On August 3rd, rapper Wale released his follow-up to his crtically acclaimed mixtape “The Mixtape About Nothing”. However, most didn’t anticipate how popular the actual release would be, and Twitter should take a significant amount of credit for More About Nothing’s release day success.
As an avid user of social media, I have never been one to have the ‘too cool for school’ attitude regarding social networking. However, as far as utilizing it as an avenue for direct marketing has always made sense to me, but personally I found such tactics painfully annoying–until yesterday.
Wale, a Washington DC native and ‘Twitter happy’ rapper, released a free album for his fans yesterday at noon. As a fan of Wale, I have been paying fairly close to attention to the process and was fascinated by the way in which he created buzz surrounding the album. Yesterday the DC emcee enjoyed more than 100,000 downloads via a single site, and even more via other sites. Although many others have been successful at utilizing social media as a marketing tool, this was the first time I was captivated by the entire process. Below is a timeline of events that led up the release of Wale’s mixtape, “More About Nothing”:
- First, Wale mysteriously disappeared from the Twitter scene for weeks and came back to announce that he will being sharing his reasoning behind his disappearance to his followers in the upcoming days.
- Days later Wale posts a link on his Twitter account to this youtube video:
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- After being hammered with questions from fans awaiting the highly awaited sequel to his class mixtape ‘The Mixtape About Nothing’, he gets the nod from his label to release the single,“Black and Gold”.
- A week or so later, Wale and Kid Cudi team up for a Heineken promotional show in Soho, New York City.
- Wale claimed he would be dropping the mixtape at noon on August 3rd, but before noon “More About Nothing” was trending worldwide via Twitter, the hip hop community buzzed about the overdue return of DC’s most celebrated hip hop act.
- The mixtape is released at noon via Twitter and a variety of music blogs. Many links experience problems as a result of the traffic.
- Late yesterday afternoon “More About Nothing’ surpasses Christopher Nolan’s Inception on the worldwide twitter trending feed.
Social media has become a vehicle for getting the word out for anything. Wale had an established following prior to this sequence of events, but the way the buzz was generated through trending topics and timelines worldwide demonstrates how truly remarkable the social media world really is. Is the future of direct marketing already upon us?
-Aaron
