Last month, The Orchard’s Interactive Marketing team introduced you to the new Facebook Timeline. Hopefully we helped make the transition as smooth and as painless as possible for you and your artist(s). This month, we are going to walk you through three things that have proven to be highly effective for us in the land of digital marketing over the past few weeks – SoundCloud’s Story Wheel, NoiseTrade, and last but not least… bat piss (wait for it).
First on deck, Story Wheel. Story Wheel was rolled out via SoundCloud Labs, and it is an online and embeddable version of a slide show projection (sound effects included). The app allows you to login through an Instagram account and drag and drop photos pulled from Instagram into a photo carousel. Next, you are able to narrate the reel through the powers of SoundCloud. Just click the giant red record button and lay down audio as you click through your very own Story Wheel. Once created, you can embed this gem using the following code:
Our friends in ZAMBRI captured their adventures to SXSW in a StoryWheel featured on NYLON…
You can then share and embed the widget from your customized page…
Additionally, NoiseTrade offers a Featured Artist Program that is curated by the NoiseTrade team. They have two tiers of featured artists. Both tiers receive placement in the bi-weekly email newsletter and on the homepage. The primary featured artist receives top billing in one of the bi-weekly email newsletters as well as a short paragraph to entice fans to download. The secondary featured artist receives one of two slots just below the primary feature in the bi-weekly newsletter. Both features are also included for up to one week as one of four rotating banner ads at the top of the NoiseTrade homepage.
Now, BAT PISS. Earlier this month, our team caught wind that a member of the band Torche had a bat piss in his eye. We couldn’t let this go unnoticed. In a day and age when it is our job to help your band stand out, we were going to take this and run with it (pending band’s approval). We leaked (no pun intended) the story to Pitchfork, and let the internet do the rest. The story saw traction from MTV Hive, Buzzfeed, Alternative Press, and a bunch more. More importantly, most online publications that picked up this story reposted the Topspin widget for their first single, “Kicking,” and/or their upcoming tour dates. It was beautiful. Now, the moral of this story is definitely not to seek out an animal to urinate in your eye. The takeaway here is use what you got. This happened. It was funny. We’ve got a record to let the masses know about. We might as well let them in on this asinine story while we are at it!
