Musician Daria Musk has famously built a career through Google+. She’s part of the emerging generation of artists whose success hinges on social media. Instead of simply building brand awareness with social media (which is standard operating procedure for savvy artists now), she’s cannily relied on Google+ to perform concerts, generate a global following of fans, find ideas for songs, and build relationships with brands. If you caught her February 14 Valentine’s Day Hangout Concert, you know what I’m talking about. Days before the performance, she adroitly used her Google Plus page to promote the concert and then during showtime, she charmed a global audience with her warmth and her gift of song — essentially lighting up the digital world for one evening, as shown in this rebroadcast:

Her use of Google+ has also been a godsend for Google, helping to legitimize the fledgling social media community during Google Plus’s first critical months of existence and leading to improvements in Google+. On February 20, at Social Media Week New York, I will interview Musk and Caroline McCarthy of Google at the Hearst Tower in order to uncover lessons learned from their collaboration, including how brands can build closer relationships with their audiences. The session occurs at 2:30 p.m. EST at the Hearst Tower. If you are at Social Media Week New York, please register here. Meantime, to give you a sense of the ground we will cover, I posted a brief Q&A with McCarthy on the iCrossing Great Finds blog, available here. Check it out for Google’s perspective on the Daria Musk story, and come see us in New York.