How Britney Spears Used a Groupon-Style Game to Get to the Top

Todd Wasserman by Todd Wasserman View Comments
email
share

Britney Spears’s album, Femme Fatale, landed at number one on the Billboard charts last week, but the singer didn’t get there all by herself.

The buildup for the album had a pretty serious social media component that may be used as a blueprint for future album releases. Spears’s label, Jive Records worked with Crowd Factory’s Social Offer technology to spread the word as much as possible via social media and reward influencers.

Here’s how it worked: Visitors to Britney.com saw an offer to pre-order the album and share the offer with their friends. If fans got 10 or more of their friends to visit Britney.com, they got a 20% off promo code for the entire Britney catalog. (This differs from the Groupon model — in which a certain amount of people are required to take part and, if they do, everyone gets the discount.)

As a result of the offer, 30% of traffic to Britney.com came through Crowd Factory. Each sharer got six or more friends, on average, to visit the site.

Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory, says the promotion worked because it joined two principles: deals and gaming. “We combined the two things,” he says. “It’s sort of a game.” Dholakia says it makes more sense to reward superfans in this case than to offer a deal for everyone a la Groupon. “This makes it more personal and more effective,” he says.

The group-buying deal wasn’t the only social media innovation related to the album. Prior to the release, Britney’s team released several teaser videos on YouTube — at 10 seconds or fewer — that got a total of more than 10 million views. As part of her social media makeover, Spears — who lags behind pop stars like Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne in Facebook fans — also recently launched a Tumblr site.

Print Story Email Story

More Stories in Media

  1. Google Reportedly Frustrated With Record Labels, May Pare Down Rumored Music Service

    Google Reportedly Frustrated With Record Labels, May Pare Down Rumored Music Service View Comments

  2. Connect With Your Favorite Bands on SoundCloud’s New Q&A Platform [INVITES]

    Connect With Your Favorite Bands on SoundCloud’s New Q&A Platform [INVITES] View Comments

Top Related Stories

  1. HOW TO: Start Marketing on Gowalla

    HOW TO: Start Marketing on Gowalla View Comments

  2. Why Large-Scale Product Customization Is Finally Viable for Business

    Why Large-Scale Product Customization Is Finally Viable for Business View Comments

  • http://BootcampLights.com Bootcamp Lights

    Rebecca Black laughs at Britney’s attempt!

  • Anonymous

    I would say that reaching no 1 on the albums chart is no “laughable attempt” afterall, Britney Spears is a mega-brand, but I would say we all would have no idea who Rebecca Black is. That aside, it sounds like an excellent social media campaign to achieved this kind of result on a flaggin career for Britney. I’m going to have to check these Crowd Factory people out.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=630092329 Geetanjali Dhillon

    Love this. And will try a version of it myself.

  • http://www.smlinks.com Social Media Links

    Hmmm..Britney is still relevant?

  • http://www.smlinks.com Social Media Links

    Hmmm..Britney is still relevant?

  • Anonymous

    I’m not sure what “Authorized by the FAA to fly digital advertising at 500 feet” means, but it sounds horribly annoying. I hope you’ll refrain from doing that, authorization or not. Thanks.

  • http://www.twitter.com/jbledsoejr jbledsoejr

    I think it’s a nice twist on the Groupon model…I think I’ll implement something similar to this.

  • Anonymous
  • http://techorange.com/2011/04/13/britney-spears-social-offer/ 小甜甜布蘭妮如何以類 Groupon 模式勇奪告示牌冠軍 | TechOrange

    [...] 、圖片來源： Daily Stab 、 Mashable! ） 不小心一頭栽進智慧型手機世界出不來，所以僭越諸位網路先進，在 [...]

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jenny-Thompson/100002285092842 Jenny Thompson

    I love Britney.

  • http://profiles.google.com/worldcommunism G K

    So, a derivative of a Ponzi / Matrix scheme has been implemented by Jive. What is so new about that? In fact, I am surprised that the consumers are so happy about the fact, that Jives holds them for idiots. Which, of course they are, if they preorder! (it is not like the supply will run out on the iTunes) the album, that has not been released yet.

  • http://twitter.com/gerardbabitts Gerard Babitts

    Classic example of how record companies still don’t get it.

    Pre-orders only makes sense in a world where there’s limited physical product.

    The real hook be pre-order for a great discount on the new release and have that discount increase until release date by incentivizing the person to market to their networks and stream via WOM? And the more your network and friends buy into the discount program the more your personal discount increases (i.e. get 20% off now, get 10 friends to buy it get another 10% off, etc.) Turn it into a MLM-style word of mouth game that incentivizes everyone along the chain to get more people to bite.

    How is offering up a discount on the catalog anything that valuable? Shouldn’t there be a presumption that a superfan ALREADY has the catalog?

  • http://twitter.com/gerardbabitts Gerard Babitts

    Classic example of how record companies still don’t get it.

    Pre-orders only makes sense in a world where there’s limited physical product.

    The real hook be pre-order for a great discount on the new release and have that discount increase until release date by incentivizing the person to market to their networks and stream via WOM? And the more your network and friends buy into the discount program the more your personal discount increases (i.e. get 20% off now, get 10 friends to buy it get another 10% off, etc.) Turn it into a MLM-style word of mouth game that incentivizes everyone along the chain to get more people to bite.

    How is offering up a discount on the catalog anything that valuable? Shouldn’t there be a presumption that a superfan ALREADY has the catalog?

  • http://twitter.com/socialsignup Social Signup

    Looking to do this yourself? Check out http://social-signup.com for a WordPress plugin to power campaigns with reward influencers and viral launches. It’s free!

  • http://www.facebook.com/ericm5 Eric Mitchell

    Crowd Factory is like a mini-me of LikeBids.com. We helped companies grow viral with their fan pages by allowing users to compete with each other to win products and coupons free. The collateral to winning is having the most facebook “Likes”.

    LikeBids is the first social media auction site. Here is a video: http://vimeo.com/21312996?ab

    Anyways, Crowd Factory works but LikeBids works better. Like this post if you think mashable should write a story on LikeBids!

  • Anonymous

    A couple of problems with this article:

    1. It mentions that the effort drove visits, but doesn’t say how many pre-orders came as a result of it.

    2. The discount being offered was on the back catalog, but there’s no mention of how those sales were affected.

    If you’re going to call this effort a success, there needs to be sales figures to back it up. Tracking the monetization here is awfully easy if pre-orders are occurring on the site and you can track the source directly enough to claim how many visits they drove.

    Saying this campaign had anything to do with her number one position on the charts is crazy unless you have sales figures to back it up. We’re talking about one of the most famous performers in the world who was promoting the record through any number of outlets online and offline.

    There’s a real opportunity to tell a success story here if the company has pre-order attribution data and back catalog sales spikes to share, but without it this is just another half-baked social “case study.”

  • http://twitter.com/TheGreatDanaJ Dana J.

    I didn’t know about this. Very interesting way to sell albums. These days, you definitely have to be creative.

  • http://twitter.com/Keyexposure Kiel Vaughan

    Discount based referrals aren’t exactly groundbreaking…

  • http://twitter.com/Keyexposure Kiel Vaughan

    What kind of product/service will you be applying it to?

  • http://twitter.com/Keyexposure Kiel Vaughan

    apparently it’s some kind of bilboard attached to a helicopter.

  • http://blog.lifesta.com/2011/04/13/speedlinking/ Speedlinking « Deal It Forward @ Lifesta

    [...] How did Britney Spears’ new album jump straight to number 1 by using the Groupon model? Find out how this could be possible here: http://mashable.com/2011/04/12/britney-spears-social-offer/ [...]

blog comments powered by Disqus
Back to top Topics Lists News