From Single Mother To Social Media Celebrity
Posted on 09. Feb, 2009 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Social Media Strategies
Following on from last week’s post on the University of Salford’s newly approved MA in Social Media which got a response from the BBC’s Business editor, Tim Weber on Twitter, here’s further discussion by way of an example.
Meet Lauren Luke, a single mother who’s recently joined the Guardian as a video blogger on the strength of the popularity of her videos on YouTube.
Thanks to John Welsh for the hat tip on Twitter.
Amazing news and incredibly timely.
The YouTube makeup guru (“possibly the most watched make up artist in the world” according to YouTube) marvels at the global popularity of her amateur how-to videos which receive millions of views per episode. A clip showing how to achieve a Leona Lewis look has received over 2 million views.
All the more interesting because as the Guardian writes:
“Lauren Luke is not a very likely celebrity. A 27-year-old single mother from South Shields, Tyneside, she lives with her 10-year-old son, Jordan, her mum, sister, twin teenage nieces and five highly affectionate dogs in a small pebbled-dashed house in an anonymous terraced street.”
I think this is a result of the web ‘amplifying’ what we do as elucidated by Benjamin Ellis on the RedCatCo blog:
“These days we (at least those of us reading this) are plugged in. We are heard. Our voices are carried by The Internet to countries and continents we may never have visited, and may never visit. Nevertheless, we are carried there. Our parent’s parent’s generation communicated face-to-face. Our generation, and the ones that follow, communicate via technology. We are amplified.”
Whilst this may imply that a Social Media degree qualification is unnecessary (as John Welsh argues here), I tend to disagree. Lauren Luke’s success on YouTube stems from the fact that she moved to the web’s largest video sharing platform to promote cosmetic products she was already selling on eBay.
She already understood about selling products on the web and simply used YouTube to demonstrate the benefits of what she was selling, replacing photos with video demonstrations.
And therein lies the rub.
As was pointed out in the comments in response to the earlier post, there is a difference between knowing how to use social media and knowing how to market.
A degree qualification that combines the two whilst introducing the student to the sociology, psychology and anthropology of the social web is a killer combination in my opinion.
As a fresh-faced graduate in Electronic Engineering I knew little about how marketing worked. Yes, I was aware of the advertising industry and the increasingly important web but the principles behind engaging to ‘convert’ were completely unknown to me.
The same might be said of a lot of graduates seeking a job in the media industries.
David Law, a recent graduate of Napier University who wrote his dissertation on participatory journalism and social media agrees that an MA in Social Media would at least teach students about the wider impact of social media, and what it means for media.
He should know; he now works in social media for digital marketing agency Big Mouth Media.
What say you?
This argument could go on and on…!
Related posts:
- The first Social Media Single: “Credit Crunch Christmas” by Micky P. Kerr
- Is That A Degree Qualified Social Media Consultant?
- Social Media Usage in the FTSE 100: Company Profile – CADBURY ADR
- Social Media Experiment FAIL
- Social Media Usage in the FTSE 100: Company Profile – Centrica
check http://yourtvonline.com