Direct-to-Fan: Releasing the Video

The gentlemen of Hollow Vixen made a killer video for their song, “B.O.B. (Battery Operated Boyfriend).” And that video sat in the virtual can for a while ’til there was a best time to both release it and capitalize on it. This made sense then, and the proper time, effort, and coordination was what would (hopefully…) going to lead to something that’d launch the band to the next level — whatever that is…

So at the outset, the challenge was to use a very cool video to capture as many fans as possible. To do so, we decided to use a couple of tools from Topspin. From the top spot on the Hollow Vixen homepage, we gave folks the option to either watch the video, download their own copy, or share either the download or streaming option with a friend. Here’s what that looked like:

From there, we created a TubeMogul account to distribute the video across all kinds of platforms. In addition, we also uploaded the video to Hollow Vixen’s own YouTube channel. There was also a witty news release mailed out to our general mailing list as well as additional media contacts. After the slight debacle using the Topspin mailing platform previously, we opted to send this release out via Nimbit’s system.

So what happened …. ?

The email went out fairly smoothly. As experienced previously, there were some problems uploading the media contacts onto the Nimbit platform. But fortunately, I still had the Topspin CSV template to use, and again, it saved the day. The mailing went out just fine and had a 49% open rate which (to this marketer…) is pretty impressive. Nimbit’s tools tell you very cleanly and clearly how the message was received, click throughs, and day/time of opens. Works fine, but it’s a bit slow moving.

The widgets we used from Topspin were cool. That being said, it was a tough call as to how to offer the product. Everyone in the band wants to offer free music for download, so we figured offer the video as a download (in exchange for a coveted email address) wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. That’s why the “email for media” widget is up on the website. After we put that up, we couldn’t think of a time when we actually downloaded a music video, so we also added the streaming video widget. That way you could watch the video, share it with friends, and hopefully generate some viral excitement.

The results from Topspin and Nimbit were less than thrilling — there were 222 downloads of the video, and 286 views of the streaming player. Both of these are still up on Hollow Vixen’s homepage. More interesting was the response from YouTube — over the last two weeks, there’ve been 33,000 views of the B.O.B. video. That’s definitely something to get excited about.

But before all that excitement goes to our heads, it’s pretty hard to quantify what the YouTube success has actually accomplished. It didn’t make much of a dent in site traffic, the press isn’t camped out at our doors, and no one has showed up with huge bags of cash for us. This is where both platforms (Topspin & Nimbit) are limited. While they offer a phenomenal opportunity to manage your success, you can’t expect them to actually deliver it. The execution of Hollow Vixen’s video launch involved a number of moving parts, and required an extreme amount of bandwidth to make it all happen with any degree of success. The fact that our biggest success came from a fairly unmeasurable/unconvertible channel (YouTube) illustrates that the quest for a “hugely viral video” isn’t enough to break a band. That’s not saying 33,000 views is a failure, but it’s not something that we can convert into a tangible, measurable result for the band.

We’ve got a few more ideas up our sleeve — one of which is a slightly different take on direct-to-fan that we anticipate some solid interest in. Stay tuned. Next update coming a lot sooner than this one did …