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Releasing Travis Porter’s Mixtape: Proud to be a Problem

Marketing VaynerMedia By Neil Sarkar May 19th |

Last night Travis Porter, arguably the hottest unsigned rap group in America the world, released their highly anticipated mixtape Proud to be a Problem.

A few weeks beforehand, they got us involved to help them craft a release that innovatively leveraged social media.

This was probably the most fun project I’ve done so far, and I wanted to share a little about what made the process so enjoyable, exciting, and unique.

1. Discovery

Travis Porter’s manager, CEO Charlie, had an existing dialogue with our own hardworking hip-hop blogger @mikeboydjr who writes Hip Hop at Lunch. Boyd introduced him to Gary and AJ and subsequently to me.

When we spoke on the phone, the opportunity was obvious. Their last independently released mixtape had propelled them to a national and overseas tour, a couple videos on MTV, and a song on the billboard rap charts. They were releasing a follow-up, 17 song mixtape and a short film (1/2 hour) on May 18th.

Their last social media campaign had been in February, a “tweet to watch” campaign for their music video for “Get Naked” and they wanted to innovate on that. From 6-8pm, they were going to take over the livemixtapes.com site, redirecting all visitors to a custom social landing page.

Travis Porter had an avid and rapidly growing fan base, which gave us a captive audience. They were unsigned, which gave us creative license. They were innovators in a space (Hip Hop music) that was seeing huge social effectiveness with rudimentary implementations, which gave us an exciting and potentially rewarding challenge.

Charlie and I hung up after about two hours and my mind was buzzing with the opportunities that this unlikely collaboration could yield.

2. Concept

CEO Charlie called me on a Friday, and the next day Boyd and I came in to the office to brainstorm. The tight timeframe of the release helped simplify and focus our vision, and we came up with the concept over a Saluggi’s pizza and a couple leftover Newcastle Brown Ales in under an hour.

The concept was:
1. Allow people to unlock through twitter (tweet link + follow travis porter) or facebook (post link + give email address)
2. Have a video section that will play either the movie or Travis Porter live ustreaming
3. Allow the audience to interact with Travis Porter directly through twitter and facebook on the page. Each interaction propagates through their network and extends the viral loop.

Simple, right? I put up a living prototype that day (you can still see it here: http://graphpaper.vaynermedia.com/travisporter) and it was game time.

3. Execution

From concept to execution was only about 20 hours between two people. I handled all the back-end work and social media integration, and our newest team member @shaunchapman (of 0 to 255 pseudo-fame) handled the front-end UI.

More impressively, we could do it in half the time if we did it again and a quarter of the time if we had control of the servers for testing production code.

Take a look at the final result:

Travis Porter: “Proud to be a Problem” social landing page

The best part is that 3/4 of the elements on the page are plug-and-play components offered by ustream, twitter, and facebook. From a user experience standpoint, 75% of the page was done in under an hour.

The development time was all spent on writing a custom OAuth implementation for Twitter, integrating Facebook’s new open graph api, collaborating with livemixtapes.com to ensure the correct user flow from authentication to unlocking the mixtape, and skinning the page according to the specifications of Travis Porter’s graphic designer, Colourful Money.

Of course that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; if you’re interested in technical details feel free to ask how we did anything in the comments and I’ll respond with an explanation and code sample.

4. Results

- 42,000+ unique visitors in 2 hours. 239 combined days spent on the landing page by all visitors.
- #3 trending topic on all of Twitter.
- #11 most searched term on Google.
- 7,000+ tweets and follows.
- 15,000+ clicks on the official bit.ly link from the generated tweet (stats: http://bit.ly/proudtobeaproblem+)
- 4,500+ likes on the Open Graph enabled album (and de facto Fan Page) for the album Proud to be a Problem.

5. Conclusions

The launch was a success. It was fresh and exciting for everybody involved — us, Travis Porter, Live Mixtapes, and the fans.

This Travis Porter/VaynerMedia collaboration is my absolute favorite type of working relationship, and the effectiveness of a good working relationship can be seen in the results.

They are on top of their game, and we are on top of ours. They don’t need more than what we can provide because they already have the talent. They’re not going to restrict us to less than what we can provide, because they don’t have a legal department.

Travis Porter just told us their story and goals, and we listened. Then they stepped aside and gave us the freedom to select the right tools from our vast social media toolbox to accomplish those goals.

But enough about us. The most important takeaway is that it is downright scary what Travis Porter and other up-and-coming artists can do with minimal effort by leveraging social media.

The power is truly shifting from labels and other corporately tainted entities to the artists themselves, and touching that yesterday was exhilarating.

Filed Under: Hip Hop, Marketing, VaynerMedia

Author: Neil Sarkar

Frank Angelone is a born and raised New Yorker from Long Island. Frank is a graduate of Penn State University with a degree in Management and a minor in Information Systems Management. He’s a huge sports fan and enjoys entrepreneurship. Prior to moving back to New York where he grew up, Frank lived in Illinois while doing an internship and in Pittsburgh where he had his first job out of college. However, his ultimate goal was to work in an environment that combined both his passions for technology and social media. Taking on the role as Project Manager for Vaynermedia was the perfect fit.
  • HipHopAtLunch

    Traveeeeey

  • http://www.revivemyblog.com Ryan @ReviveMyBlog

    I would like a more in depth look at the custom “Tweet to unlock” authorization scheme that you developed.

  • http://twitter.com/NeilSarkar Neil Sarkar

    Sure Ryan. It's a standard php oauth setup, we modified this source code but didn't really change the authentication loop http://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth

    After the user is authenticated, we're simply just setting a cookie indicating authorization. Technically it's not secure as anybody with javascript knowledge could create the cookie themselves, but the nice thing about working with Travis Porter is that for their audience, those would be edge cases and a few people getting the mixtape for “free” (without tweeting) is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

    Here is the relevant code once they authenticated

    $twitter_access_token = $_SESSION['access_token'];
    $connection = new TwitterOAuth($GLOBALS['creds']['twitter_api_key'], $GLOBALS['creds']['twitter_secret'], $_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token_secret']);

    if( $connection && !@$_COOKIE['proudtobeaproblem'] ) {
    $connection->post('friendships/create',array('screen_name' => 'iamtravisporter'));
    $connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => $tweet));
    setcookie('proudtobeaproblem','true',time()+60*60*2,'/');
    }

    That right there follows @iamtravisporter, posts the tweet, and sets the cookie that unlocks the mixtape. Let me know if you want further clarification on anything…again all the actual oauth authentication is handled by this http://github.com/abraham/twitteroauth

  • liquidmarke

    Neil are you putting the code below on the callback.php page?

    $twitter_access_token = $_SESSION['access_token'];
    $connection = new TwitterOAuth($GLOBALS['creds']['twitter_api_key'], $GLOBALS['creds']['twitter_secret'], $_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['access_token']['oauth_token_secret']);

    if( $connection && !@$_COOKIE['proudtobeaproblem'] ) {
    $connection->post('friendships/create',array('screen_name' => 'iamtravisporter'));
    $connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => $tweet));
    setcookie('proudtobeaproblem','true',time()+60*60*2,'/');
    }

    I am trying to figure out where to place it.

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