I Hate Mornings

Background

I was lurking at the London Social Media Café (aka. the Tuttle Club) about a month ago, determined to write three songs in a day to catch up on my 50 Songs in 90 Days Challenge. Somebody (almost certainly @solobasssteve) suggested I write a song about Twitter, because all the SMC types are Twitterholics, and talk endlessly about how maahvellous Twitter is. So I wrote the song and posted it on the 50/90 Challenge site.

It got some buzz on Twitter (of course – that was the plan all along ;o), but people don’t like to listen to random anonymous songs without a context, so I made a quick video and stuck it on YouTube.

A few hundred people saw the YouTube video, and I was pretty stoked. Over the next few days, I followed its progress with Twitter search, and left a few comments here and there thanking people for mentioning it. The overlapping Twitter networks couldn’t resist retweeting a song that mentioned retweeting in the chorus, so I guess it must have appeared in a fair few Twitter streams around the world (I recorded a Skype interview for a BBC Radio Five Live show, and I woke up one morning to find the song had just been featured on National Radio New Zealand.)

Then @youtube tweeted the song, causing a bit of a surge in the view count. A couple of days after that, it was featured on the YouTube home page worldwide, and I watched the view count jump from about 800 to over 12,000 in 2 hours. By the end of the day it reached 50,000, and it’s now at 183,084 two days later. That’s a lot of views for a slightly silly song.

Why did this song get featured?

I have no insight into the YouTube editors’ thought processes, but I can see a number of factors that helped the Twitter song hit the big time:

• It was already getting hundreds of views in a short time. It’s not difficult, but most videos I put up get <100 views ever. So this one obviously had legs.
• It had an obvious target audience. As an editor you could look at the title and say, “The social media geeks will love this. There are loads of them, and they link to stuff a lot.”
• The hook is in the first 2 seconds. You can press play, laugh, and send it to your friends without having to watch the whole thing (ie. zero drop-off rate).
• YouTube viewers probably think Twitter is stupid, if they’ve heard of it at all. Given that popularity on YouTube is measured by the number of people who can be bothered to write “You suck. Buy my porn.” in the comment field, I think the Twitter song would be pretty good bait for that sort of thing.
• It’s funny (at least the backing vocals). And funny is always better than good.

So what do you get for being a YouTube megastar?

Well, I don’t know exactly. I’ve had loads of really nice comments, which I’m slowly responding too. It’s always a treat when somebody listens to one of my songs voluntarily and enjoys it. I’ve had loads of terrible comments, which have kept me amused for days now, and to which I’m also slowly responding. Nothing tickles me more than responding to an abusive comment in an annoyingly nice way, making an extra effort to live up to whichever stereotype you’ve been assigned.

I’ve had a few offers of collaborations with other musicians, which is always good. I’ve also been asked to play the song at the Harvest Twestival next week, and potentially to write some reviews of social media stuff for musicians. I suppose the aim of the experiment (if I can retroactively assign one) was to raise my profile in the Social Media community and that’s definitely happened.

It’s all a bit ironic because the whole thing took off days after I got a full-time job and decided not to bother becoming an internet superstar any more. I’m sure I had laid some important groundwork but, like with most successes, it’s only when you forget about becoming famous and concentrate on making better stuff that you get somewhere.

The Twitter song page

The Twitter song now has its own page, where I’m collecting fun stuff. Go read it. ;o)