The Awesome power of Social Media
Social media, urgh.. its become one of my most hated of buzzwords, but this week I was impressed with effectiviness of the RATM for Christmas No 1 Facebook Group. It was announced yesterday that Killing in the Name was the UK’s Christmas Number 1 with over half a million sales, beating the latest X Factor winner Joe McElderry. With just single single page on a website, the RATM for Christmas Number 1 campaign had such a viral effect that it eventually generated more sales than a campaign based on one of the UK’s most popular TV shows, radio play etc. The fact that a single person could have an idea and reach so many people in a short period of time with easy to use tools is as inspiring as it is powerful. The facts are these
- The campaign made Sony even more money
- Simon Cowel is still uber rich and doesn’t give a crap
- over £60k was raised for the homeless charity Shelter through Facebook, plus RATM are donating the proceeds of sales
- Killing in the Name is first song to reach number one in the UK charts through downloads alone
- The Facebook group has almost 1 million members
- RATM should release a new album already
Don’t feel bad for this X Factor guy, he sold exactly the number of singles he was going to anyway, its just more people thought it would be funny to make a mockery of the system. I’m sure he still has a few months of excitement in the music industry before going back to restocking shelves at Tesco and opening community centres or whatever happens to these people once the new series of X Factor/ Pop Idol/ Britains got Talent starts and people forget about them. I’m off to start a Facebook group to bring Mountain Dew back to the UK.
