New BF5 Album - Onus on Fans to Promote

(If you don't like words, then see the diagrams at the bottom of the blog...)

Recently Ben Folds reunited with fellas from BF5 to create a new album - the first from the boys in over 10 years. That alone is remarkable (and highly anticipated).

Now, being the quasi-big rockstars that they are, they could have recorded their album then handed it over a label and take the conventional route in releasing an album, i.e. let someone else deal with it while they kickback and chillax. But not these guys - they're employing a completely different method.

BF5 are calling on their fan-base to promote the album for them. Big deal, right? Well, everyone who participates becomes a "Vice President of Promotions" playing on notion that nowadays, everywhere you look, somebody somewhere, is a VP of something... But as with any VP title comes the CUSHY PERKS - and over at the "defacto BF label" there's no exception...

So how is this any different than what most bands that don't have a major-record label, or a massive budget do? Well, to put it bluntly, these guys have already made it. And somehow it's refreshing to see guys at the top stir up a sense of community on the grass-roots level with a bottom-up approach. Most jerks who make it use the a top-down approach and never look back.

Myself, well, I'm probably not "VP" material. But if I had a few extra cycles to break away from the 'bread-maker' (i.e. paying job), I'd love to implement the following idea that had occurred to me this morning whilst in the shower scrubbing myself.

And maybe, someone actually worthy of VP status could even implement the idea...

So here it is:

A web-engine-app that is linked to a twitter account that would do the following: 

Build a visual diagram of how Ben Folds word-of-mouth campaign has spread from user-to-user via re-tweets. 

Sounds cool, right? Huh? Doesn't make any sense? Ok, let me explain how it might work.

It would go something like this...

Ben Folds kicks-off the chain-reaction by tweeting something like:

"Grab a copy of the latest BF5 album before it's sold out! @trackbot4000"

(Of course this is an example. The content of Ben's tweet could be whatever he wishes it to be...)

But the key here is Ben's initial tweet is directed to a twitter account that has been setup and linked to a campaign tracking page; eg. THE "trackbot4000".

Then, anytime someone re-tweets Ben's tweet (either with, or without @trackbot4000 inline) this would register on the campaign tracker engine via sniffing through the twitter public API. The campaign tracking engine would then build a relationship map of who retweeted who...

Hold on, stay with me here -

Then people could go to a website, and the presentation aspect would come in the form of a nifty diagram showing connections between all the tweeters that have retweeted Ben's original tweet and everyone who has retweeted their tweet, and so on and so on.

Eventually a pyramid structure would emerge showing how the word-of-mouth has spread. Yes, something like a Ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme where no one actually benefits. Or wait, maybe everyone benefits, who knows...

Technically, shaking out the links between who is retweeting who, should be achievable polling data via the Twitter Public API (I suspect...)

Anyway, as they say, an image is worth a thousand words, to which I say, "a working system is worth a thousand images..." But let's start with the image(s) anyway...

I apologize for the scraggly martini-napkin-style diagraming, but I did it on whatever vellum I could muster from around my hotel room.

Here's a visual example of what the hell I am talking about: 

 Step 1 - Ben tweets a kick-off tweet targeted @trackbot4000...

Step 2 - Trackbot4000 is invoked (turned-on) by Ben's "kick-off" tweet...

Step 3 - Ben's fans retweet Ben's "kick-off" tweet. Word of mouth, spreads like wildfire... 

Step 4- All the while, @trackbot4000 listens and begins constructing the network relationship maps of who is retweeting who, etc...

Step 5- Then the trackbot engine builds and displays a diagram on a website hosted on the interwebs.

That's pretty much how it would work kids. Anyone bad-ass-crazy enough to implement such a system, would be a thrice-righteous VP by my book.