RockDex Case Study: John Mayer
One of the best things about RockDex is that it lets you push aside the punditry, allowing you to examine how real people are reacting to events that are blowing up the media.
A couple of weeks ago, celebrity tunesmith, guitarist and quasi-ladies-man John Mayer said some pretty wack stuff in an interview with Playboy Magazine.You know. That interview where he compared his male part to a white supremacist and ex-girlfriend Jessica Simpson to "sexual napalm." He also used a racial slur. And, rumor has it, he kicked a small child out the window while saluting Hitler. But that bit hasn't been confirmed.
There was so much coverage of the interview's controversial content, we actually never bothered to read the thing. (Who reads Playboy, anyway?) If you want to, though, it's archived at Playboy.com. Due to that site's overall purpose, you'll want to watch who's around when you click it.
So, anyway, the media backlash. It was so fierce, immediate and palpable that the guitar-playin' fool decided to make apologies at a concert and via Twitter on the day the interview came out, February 10. Despite Mayer's attempts at apology, the s-word-storm continue to swirl, and the man who was before only suspected of being a douchebag was full-on called out by the press, interest groups, your mom and pops, and basically everyone with at least a dial-up connection. But how were the actual fans reacting? Were they turning their backs? Were they unfriending his ass by the million?Hardly.As RockDex shows, Mayer's page gained more fans on Facebook around February 10-11 than any other time in the previous several months except for a spike on February 3, which was the day his Australia/NZ tour was announced. His growth has declined since the big flap. On February 12, 2,615 people became his fans on Facebook. The day before that: 2,521. On Feb. 17, he dipped down to 1,307, but that's still higher than where he was in December and early January, before the world knew the racist nickname of Mayer's Oscar.
That's a sure sign of support, as the act of becoming an artist's fan on Facebook is a more sentimental act than listening to their music on a corresponding site such as MySpace (where, as a side note, Mayer's song plays hovered around 75,000 per day during this time, neither low nor high for him).
Tweets mentioning Mayer skyrocketed during this time as well, surpassing the 5,000-a-day mark on February 11 and climbing in the ensuing days.
RockDex shows us who the most influential Twitter users talking about Mayer are. And one of those happens to be the Hef himself, verified and in the flesh.
Though we'd never suggest Mayer make an encore performance of that Playboy interview, it didn't seem to hurt his social media numbers.
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