What Do The Chainsmokers, Bernie Sanders, And The Golden State Warriors Have In Common?

As pointed out by Suzannah Showler in this article, we have become obsessed with other people's daily habits. We look into other people's lives and - just like investigators trying to resolve serial killers' cases - we search for patterns. What do successful people have in common? Which habits people of success share, that if adopted by us will help us to be successful, just like they do?

Mason Currey call these patterns "Daily Rituals." His book "Daily Rituals, How Artists Work," released in 2013 - that was soon a hit proving the large interest in this topic - is an aggregator of mini-biographies, where the author analyzes habits, preferences, and schedule of successful people. He found out that what all these successful people have in common is a tremendous love for what they do, besides any financial remuneration interest. Many of these artists never did what they did for financial reasons, and the author points out how most of them were already wealthy or somehow supported.

But in a highly technological era like the one we are living in, would the only love for what we do make us successful? In a time when seven out of ten Americans use social media to connect, entertain, engage, and share information, how does Social Media influence "popularity"?

Without a doubt, Social Media has made popularity quantifiable. Social Media has transformed popularity from an intangible, unquantifiable quality to something easily measurable. Followers, likes, shares, retweets are all metrics we have adopted to calculate engagements, influence, and popularity. Quoting the words of Mark Levene “Popularity is a form of collaborative filtering, which is a technology that uses the preferences of a community of users to recommend items to individual users”.

The Chainsmokers (the American DJ and production duo consisting of Alexander "Alex" Pall and Andrew "Drew" Taggart), Bernie Sanders (junior United States Senator from Vermont since 2007), and The Golden State Warriors (the American basketball team based in San Francisco) have in commune a strong interest for Social Media. Although they belong entirely to different fields, they leverage Social Media to strengthen their fans' loyalty, market their successes. This as well as bringing awareness to themselves and get feedback on their work.

The Chainsmokers, Bernie Sanders, and The Golden State Warriors, besides using the traditional Social Media channels have shown to be also keen to use new Social Apps, particularly these apps integrating with public events. The three celebrities, indeed, have profiles on a recently launched events social networking app called IRL, where they have quickly started trending. The app is a kind of Instagram for events where a user can follow anyone’s events calendar - among other functionalities - users can follow friends, favorite sports teams, musicians, comedians. On IRL the Chainsmokers, Bernie Sanders, and The Golden State Warriors have registered over 100k followers in only two months.

The Chainsmokers use their IRL profile to promote their music tours, and they include into this the link for purchasing the tickets. Bernie Sanders profile instead shows the political and social events the Senator is attending to promote is Presidential candidacy; each event has a photos and a link to the Senator web page that includes map and description. The Golden State Warriors, from their side, share on their profile their basketball events. IRL has the potential to become the next major platform for influencers to flock to and build new influence around driving their fans to in person events. No major social media product offers this type of direct influence today.

Social Media transforms celebrities into brands. Whether they are groups or individuals, sports celebrities, politicians or musicians, they aren't just people. Some of them even leverage their image to make money selling products. The Kardashians, for instance, promote their clothing store on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Many celebrities, also earn by sending out sponsored posts and tweets.

On a similar note, some celebrities use social media for re-building their image. Celebrities who have some sorts of faults in the public eye, leverage their social media accounts to show themselves as humble. They use Social Media to justify what happened in that particular event, or even apologize for their actions. As a result, they're more likely to sell and to re-acquire the lost trust and admiration from their fans.