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

It’s all too inevitable that the coming of Google’s Street View to the UK would stir up ‘fury’ and ‘outrage’, even if most people in the country clearly think it’s an amazing development.

Privacy rights are well worth fighting for, but have the irate commentators really thought about what they are so up-in-arms about on this occasion? If they were paying attention to the advantages of digital media rather than automatically resisting it, they might see that having photos of totally public areas online is far, far down the scale of threats to our privacy. Censoring the taking of photos in public places should be more of a concern.

Wouldn’t it be nice if a group like Privacy International were at the cutting edge of the digital debate, acknowledging the central role of such technology to improving all of our lives and working to make sure its develops with a strong moral code. However today’s news that they are attempting to shut down street view only goes to show they are hopelessly out of touch.

The fuss over the few people/vehicles/dogs that can be identified misses the point too. They can simply be removed if requested. Web media works best when it is collaborative, therefore Google naturally relies on the input of its map users to improve its content all the time.

The irony is that only in such a connected, digital world can such fearful hot air be blown up into the sort of instant fuss that we’ve seen in the last few days. Do you think Google expected the severity of it? Probably. And there’s going to be plenty more hot air to come. It’s all part of the process of such huge cultural change. Ho hum, on we go.

Just wait until those people who are kicking up a stink right now get used to the shear usefulness of Street View on a mobile phone when they are trying to find their way to a job interview, buy a new house or make it to a dinner party on time. The conversation that night will be about how earth we ever lived without such a valuable free service.

Brits have shown the world just how preoccupied with the weather we really are via the medium of Twitter. The dumping of a few inches of snow and the subsequent, inevitable shut down of Our Roman/Victorian era transportation network lead a lot of people to be stuck at home Twittering about the ‘arctic’ conditions.

The #uksnow tag was beating even #superbowl at certain stages on Monday, highlighting the huge leap in popularity of the micro blogging platform in the UK in the last few weeks.

Within hours of the first flake falling, a Google Map mashup was inviting people rate the snow in their postcode out of 10 with a simple Twitter text message.

Then once workers realised they weren’t possibly getting to the office, the avalanche began. #uksnow comments dominated the conversation – and to some extent still do right now. Photo service Twitpic featured a hell of a lot of snowmen and ‘picture postcard’ back garden scenes, and some genuinely useful travel information was also available too.

It was an exemplary show of the shared national joy/misery that a bit of snow causes us (that must have proved thoroughly unfathomable to people in other snow-prone climbs), but is the Twitter response just the latest social network fad? Certainly the hastily arranged flash event in Trafalgar Square @snowballfight smacked of trying too hard.

It seems unlikely that the Great British public will rush to post an image of their back garden every time it snows from now on. So to that extent we are witnessing the excitement at discovering a new toy. Yet the whole episode also reveals how people wish to use their media these days – to natter about the issues of the day in real time, and to have a nose around to see what other people are experiencing. The most basic human social instincts catered for in 140 character text messages and endlessly similar grainy photos.

It all hints towards the ways we’ll be communicating in the near future, even if it seems a bit silly now. The news networks, (who have really gone overboard with their coverage of the conditions), will take the hardest hit when people automatically turn to Twitter for all they need to know about shared events like this in real-time. It may only be text messaging, but the service has already proved it’s superiority as a medium, and we know this is only early days…