After a Facebook and Twitter campaign that spread faster than swine flu, Rage Against The Machine (RATM) were victorious in the race to the Christmas number 1 slot on downloads alone, beating sweet, dimpled X-Factor winner Joe McElderry by 50,000 sales.

At our Social Media event back in July, Martin Thomas, talked about the ‘crowd’ – newly-empowered consumers who are directly telling brands what they think of them via social media.  He argued that companies need to embrace this direct feedback and harness the power of the crowd, changing their mind set and the way they do business to become ‘crowd surfers’.

This campaign is a fantastic example of just how powerful that ‘crowd’ can be.  Joe is part of the great X-Factor marketing machine – paraded on prime time TV in front of millions of viewers every week, promoted on radio, the internet, spin-off TV shows, posters – just about every way imaginable.  The rage against this marketing machine was conducted primarily on Facebook and Twitter – but with the backing of the band and a few other high profile influencers, gathered enough momentum to stop the X-Factor bandwagon reaching the number one spot again.

Perhaps the crowd are getting fed up with X-Factor; they are telling Simon Cowell that new life needs injecting into the brand if it is to continue to dominate pre-Christmas TV.  Perhaps they are bored of the predictability of the Christmas number one going to the winner – that race used to be much more exciting.  Or perhaps it was more about the race itself – the eXcitement Factor (groan) – the thrill of finding out whether it could really work, whether the power of social media was a match for the X-Factor’s tried and tested formula.

Whatever the reason, this has to go down as one-nil to the crowd.  But Mr Cowell, to give him his due, is a pretty good ‘crowd surfer’ himself.  He has participated fully in the debate, even phoning the organiser of the Facebook campaign to congratulate him on his success.  And it’s definitely true that X-Factor, Simon and Joe have enjoyed even more publicity than they would have had because of this campaign.  And of course, Simon has interests in RATM’s record label!  So, was Simon secretly behind it after all?  Calling all conspiracy theorists….