We began handling social media for Nashville-based recording artist Kyle Andrews in August of 2010. Kyle is a unique artist to work with because he has been fortunate enough to land several sync licensing placements through the hard work of Terrorbird's licensing team. In fact, when we took over social media services for Kyle, Holiday Inn was in the midst of airing a worldwide campaign prominently featuring his song "You Always Make Me Smile" (YAMMS).

As a part of a unique partnership, Holiday Inn's ad agency also agreed to fund a music video for the song. The video was shot in Utah and took place during the world's largest water balloon fight. Check out the video here-- it came out great, and as soon as we saw it we knew we had a unique asset to attract fans. And while we couldn't give away YAMMS for free, we were given permission to use Kyle's own remix of the song as an asset. Finally, Kyle's team planned to use YAMMS as the lead single to push his Kangaroo EP which had a release date of August 31st. 

With all this in mind we had a few goals.

- Ensure anyone looking for the song they heard from the commercial could easily find Kyle online

- Leverage YAMMS placement to increase Kyle's fan base across email, Facebook, Twitter & YouTube

- Maximize reach of YAMMS video & ensure it led fans back to Kyle's website or social media pages

- Draw attention to the release of the Kangaroo EP & sell direct-to-fan in conjunction with conventional digital retail outlets

- Expose new fans to the rest of Kyle's catalog including the Kangaroo EP

Here are some of the steps we took to achieve these goals.

- Optimized Kyle's website metadata to include references to Holiday Inn & YAMMS

- Leveraged the YAMMS Remix as a loss-leader, giving it away to fans in exchange for an email address

- Secured an exclusive premiere with YouTube for the YAMMS video

- Linked the video back to Kyle's site, store & social networks

- Reached out to current fans via email, gave them the song for free and asked them to share with a friend

Results:

- Acquired 4,447 email addresses from YAMMS giveaway (~440% overall increase)

- +437 facebook fans in September '10 (>25% overall increase)

- The video accumulated over 1M views in less than three weeks; as of this writing it now has over 1.75M views