Microsoft’s New Phone

Gala Darling is not the kind of girl who would normally sell you a smartphone. She imagines herself as a “a psychedelic picture show,” with platinum (formerly blue, then hot pink) hair, trippy Alexander McQueen bondage heels and Chloé 2148 sunglasses. A Kiwi by birth, a New Yorker by inclination, the 26-year-old is a devotee of the byzantine echo chamber known as “social media,” with 10,320 followers on Twitter and 4,357 friends on Facebook. She signs her blog posts — on fashion and also on “how to live magically” — with “love letters and feather headdresses.” Her next book, on “radical self-love,” is only “partially about masturbation.” People read her — lots of people, judging by the hundreds of comments her posts routinely generate.

Darling is part of an eyebrow-raising gaggle of Web-tethered gadabouts who were paid to promote the Kin, a new smartphone from Microsoft that mashes up your Twitter, Facebook and MySpace pages into a kind of “magazine of your life” — provided that your life mostly takes place online. The phones went on sale last week and, given their target demographic (young people), a suitably hip marketing stunt was in order. Behold, “The Spot Concerts.” The “spot” here refers to a tiny green dot on the phone’s screen, a kind of virtual grab-bag to collect and quickly share RSS feeds, Facebook status messages and Twitter updates. (That’s a mouthful; watch this demo for an idea.) But “the spot,” in Microsoft’s imagining, may also be a physical place or a meme around which everyone on the Web is coalescing. “The Spot Concerts” were an attempt to fuse these meanings, and hawk some cellphones.

Hot bands (Black Keys, Asher Roth, Big Boi) were booked for “secret” shows to be held in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco.

People like Darling — “socialoligists” in Kin-speak — were given phones and told to tease the performances, dropping clues about where and when they were happening as they neared. The whole find-the-gig gimmick recalls “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” and is just as transparently fixated with tapping into the youth zeitgeist. Microsoft commissioned Darling (along with fellow socialologist, Matt Levine, who owns The Eldridge) to crowdsource publicity for a concert by The Ting Tings, which took place on Saturday in an unlikely location: the Israel and Leah Cummings gymnasium of the Educational Alliance, a 120-year-old social service agency founded by Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. Whatever! “There is an open bar & it’s 18+, FIRST COME FIRST SERVED,” Darling posted on Twitter before the show. “Let’s dance baby!”

Two more of “The Spot Concerts” remain; Dead Weather on Saturday in Chicago and Big Boi & Friends later this month in Atlanta. Visit facebook.com/kin for clues about finding the performances.

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