/How We Built/ thechemicalbrothers.com
09/11/2007 | Filed under Discover > How We Built
The Chemical Brothers’ new online presence is a masterpiece in user-generated content. Founder and managing director of Brighton’s 3rd Eye Vision, Tim Carr, explains how it was achieved
.net: What brief were you given?
TC: Firstly, there were four clients: the band, the management, the label and, perhaps most importantly, the fans. It was important to us that all parties were happy with the end result, and therefore had some sort of say in the project brief.
The band members wanted a site that showed off their prolific output, but also got the fans involved and excited. Their forum has always been full of activity, but their sites didn’t seem to do justice to this buzz, so we wanted to get the fans contributing to the site and give them everything we could.
We went onto the forum and asked the fans what they wanted. The response was compelling, but bizarrely enough, there was huge demand for recipes – hence the recipe section in the Good Things area! You really do have to ask people what they want.
Another feeling was that the site required a lot more input from the band, rather than it being a piece of brochure-ware. One way to get them involved on a day-to-day level was to provide an SMS service on the homepage. They now regularly text in before and after gigs, which is great.
On the back of these high-level requirements, I drew up the brief and ran it past the band and staff at Virgin. The brief was born and the project begun.
.net: After that initial stage, was there much involvement from Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons (aka The Chemical Brothers)?
TC: Plenty – Tom and Ed were really good with feedback on designs and how the site should work. They helped us get hold of bits of memorabilia that only they had access to, sifting through old boxes containing, among other things, a Mexican Chemical Brothers chocolate bar!
One of the main priorities for them was that the site had to be intuitive to use. Their fans needed to be able to access what they wanted quickly and easily. This suited us well, because our philosophy is to design for users rather than designers – it was good to be working with clients who share this.
.net: How important was it to build a community around the site?
TC: In this case, it was kind of the other way around – the community was already there, so we had to build a site to accommodate it. UGC is central to the site, so the community of fans is also central to the site and its overall success.
.net: How will you involve the fans?
TC: For each gig, we publish a unique tag that fans can use to tag their content on Flickr and YouTube. We call this “tagcasting”, and it’s been a real success. To give you an indication of its uptake, for their recent London gig, we have over 100 photos/videos coming into the site. In total, the site pulled in more than 1,000 pieces of UGC in its first month alone.
Once uploaded and correctly tagged, the content appears beside the gig on our Google-powered Live2007 tour map. It’s great seeing it happen! The fans always loved the forum, so we upgraded and updated it, added tag clouds of posts and logged-in users, and each thread is now available as an RSS feed.
.net: What were the biggest challenges?
TC: Presenting the band’s prolific 15-year history in an inspiring, logical and easy-to-use interface, and fitting this with new content from the band and from the fans (15 years of artwork, gigs, videos, pictures, memorabilia and memories is a lot of stuff!).
As anyone who has witnessed The Chemical Brothers live will know, their shows are spectacular, and their videos are similarly ground-breaking. A section called The Chronicles was our solution: you float downstream through the band’s history, past videos, tracks and gigs, watching and listening to any of it. And you also float past your own memories pulled in from Flickr and YouTube.
.net: How has the site been promoted?
TC: The new site is being promoted as part of the band’s album campaign, as well as through the usual social bookmarking sites. In fact, the site has been added to more social bookmarking sites since its launch, so even the promotion is done by the fans! Virgin also has its own PR team dedicated to promoting the site, because we’re regularly achieving 11,000 unique visitors a day.
.net: 3ev is known for its heavy involvement in CMS technology. Will this site take advantage of that?
TC: SMS is the most elegant part of the whole solution, and by including this, the band can update the site quicker and easier than ever. Last night, they came off stage and were able to thank the fans via SMS within minutes. How cool is that?
We’re great believers in keeping things simple, so we’ve used WordPress blog software for the Good Things section. This means that the band doesn’t have to learn a massive CMS to be able to contribute to the site, and it means they contribute much more.
.net: What are you most proud of on the site?
TC: It’s a toss-up between the Chronicles and the SMS. They involved very different things. With the SMS, it’s really great seeing “All right guys ... one hour to go ... have fun! t&e x” appear on the site, but when the Chronicles came together – when the videos, pictures and memories all started flying past on the site – that was brilliant. It’s a trippy way of displaying a vast amount of information in a logical fashion.
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Comments
Philippe Martinez / 16/04/2008 / 08:30 / http://carsplusmovies.com
The idea of offering to the fan base a place to hang out and exchange is great and makes me wonder why so many band websites don't do the same. Unfortunately, the website itself is a bit too "normal", expected. For a pioneer band like the Chemical Brothers, I thought I would land on a surprising, highly visual experience. Not so much here...
