:

My iPad is due on Friday 28th May – exactly 14 days from now!

Orders must be high because since I ordered mine, the due date has been pushed back to June 7th for those who didn’t get in early.

Anyway – I came across this article in the Telegraph titled: “10 reasons why I won’t be buying an iPad”, so I thought I’d respond with my version:

10 reasons why I can’t wait to get my iPad!

I’ll be using the same titles, taken from the Telegraph article:

1. I don’t need one:

Actually I do.

Picture this:

Get up – and access my email in seconds. Don’t even need to bother opening my laptop. That takes at least 60 seconds (unless you have a PC then say 5 minutes).

Read the papers while eating breakfast without appearing rude by bringing my laptop to the breakfast table.

Walk to the station (leave my heavy laptop and power cable at home) – iPad in my bag.

Read Godel, Escher, Bach – The eternal Golden Braid – on my iPad. It’s far too big and heavy to carry!

Catch up on any breaking news on the Sky iPad App as I pull into the station.

Arrive at meeting and plug my iPad into the projector – give presentation using keynote (way better than PowerPoint).

Talk about iPad for first 15 minutes.

Check and answer emails before leaving, following successful keynote.

Watch a movie on the way home on the train.

Get home relaxed – hand iPad to my son to play some games on then leave on the coffee table still charged.

2. No Flash:

Thats probably a good thing! See this open letter on Flash by Steve Jobs

Apart from issues with battery life, reliability, security and performance – Flash was created for PCs and Mice. I prefer more modern technology

3. Open source is gaining a foothold:

That’s true and all very well. But I don’t care – I’m happy with open standards like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.

4. Price:

See 1 above. It’s worth every penny! Just think of the increases in productivity!

5. Missing camera:

I don’t want to turn it into the biggest camera in the world. I have an iPhone for that!

6. It’s style over substance:

It’s beautiful!

7. No multitasking:

Haven’t you been listening to the news? It’s out in June as part of the OS upgrade

8. Lack of compelling content:

What more do you need? There are thousands of Apps available – just look at these.

- Popular Science
- The Wall Street Journal (see my next blog on the reason why the IPad could just save newspapers)
- Epicurious

9. It’s not a laptop replacement:

Actually, it is!

I have a keyboard (built in – or even wireless)
Word processor
Spreadsheet
I can run presentations off it

Why break my back carrying a laptop around?

The article goes on to suggest:

“The iPad is not a computer in the truest sense of the word“.

Now that’s exactly why I want it

I DONT WANT A COMPUTER!!!

10. Things will only get better:

And indeed they will – on Friday 28th May when UPS arrives with my shiny new iPad. I think my life is going to change forever!

I’ll keep you all posted on how I get on with it! My next post will be made from my iPad somewhere more comfortable than my desk.

oh – here’s a picture of the case I ordered while waiting for my beautiful shiny new productivity enhancing iPad to arrive:

However that isn’t the case for the majority of the World’s population. Vast sections of the planet don’t have access to the internet.

But things are changing, and when the large populations of China, India, Russia and Brazil enjoy a higher penetration of internet usage a new world order could be upon us.

Internet Usage hasn’t even touched the surface

• 3/4 of the world population do not have direct access to the internet
• That’s about 5 billion people who don’t have access to the internet around the world
• 1.7 billion people have access to the Internet around the world

The Power of China

• One in five global internet users are Chinese
• More people use the internet in China than the whole population of the United States
• The percentage of the population who have access to the Internet in China is still less than the world average
• 78% of Chinese people don’t have access to the Internet

Highest internet usage by population and percentage

• China has the most internet users in the world with 360 million, followed by The USA (227 million) then Japan (95 million)
• From the top twenty list of users, the highest penetration of percentage of population to internet usage is South Korea with 77.3%, second is The United Kingdom
• Iceland has the highest penetration as a percentage of population of internet usage in the world with 90%
• More people have access to the internet in Iran than in Italy, Spain or Canada
• Poland (52%) has a higher penetration to the internet by percentage of population than Italy (51%)

Internet Usage By Continent

• Asia has the most internet users in the world with 764 million users and 42% of the global population
• However 80% of the Asian population does not have access to the internet
• Europe has 165 million more internet users than North America
• Africa experienced the largest growth in internet usage over the last decade with an increase of 1,800%

The Future is India
It amazes me that India only has a 7% penetration of their near 1 billion population. Yes of course it is a vast country with many rural areas and a population that experiences abject poverty, but it has a huge technology service offering already. To think when penetration of internet users goes above the 50% level, India will be technology leaders surely.

Already Indian names now figure prominently on the league tables of the wealthiest people on the planet. The country boasts 47 billionaires, up from 12 in 2005 and just nine at the turn of the millennium, compared with 10 in France and 35 in Britain. The highest-ranking Indian in the Forbes rankings is Mukesh Ambani, the world’s fourth-richest man with £19bn. If the Internet has an impact on wealth, which it surely does, then India is just getting started.

When India rises to even 20% of internet population penetration no doubt every business in the world and every social media users will have some direct contact with an Indian company or fellow user.

All Data and stats come from
www.internetworldstats.com
http://www.google.com/publicdata

If we take a look at one of the ‘key’ search terms that many voters will be using over the course of the day that could potential sway an undecided voter – election 2010:

Hardly ground breaking stuff from any one of the political parties hey? This could have been an opportunity for any one of the parties to target, considering the popularity of the term. However, all four party websites have chosen to ignore this and concentrate on pushing their own party terms – rather than targeting the majority. If we take a look at the term ‘Conservative election’ we can see a pretty strong position for the Tories:

The website has been pretty consistent at the top of Google over the past two months, however if you take a look at Labour, they have only recently ‘peaked’ in April:

This improvement coincided with Gordon Brown releasing information on the General Election on May 6th, however prior to this the Labour Party were not visible for a party specific keyword term. On the other hand The Liberal Democrat Party are a little more erratic than both parties:

The Liberal Democrats have a number of subdomains, including European specific URL and Manifesto URL – which is causing a conflict with the main website. One of the main obvious issues is the constant deleting of pages across the website, rather than 301 redirecting to a useful page. For example, the following URL was being returned at the end of April:

http://www.libdems.org.uk/noidcards/

An interesting piece of data we’ve extracted from our tools is that the Conservative party are actively targeting the ‘Manifesto’ keyword terms of the other two main political parties as highlighted in the chart below:

Moving along to the Newspapers, its clear to see that the top performers online since the Election news came about at the start of April – with the Guardian constantly performing on page one for the keyword term ‘Election 2010′:

Its interesting to see that since the announcement that the Guardian are backing the Liberal Democrats they have occupied top positions within Google UK, whilst Conservative supporters, The Daily Mail, only appear within the SERPs for a negative piece on the party entitled:

General Election 2010: Liberal Democrats and the dirty tricks of the real nasty party | Mail Online

Lastly, looking at the broadcasters, its no surprise to see the BBC on page one for the keyword term ‘Election 2010′, whilst ITV have improved over the past four weeks:

The BBC and ITV have a dedicated section, whilst Channel 4 have an individual article returning in Google’s SERPs. It is clear to see that each political party has ignored the potential to rank highly for a selection of generic keywords terms, focusing on party specific terms – which core voters would search for anyhow. The Guardian and Telegraph perform very well for a number of election keyword terms across the board.

For any of this to work you’ll need an Apache server with mod_rewrite enabled. To get started, add the following to the top of your .htaccess file. If this results in a 500 server error, your host probably doesn’t support mod_rewrite, and there is likely not much you can do about it.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

Domain Canonicalization

While many web users view www.example.com and example.com as functionally equivalent addresses, search engines cannot make such an assumption since, technically, the URLs are different and a webserver could return different content for each. In reality, hosting packages often automatically create a ‘www’ subdomain to serve the same content as the main domain, leading to many pages appearing twice in search results – both with and without the ‘www’ prefix.

The simple fix for this is to pick one domain to use as the canonical hostname and redirect any requests for other domains to that one:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

HTTP/HTTPS Canonicalization

Websites handling sensitive information (e.g. ecommerce) will often need to make use of secure connections via the https protocol. Typically, this is only required for certain parts of the site, such as those accessed via a login, but links to the https versions of normal pages often creep into search results.

The following example ensures that any requests for paths beginning with ‘/checkout’ will be redirected to https if they are not using the secure protocol, but attempts to access any other parts of the site via https will be redirected to their non-https equivalents.

# redirect non-https requests for /checkout to https
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^checkout/ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
# redirect all other https requests to http
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond $1 !^checkout/
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Directory Index Canonicalization

Apache allows us to specify a list of pages which will be returned if a directory page is requested (i.e. a url ending with a slash), such as http://www.example.com/. Typically, index.html or index.php are used. However, direct access to these files is not prevented and careless creation of links can easily lead to http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/index.php appearing in search results separately.

The following rule ensures that any requests ending in /index.php will be redirected to the parent directory.

# matches original request header
# (to avoid infinite loop with apache internal rewriting)
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.php$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]