Grammy's Gone Social

Yesterday Mashable published an interview they did with Evan Greene, Chief Marketing Officer of the Recording Academy, about how the Grammy's are embracing social media this year and how and why that decision was finally made.

It's a quite interesting interview. Now, one thing that called that my attention [and I believe is worth to learn from] was how the Academy prepared to launch this effort:

The Academy established a social media task force in 2008 and did a lot of outreach in 2009, basically assessing the climate, the places where the fans were spending their time, and evaluating the decision to jump in full force. Evan made it very clear that the Academy didn’t want to just haphazardly get involved, if the organization was going to do social media, it was going to do it correctly.

It's great to see that the Recording Academy took the time to first understand how Social Media was part of music fans' lives [both its role and the way in which impact these] before launching this effort. It is also fun to see how they allowed fans to become 'part of the experience'. At the end of the day Social Media is all about the experience.

Fans are the core of popular music. And unlike industry executives (and sometimes even the artists themselves), fans are often the first to embrace new technologies and social networks to share and remix content by their favorites artists. So with that in mind, TBWA\Chiat\Day, the agency of record for the Grammy awards, created a multi-format multimedia campaign related to Grammy-nominated artists, curated entirely from fan-generated content. If you visit WereAllFans.com, you’ll see portraits of some of the nominated artists composed entirely of real-time content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. The content is refreshed and fed in and users can click on aspects of the content to view or play it back all on the page. It’s a pretty cool way to show stuff off.

Check out the site. It's kind of fun [even if you're not a fan of Lady Gaga]