Internet Poll- Round 2

[Miguel]

In retrospect, Haley's 2-vote win over Austin is rather surprising.

This guy is a social media juggernaut:

I ask him if I can watch him Skype with a fan. Mahone conducts exclusive Skypes with female fans — for a fee, now $50 for a 10-minute call. (“We’ve changed the prices so many times because we wanted to be fair,” says Michele. “We don’t want to gouge people, but the demand was so high.”)

...He randomly starts calling fans who’ve contacted him in the past, then posts his Skype name via Twitter. Getting up to go to the bathroom, he says, “The Skype name is out. I’m gonna have to make another Skype now” to control the volume of calls. Within seconds, his computer starts blipping as calls roll in by the hundreds. He finally answers a call from a softspoken teenage girl who retains her composure by nervously fiddling with her long hair.

...Kara DioGuardi, the former American Idol judge who is trying to sign Mahone to Warner Bros. Records via her production deal with the label, says the thing he’s doing most right is connecting with fans online in a way that feels authentic...Says DioGuardi: “He knows how to connect. I think people feel attached to him because he’s so genuine. He lets them into his bedroom and talks to them in his videos. He’s got their notes on the wall. He’s got his mother, his grandmother there...It’s very much what they’re going through at that age.” Plus, “When you see him perform,” she adds, “it’s like he’s singing to you.”

Mahone has 700,000 Twitter followers, 450,000 Facebook fans, 350,000 followers on Instagram and 72 million views for more than 100 of his homemade YouTube cover versions of songs by pop artists (as of June 15)...He has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise bearing his name, ranging from hoodies to sticker packs (some that sport the catchphrase “Haters gonna hate. Mahomies gonna love.”). Sometimes, when he goes to his favorite San Antonio mall, he has to bring his bodyguard in case he is recognized and swarmed by screaming teens. Recently, $60,000 worth of tickets for his concert at New York’s Best Buy Theater sold out in less than an hour.

...Austin and Michele also have taken paid trips for him to play at parties, charging up to $400 for a 45-minute set followed by a 30-minute meet-and-greet. “A lot of times people say, ‘I only have $200 to spend,’ ” says Michele, “and we try to do something to fit into what they need.” A family in Chicago paid them $2,000 to fly in and play at a party late last year. The trip became a watershed moment. The day after the party, they announced on short notice that Mahone would meet fans at Chicago’s Millennium Park, and nearly a thousand screaming Mahomies showed up. Austin and Michele had to be whisked away by police escort when the throng got out of hand. “That was a turning point, when I started to realize that things were getting crazy,” says Michele. “It wasn’t long after that I ended up leaving my full-time job to focus on what he was doing.”

...Still in braces when he first met this reporter in March, Mahone got them removed just in time to open for pop stars like Adam Lambert, The Wanted, Hot Chelle Rae and Carly Rae Jepsen at Philadelphia pop station Q102’s Springle Ball in late May. “Any time we see a huge online fan base get behind someone, we want to be a part of that,” says Q102 program director Tim Herbster, who first heard about Mahone last year from a colleague at a station in Tampa, Fla. “We did a poll called The Next Big Thing” — a March Madness contest with 16 major pop acts, including the hugely popular U.K. boy band One Direction — “and he won it, with just his grassroots fan base. That’s something else.” Thanks to Mahone’s mass of online fans, The Next Big Thing poll was the biggest promotion Q102 has ever done on its website, drawing more than 200,000 unique page views in four weeks.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/au...ion-333443

^^ Maybe this poll is important.