Lil B. Know the name? If you don't, you will soon. The 21 year old rapper's star is quickly rising. Since scoring his first hit ("Vans") with his former group, The Pack, at age 16, Lil B has released a huge amount of music. Probably more than 1,000 songs. The music is often times strange, with lyrics running the gamut from emo-existential musings ("Robots Forever") to bizarre gender & identity play ("I'm Miley Cyrus") to novelty rap ("I Cook"). Quality varies wildly between songs. He's created a world around his philosophy, "based," (basically being yourself) and accordingly calls himself "Based God."

Meanwhile, his notoriety is increasing proportionally to his oeuvre. Features about the Based God have run in The Guardian, the New York Times, Fader Magazine, and pretty much every music-related blog out there. He's in talks with Universal Motown, has collaborated with Soulja Boy and Andy Milonakis, and has played a number of sold out shows. He claims he's working with Prince.

So to what does Lil B owe his escalating success? Social media.

Lil B sees social media management as a job equal in importance to creating music. His Twitter account currently has around 150,000 followers. He spends pretty much all day on Twitter, not only writing his own tweets but retweeting his many fans. Facebook is used in a similar manner. Tumblr is used as a tool to perpetuate the creation of Lil B-related memes - a popular one shows an image of someone crying and happily proclaiming "THANK YOU BASED GOD."

But Lil B's most innovative and prescient use of social media is undoubtedly as a tool for distributing music. Most of his songs are uploaded to his YouTube channel, usually packaged as hastily made music videos. Fans used to buy a full length album, which they listened to repeatedly until the artist released another albums several months, or even years later. With Lil B, this is impossible. The rate at which new songs are released is just too quick. Because there's so much of it, the emphasis is more on consuming a piece of content once and moving on to the next morsel. Lil B connoisseurs don't download, they stream.

What can marketers learn from Lil B? Here's how I see it:

1. Be present. This one is pretty obvious. A brand needs to be in the trenches on a daily basis, interacting on a one-to-one basis with their fans. Believe in your product and word of mouth will happen. Which brings me to my next point…
2. Go where your fans are. Search "Thank You Based God" on Google Images. Lil B noticed that he was inspiring these memes, so he went where the memes were originating - Tumblr. But it's also critical to notice differences in your various properties so….
3. Don't syndicate. This is up for some debate, as syndication can be right for certain brands under certain circumstances. But Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr were created for different types of content and accordingly have garnered different user bases. Think about that next time you have your Facebook post push automatically to Twitter. And finally...
4. Distribute content the way your fans like it. Check out this post over at virtualmusic.tv. See how many hits all those popular music streaming services have? They are absolutely paltry in comparison to YouTube. Now look at some clips uploaded by Lil B. They never have pre-roll ads, because Lil B has chosen to not opt into any profit sharing plans. Why? Because pre-roll ads are annoying, and they repel views. 

The bottom line is to care about your fans and their user experience. Think about what they'd like when you make choices between different platforms and types of content. And if you're having trouble figuring out what's right, maybe you should ask yourself, "what's based?"