Backplane is the social media firm behind Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters community, raising $4.5m in early 2012 to develop a platform that could be used by Gaga and other musicians and brands to run their own fan communities. 1m registered Little Monsters later, Backplane is opening that platform up to a few more clients, including Guns N’ Roses and magazine publisher Condé Nast. TechCrunch reported the news, and we’ve done a spot of Googledigging to find the URL for the Guns N’ Roses site, which will be called Paradise City – “a community loaded with music, art, gunners and Guns N’ Roses”. A valid question: does the present-day band have a rabid-enough fanbase – not to mention an engaged-enough singer/leader – to make this kind of community fly? It’s currently invite-only, so we’ll have to wait to find out. Condé Nast’s partnership shouldn’t come as a huge surprise either – one of its affiliates, Advance/Newhouse Investment Partnership, invested in Backplane in that February 2012 funding round.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…