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:
Taylor Swift has never been all loud for the LGBTQIA+ community before and now suddenly she’s doing all this? Another celebrity jumping on the Queer bandwagon and trying to capitalize off it lmao https://t.co/fLSqsfomvr— spookalina (@rileytresjolie) June 14, 2019
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.
Gays: Taylor Swift needs to use her platform— 𝓛𝑜𝓋𝑒, Chris Swiftie™🏳️🌈 (@HuffleBoy) June 16, 2019
Taylor: Speaks out on LGBTQ rights, donates $113k+ to pro-LGBT advocacy groups, raises 200K signatures for the Equality Act, releases a pro LGBTQ-song, centers diverse queer voices in a music video, etc etc etc
Gays: Stop that.
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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