New Music Marketing Tools From Pinwheel, Cinemagram, YouTube & Facebook

As new social sites and services keep appearing, older ones keep updating. Though none of these four are music-specific, all have great potential for music marketing: Pinwheel is a new site that allows one to add notes and pics to locations, Cinemagram turns short iPhone videos into uniquely animated gifs handy for off-the-cuff promo purposes, YouTube unveils updates to its annotation feature, and Facebook is set to rollout Timeline for Pages.

Pinwheel Pins Notes & Pics to Places

Pinwheel is a new site that's "sending out invites in waves" and getting a lot of tech blog coverage at the moment due to having at least one tech superstar cofounder (Caterina Fake). Somehow I think it will also benefit from the current Pinterest feeding frenzy though it's a different product entirely. Instead of pinning digital items to a board, people are pinning notes to locations with short texts and photos.

Notes can also be organized in sets and Caterina Fake points to such possible themes as "Tales from the Road: KISS's 1974 Hotter Than Hell Tour", "Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting" and "Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008." Certainly a lot of possibilities related to location and photo sharing fit music marketing from events to the stories behind songs. Worth getting in on earlier rather than later as it will be receiving a lot of scrutiny from the tech press over the next few months.

Cinemagram Creates Unique Animated GIFs

Animated gifs, those small looped animations that are particularly common on sites seeking quick laughs, typically feature a series of still pics repeated in sequence. Cinemagrams are an interesting variation from Cinemagram that take a short iPhone video clip and present it as a still with only a section animated. Look here for examples and here for more background.

The key benefit of such apps is that they're typically quick and easy and that they offer what is initially a different look. Also worth considering is a similar iPhone app, Kinotopic, and glmps that creates an odd still photo/video combination.

YouTube Updates Video Annotations

YouTube has been updating its site including some changes to its video editor, video manager and browse pages late last month. Updates are continuing "including a new annotation type that lets you label areas of a video, an extended color palette, and a new timeline." I'm announcing this news as if it's a good thing but given the growing tendency to obscure one's video with way too many ad-like annotations I'm not necessarily convinced this is good news.

Facebook's Timeline for Brands Coming Soon

Insiders are expecting the gradual rollout of Facebook's Timeline for Pages beginning late this month. It is expected to be similar to but not exactly the same as Timeline for personal accounts.

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his freelance writing hub at Flux Research and music industry resources at Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.