We’re currently working with exciting new band Burn The Negative on their digital content strategy.

The guys are playing at festivals every weekend throughout the summer and are active social media users, so we looked for a way of making the most of their stories to grow their fan community.

We designed a new ‘feeds’ section on their website which pulls in anything posted on their Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc in a nice real time feed.

Lifestreaming like this is not exactly new, however many artists have leapt onto the social media bandwagon quite randomly, sending their fans off to Facebook groups or Twitter profiles, then blasting out/repeating promotional messages across all these networks (often next to ads for which they receive no revenue), without paying attention to their own ‘shop front’ on the web.

Not long ago, many even spoke of abandoning their expensive flash websites in favour of simply pointing everything to MySpace. In retrospect (and really, at the time too) this should never have seemed a good idea.

We think that using each network for a specific type of content, then filtering everything back through the central hub of an artist’s own website, makes much more powerful use of all these great tools. It also gives a better sense of a single fan community than idle, spammed and poorly branded pages elsewhere.

The feed allows us to easily pull out the photos and tweets from each road trip, using the cool Storytlr tool, to tell a short story that is instantly compelling, visually attractive and easy to use. It’s even geo-tagged so you can plot the bands travels on a full screen Google Map.

All digital content is best served up at the top level as a feed, but how this information is aggregated and presented is vital, otherwise quality content will simply be lost in all the noise.

With an ever growing array of social media platforms requiring a presence, artists and brands need to find new ways of bringing these together as part of a coherent strategy for their own websites and mobile apps. Then, rather than struggling to keep up, they can really start to connect with their whole fan community.

Burn The Negative’s Social Media Feed
Buy their new single, ‘Low’, here now