Before you continue reading, click this link and watch what happens. When done, come back here to read what I did to make it happen.
Attended a mini Topspin ecosystem partner bootcamp last week with the awesome and amazing Topspin Creative Services team members Chris Carlson and Parker Todd Brooks. They walked the Music Geek Services team through all the current and future Topspin Labs tools. MGS had been using Download Anywhere for about a year and dabbled with Link Builder, but had not yet used iFrame Anywhere. As Chris and Parker talked about it and walked us through a use-case example, the wheels in my head started turning.
The next day as I was reviewing my emails, one of them was from Rhett Miller‘s label manager. She mentioned that American Songwriter magazine had just posted a great video of Rhett performing an acoustic version of one of the songs off his upcoming album in their offices. She wanted it posted on his site so they could link to it from Twitter, Facebook, etc. Hoping that the video would provide some buzz about the upcoming album.
After I posted the video to the site I realized this situation was perfect for iFrame Anywhere. Why should we be linking to YouTube, the magazine, or to some news post deep inside Rhett’s web site. Why not send the user to a page that would have the video “hover” over the current pre-order offer page. So the user would instantly see the video, be given an opportunity to socially share it on Twitter and Facebook, and then when done watching the video would be delivered directly to Rhett’s home page which current features the pre-order campaign and tour date listing.
We could then tweet out this link, post it to Facebook, and share it via emails. This would drive traffic to an awesome video but also to the pre-order page.
When the user socially shares it via Twitter, here’s the default tweet:
Here’s what it looks like when the user shares it via Facebook:
Then when one of their followers/friends clicks on the link, they end up on a page that looks like this with the video hovering in a modal window over Rhett’s home page which contains his pre-order offers:
When the user is finished watching the video they can either trigger one of the shares or click the “x” and they end up on Rhett’s offer page:
This tool could be used for a video launch, an email-for-stream (e4s) campaign, or anything that you can whip up that will work inside an iFrame when you want to feature content, but also drive traffic, on your website.
