Picture the scene, 3000 or so Dizzee Rascal fans all tipsy and dancing in the confines of the Brighton Centre. This is the last place you would think you would get an insight into social media usage trends. But strangely enough I did? As Dizzee addressed the crowd he inadvertently (or maybe strategically) polled the audience’s usage of his social media communication channels.
The first request was “Any Beboers out there” to which there was silence…seriously total silence and a few confused looks. Dizzee said “didn’t think so….How about any MySpace fans.” This was greeted with actual jeers and boo’s. MySpace was actually being heckled by these individuals. “NO love for MySpace I see” was Dizzee's reply to the crowd.
“How about all you Tweeters”. This was greeted a with a loud cheer and clapping and a few whoops. I even found myself being taken by the moment and making some random noise in agreement too. Smiling Dizzee then said “Where are all you Facebook fans at”. At this moment everyone went bonkers (excuse the reference to a Dizzee Rascal song). The crowd screamed and shouted in mass favour of Facebook. With this Dizzee told the crowd to join his fan website and gave out the URL.
Working in online marketing I couldn’t help but crack a smile. I was witnessing fan based community specific social media marketing at its finest. There is no denying that social media has made huge strides forward recently and becoming a great platform for promoting and managing a brand. In this case Dizzee Rascal was promoting himself as the “brand” and was marketing himself in an indirect fashion by informing a highly targeted group in a bid to generate further exposure for himself, increase traffic to his websites and build relationships with his fan base.
By speaking direct to his target audience he was also able to gage from their reactions the social media websites that where most popular which means he could concentrate his efforts on those main websites. In this case Facebook and Twitter. However I was shocked by the reaction to Bebo, it was like he had said some incomprehensible foreign word that no body understood. I almost expected some tumble weed to roll past at that moment in time. People honestly looked bewildered by the word Bebo?
And by Dizzee’s reaction in response to this it almost appeared like he expected that reaction. It must be the same at all his gigs around the country. I wonder if people went home that night and Googled it hee hee. And why was MySpace booed? Has MySpace been pushed so far to the back of the class now that it is picked on by people?
MySpace focuses heavily on music, so in this situation I would have thought it would have been a great social media website to promote Dizzee's music. Clearly not! The once popular website that was synonymous with the term social network has now ultimately been forgotten. What an incredibly fickle place social media is? This rudimentary method of finding out what the most popular and effective social media sites are actually falls in line with most official guide lists available online. SEOmoz has recently published the top social media websites in order of popularity as being:
- Wikipedia
- MySpace
However this list appears to be a lot kinder to MySpace and shows that there is greater support for this website out there. But looking at the order of these social media websites corresponds to the reactions of the crowd. Facebook was shown more love in the Brighton Centre than Twitter was. MySpace was shown very little love and Bebo…well lets not mention them again as I am very uncomfortable with long periods of silent.
So there you have it courtesy of Dizzee Rascal himself, if you are a website owner or an online marketer and you are thinking of promoting your website or brand online using social media then Facebook and Twitter are the platforms to focus on.