Natiiv

Little Drummer Boy to Commissioned Music

Matt Ryd's social media success story

This is a guest post by Matt Ryd. Matt is a talented singer-songwriter in Chicago and client of Natiiv Arts & Media. Matt was one of two bands that performed before Comedy, Q's and A's last week and he told me this story during intermission.

How did his rendition of Little Drummer Boy lead to a commissioned song? Why don't we let him tell the story.

Shortly after I posted a 'Happy Holidays' cover of Little Drummer Boy on YouTube, I received a really positive comment from someone with the username "f8ball". f8ball apparently clicked through and looked at several of my other videos, because she posted a few more compliments on some older songs that I had posted. I replied on YouTube and clicked through to her profile, where I learned that her name was Becca and saw that she had "http://www.twitter.com/beckzorz" listed as her website.

I followed her on Twitter and sent her an @ to say hi and that I appreciated all of her kind words, and she and I had some back-and-forth conversation. About a week later, she sent an email to the address listed on my website with a link to http://robinsloan.com/remix-fund. Robin Sloan is an author and the head of media.twitter.com. He had funded a self-published novella by using Kickstarter, and was allotting some of those funds to a 'Remix Project,' encouraging others to take advantage of the Creative Commons license and create new media based off of the characters and world of his story, Annabel Scheme.

Becca submitted the idea of having me write a song and create a Casio-style video based off of one of the plot points of the novella. The readers of Robin's blog voted on their favorite submissions, and mine won out as one of the chosen remixes! I posted an acoustic version of the song to my tumblr (which I use as the main blog for my .com) last week (and sent it out to my mailing list as a free CC BY-NA-SC download) and will be posting the video in the coming months.

As a result of the whole story, my site received a bunch of traffic referred from Robin's post about the song (as tracked on Google Analytics) and I got a few dozen new subscribers to the mailing list (on MailChimp). I'm anticipating that the video is going to be pretty well-trafficked when it goes live, as well. And as an added bonus, since Robin was using his Kickstarter funds as an incentive, I'm also being paid to write a song and make a video.

I think this story is pretty cool because 1) it reads like a laundry list of SM and new media outlets: YouTube, Twitter, Kickstarter, tumblr, MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc.; 2) It's a great illustration of how building actual relationships with fans can provide opportunities that you can't possibly imagine--because I had established a friendship with Becca on Twitter, she felt completely comfortable sending me an email and asking if she could submit me to Robin's remix vote.

It's yet another prime example of why people should be utilizing these tools, and why they should enlist Natiiv Arts & Media* to teach them how to use them effectively!

Thanks to Matt for taking time to share this story. Who have you met that you didn't know you needed to know online?

*I didn't ask him for that plug, but I'll take it.