I attended the kick-off of Lady Gaga’s World Tour on Friday night at Centre Bell in Montreal (for those who don’t know her, she’s a rising star in the pop world, you can read more on Wikipedia). The evening allowed me to generate some interesting insights on real-time media, real-time search and mobile phones.

1. At the end of the first act, a group called Semi Precious Weapons, Lady Gaga tweeted from backstage “You had 96 hrs to learn the lyrics. I can hear u screaming.” (the 96 hours was a reference to the release of her new album 4 days before). It wasn’t much but isn’t it cool when the artist you’re going to see is actually sending Twitter messages minutes before stepping on stage? It definitely increases engagement with the fans and personalizes the relationship. Interestingly enough, Semi Precious Weapons had also tweeted before going on stage and they also shared some pictures on Twitter after the show.
2. After the first act, we were supposed to listen to Kid Cudi but the guy didn’t show up. After waiting patiently for one hour without any information, the crowd consisting mostly of teenagers started getting restless (some people even booing!). I picked up my phone and did a search on Twitter for Lady Gaga, see if anything had popped up in the “back channel”. I saw that Perez Hilton, the well-known celebrity blogger, was in Montreal that evening and had just tweeted “Just for tonight… GaGa is going on at 10 pm. Tell everyone near u!”. That information wasn’t shared with the audience even though it was known. Real-time search won that night.
3. Now, being a good guy, I shared the information with the people around me. The teenager in front of me had a Blackberry (a Pearl, I think), which surprised me because I didn’t think RIM had been successful in promoting their devices to teenagers. I still associate Blackberries with “work”. The other thing that surprised me was that the teenager and his friend were vaguely aware of Twitter but were clearly not users of the service. These teenagers were clearly in a Facebook world. An anedocte, but still interesting.