Social Media Monitoring Project Part 1: Taylor Swift


Introduction:
            It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible to find someone in today’s world who has never heard of Taylor Swift. Nonetheless, for those who feel they are ill-informed about Tay-Tay, she started out singing country music with a self-titled album in 2006. Since then, she has moved on to record songs of many genres, though her music could generally be labeled under the pop umbrella. One of her most infamous moments occurred in 2009, when Kanye West stormed the stage in the middle of her VMA acceptance speech to say that Beyoncé should instead have won the award. From this moment forward, Swift would have an image in many people’s minds as “America’s sweetheart”, which her younger fanbase and overall pleasant appearance also contributed to. For the vast majority of her career, another famous part of Taylor’s personal branding was her silence about political issues on either side. This has increasingly become an anomaly in the era of Trump. In 2018, however, she finally ended this silence by endorsing two Democratic candidates for congress in her home state of Tennessee. This political speech has continued into 2019, with the release of her new pro-LGBT anthem, “You Need to Calm Down”.


            This song demonstrates the positive effect that networking and collaboration can have in the world of marketing. “You Need to Calm Down” was successful due to the fact that Swift utilized a variety of tactics to broaden her song’s reach as widely as possible. She also made the song inseparable from LGBT positivity and activism. Not only are the lyrics explicitly tied to LGBTQ acceptance (i.e., “shade never made anybody less gay”), but the end of the music video features a message encouraging viewers to sign a Change.org petition for the Equality Act. The proposed act would protect Americans from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, which are currently grounds for prejudice under the justification of religious liberty. As seen below from Google trends, searches for the term “Taylor Swift” peaked for the month on June 17th, the day that the music video for “You Need to Calm Down” was released on YouTube:



Google trends also indicates that searches for Change.org, the website on which the Equality Act petition was published, also peaked on June 17th. This shows the way in which celebrities can benefit both personally and vocationally from social movements, assuming they are careful. It also demonstrates the power that one person can use to help a whole community or movement.


An Unexpected Source of Success:
The music video for “You Need to Calm Down” also included a plethora of iconic LGBTQ celebrities, including (but not limited to) Ellen DeGeneres, Laverne Cox, RuPaul, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Examining Taylor’s typical competition in this field, though, is when things get interesting. One of her most infamous public “enemies” has always been Katy Perry, who was rumored to be the inspiration for Taylor’s 2015 hit “bad blood”. Earlier this year, however, the pair decided to bury the hatchet and forget about their prior disagreements. In a move that surprised most fans, Taylor decided to feature Katy at the end of her “You Need to Calm Down” music video, as the metaphorical “burger” to Taylor’s “French Fries” (an inseparable pair).
From a marketing standpoint, this was an extremely savvy move. Devoted Katy Perry fans who would have been formerly opposed to Swift finally had a reason to check into her music, at the very least to see a cameo from their idol. Google Trends shows that searches for Katy Perry shot up on the same day as the music video’s release, demonstrating that its success had an impact on her PR in a positive manner as well.


In addition to Google Trends, one of the tools that I used was a free trial of the social media analytics site Awario. (Full disclosure: Awario has limited capabilities in terms of the amount of mentions it is able to collect at one time. Nonetheless, I found it helpful in demonstrating the ratios of likes and mentions, even if the actual numbers are far less than reality.) One of Awario’s features is a word cloud that shows the terms that were most commonly mentioned alongside one’s original query. 

As you can see above, the term “Katy Perry” was discussed 14.7% of the time that “Taylor Swift” was mentioned, which is a huge overall percentage. Taylor’s new friendship with Katy has more than just personal benefits; a potential partnership between them would have the potential to be a huge PR boon for both of them.

“Why are you mad? When you could be GLAAD?”
            In many cases of campaigns or songs that are released about social issues, a major criticism from the groundswell is that they are a case of performative allyship. This means that a fluffy, feel-good message is delivered, but no tangible good is actually done for the community or issue that they are trying to raise awareness of. In Taylor Swift’s case, she wanted to put her money where her mouth was, and she accomplished this by making a large donation to GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization. According to NBC News, this actually created an increase of other donations from Swift’s fans: “Since the song — the second single on her upcoming album "Lover" — was released, GLAAD has received an ‘influx’ of donations in the amount of $13. The LGBTQ media advocacy organization suspects the donation amount is a nod to Swift's favorite number.” This demonstrates the tangible good that celebrities can do for organizations, and vice versa, when they team up. GLAAD wrote an article on their own website thanking Taylor for her generous donation, which created positive publicity on her part. Beyond her own donation, she also created a push for other people to support GLAAD through her song, which ultimately helps the LGBTQ community in the long run.

Taylor’s Social Media Profiles:
            One of the first things I noticed when I went to look at all of Taylor Swift’s social media pages was that her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages all included mostly identical posts to one another. This is unusual in the world of social media, as most successful brands differentiate their pages depending on the platform.

One thing that surprised me about Taylor’s posts leading up to “You Need to Calm Down” was that her posts in support of specific measures to help the LGBTQ community did not receive as many likes or re-posts as I would have expected. For example, Taylor posted a picture on Instagram on June 1st of the letter she had written to her senator about the Equality Act, encouraging her followers to do the same. This post received less than a million likes. Two weeks later, on June 17th, she posted a picture of her hugging Katy Perry in the burger and fries costumes from YNTCD, with the caption “A happy meal”. This received nearly three million likes.


In addition, a graph from Awario shows how Taylor’s reach was at its highest on social media on the day that her music video was released. Millions more people saw her posts on that day than they did on any other time period at the beginning or end of the month.

This may be due, however, to the visually dependent nature of social media, rather than pure shallowness of its users. Posts with lots of text may be in general less likely to receive attention than colorful, highly visually dynamic photos like the one of Swift and Perry. If Taylor were to post more pictures that supported the LGBT community in a less wordy, more visually interesting way, the posts might then receive more attention.
Praise vs. Criticisms:
            As seen below through Awario’s metrics, sentiment about Taylor Swift during the month of June was judged to have more overall positive sentiment than negative (though the majority was still neutral).
            Positive feedback from other celebrities was present after the song’s release, including Taylor’s own personal friend Cara Delevingne, who also identifies as queer. She told Variety that “what [Taylor] is doing is brilliant. It’s just the beginning.” Ariana Grande, another source of usual competition, also praised the song on her Instagram story, saying she “love[s] it and the message soooooo much”. She also joked about how Taylor used a drag queen dressed as Ariana as part of the music video.

            In spite of the positivity that Taylor received from her friends and fellow artists, not everyone was on board with her new LGBTQ allyship. Several people accused her of trying to capitalize on the LGBT community without having been historically invested in the cause, in tweets like the one below:

Others accused her of centering herself, a straight woman, in a movement that wasn’t meant for her. Satirical news site The Onion commented on this as well, in an article entitled “Taylor Swift Inspires Teen To Come Out As Straight Woman Needing To Be At Center Of Gay Rights Narrative”.
            Certain critiques, however, may actually have helped Taylor’s popularity in the long run, by uniting fans in her defense to the negativity seen on social media. A tweet with 13k likes came after what they felt was unfair criticism of Taylor’s activism, given the fact that people have complained in the past about her lack of conversation in politics.


            In social media marketing, the phrase “any publicity is good publicity” often comes up. I believe that in this case, that statement may be true, as negative feedback may increase Taylor’s brand loyalty from her most devoted fans.
Conclusion:
            Taylor’s fans are always going to have a huge amount of loyalty to her, due in part to her own highly successful personal branding over the years. The release of “You Need to Calm Down” proves that while entering into the arena of politics can help the publicity of brands and celebrities, it is likely that even the most carefully planned campaigns will have have a negative backlash. It also shows the power of networking with other popular groups or people; I would personally recommend that one of Taylor’s new target audiences should be Katy Perry fans, given the success of Katy’s mere appearance in the music video. Taylor has done duets with many other famous artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Ed Sheeran, and Tim McGraw, to name a few. If she and Katy were to sing a duet together, I predict that they would both receive a huge boom in popularity. Beyond that, she should continue to expand her network of collaborations with other celebrities, such as Ariana Grande. Taylor Swift’s public image has been ever-changing in the past few years, and I’ll be interested to see what she does next in terms of her own personal branding.

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