Help The Gasoline Brothers aan een Interactive Award

Over de Twitter-case van The Gasoline Brothers is al veel geschreven op dit blog. De band wil de case indienen om kans te maken op de Interactive Award die op 15 januari tijdens Noorderslag wordt uitgereikt en die vorig jaar werd gewonnen door Silence is Sexy (ook vaker te vinden op dit blog). Maar zoals dat gaat met 2.0-cases: The Gasoline Brothers willen gebruik maken van crowdsourcing (oftewel: jouw kennis) om hun verhaal aan te scherpen en korter te maken.

Hieronder vind je de opzet van het in te dienen voorstel, geschreven door HKU-student Age Versluis en de band zelf. Het is nu nog te lang (er moeten nog zo’n 150 woorden uit, de maximum lengte is 600 woorden) en het kan hier en daar zeker scherper. Help mee de case zo scherp te krijgen dat de jury niet om The Gas Bros heen kan: laat in de comments onder deze blogpost je commentaar achter. Of bewerk het document direct in Google Docs! Alvast grote dank namens Leon en de andere Brothers.

The Gasoline Brothers and their Twitter campaign – sharing and promoting music in perfect Web 2.0 style

The Gasoline Brothers released their critically acclaimed debut album Hm! in 2006. The release of their 2nd album Tsk! was planned for October, 2009. The challenge: how to ‘resuscitate’ their old fanbase and get the attention of other music lovers and the press after 2 years of silence?

The Principle: make it free, share & promote. Use Twitter!

The Gasoline Brothers’ principle: Let the music be available for free to as many people as possible. Why? The only way you can get people to like your music is when they’ve actually heard it. Those who like it are potential concert-goers, merchandise-buyers and CD-buyers. And in the Internet-age: they are likely to tell other people. There’s the essence of The Gasoline Brothers’ campaign: they used every useful interactive tool they could find to get the word out in the street. With zero budget.

Twitter rules!

It’s quite easy to give away your music online, but how about sharing it and promoting it to others? The Gasoline Brothers used Twitter as their primary means of communication with old and new fans, journalists and bookers. The Gasoline Brothers created a big network of fans and music journalists. A lot of people discovered their music via Twitter. Many of them ‘retweeted’ The Gas Bros’ messages, introducing their own followers to the band as well.

Anything you can talk about, you can tweet about. Once there was something to give away (for free), The Gas Bros used Twitter (and their website, their blog and other social media) to get the message out. For example, they decided to give away their debut album for free and promoted it via Twitter. Months before the release of their 2nd album, they started sharing new stuff via Twitter, e.g. a new video, the album cover, new songs and so on. The Gas Bros made sure that there was a blog post to back up every tweet, so that people could click a hyperlink and find more information. Their website http://www.gasolinebrothers.nl and their blog http://blog.gasolinebrothers.nl/ served as the traditional ‘headquarters’, with Twitter being the tool to show the way to these headquarters.

Pre-release: the Moerenhout case

The Gasoline Brothers are pro-cycling fans. So when they tweeted with Dutch pro-cyclist Koos Moerenhout, he asked them about their music. The new album had not been released yet, so the band pointed him to the free download of their debut. Moerenhout loved the music and told his entire Twitter network about the band. Many Tour the France riders started listening to the band, thus creating a real Twitter hype (written about in many Dutch newspapers). The band also offered Moerenhout to record a song for him if he won the Dutch championship. Which he did. The song – strategically released one month before the release of their new album – got a lot of publicity: all major Dutch papers wrote about it and RTL TV News did an item about it.

Album Release

The release party took place at EKKO (Utrecht), but the band also organised a live webcast of the show, so people at home could watch the whole concert for free. The Gasoline Brothers partnered with music community 3VOOR12, who broadcast the show live. Also, all the tweets about the show – the ones tagged with #gasbros – were displayed next to the webcast. A highly original and fun way to let people see the show and have them share their comments. Truly interactive. The result: over 200 comments and pictures shared on Twitter!

Free album downloads

One week prior to the new release The Gasoline Brothers distributed their albums for free on the established torrentsite Mininova, using Twitter to promote the downloads. With stunning results: 34.095 downloads for Tsk! , 1.900 downloads for Hm! The consequence: lots of new listeners & fans, all over the world.

Mobile phone marketing and computer game marketing

The Gasoline Brothers also released an iPhone app and an Android app for mobile phones, as well as a computer game (to be played on the Internet). The apps and the game served as ‘marketing tools’ to promote the band’s music. Again, the developers were found via Twitter. Of course, the band used Twitter to promote the apps and the game.

Total marketing budget spent: € 0,00

This summary was also created by one tweet. By a Gasoline Brothers fan who thought this was a really cool case. Goes to show the real power of engaging fans using ‘new’ Web tools.