Before launching into his hit “The River” at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid on Sunday night, Bruce Springsteen addressed the vast crowd of concertgoers in accented Spanish: “Queremos dedicar esta cancíón a Nacho y su familia. Está en nuestras plegarias.” (“We want to dedicate this song to Nacho and his family. He is in our prayers.”)
Who is Nacho? And why did the Boss dedicate a song to him?
Nacho is Nacho Hurtado, a 20-year-old fan and concert ticket-holder who died on June 7 after battling a brain tumour. In the lead-up to the Madrid show, his family and friends decided to start a Twitter campaign with the aim of getting Springsteen to dedicate a song to him.
The result was #vaportiNacho (“This one’s for you, Nacho”), which first appeared on Twitter on June 14; by June 16 it was a trending topic in Spain. The cause was further catapulted into the public consciousness by the involvement of several popular media personalities, including Andreu Buenafuente, who tweeted his support to over 1m followers.
Soon prominent online news sources such as 20 Minutos and an El Mundo blog covered the campaign. By daytime June 17, a piece on the RTVE website revealed that Springsteen “is said to know about the story”. Later that night, the Boss set the Bernabeu crowd alight with his thoughtful dedication to Nacho, tweeting afterwards:
Using the Gorkana Group’s real-time social media monitoring tool, Metrica Radar, I tracked the trajectory of the #vaportiNacho hashtag (which is still generating mentions as I write):
What this shows is that human-centred narratives can have an impact beyond the confines of where they happen and those they affect directly, thanks to social networks. Nacho’s story gained momentum in part because it was linked to a big event (a phenomenon we’ve looked at before), which contextualised and therefore personalised the tragedy. But it was also helped by the fact that the celebrity called upon to take note and get involved actually did.
#vaportiNacho would have had less impact if it had not achieved its purpose, so credit must be given to Springsteen. He and his team recognised that genuine and timely engagement with fans is a vital PR tool. Yet as Sainsbury’s demonstrated when it renamed Tiger bread “Giraffe bread” back in January, it is not just celebrities who stand to win from such engagement, but brands and companies too.
Social media users, be they fans, consumers or a target audience, influence the news landscape as much as editors, journalists and other conventional content creators/curators. Ignoring certain channels can result in a PR disaster or, more simply, in disappointed fans and customers. Anyone in the public sphere would do well to follow the Boss’ example.
