https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSKVoLEqdhk

My worst kept secret is how much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan I am. They were the first band I dedicated my fandom to and I always found a way to include them in projects or assignments throughout high school and university.

When I first started working at Warner I was very excited to find a signed Zeitgeist poster in the office. It now takes pride of place on the wall next to my desk. Sadly the band is no longer signed to the label but I still found a way to work with them.

Paper Crows are one of my favourite bands out of the new acts I’m working on. As if I wasn’t convinced at first they completely won me over when they quietly recorded a cover of ‘Disarm’ and posted it on their social networks. The recording was well received but fairly low-key until I spent some time testing the sharing functionality on their tumblr blog.

During my tests, I tweeted about the song and tagged The Smashing Pumpkins. When I got home that evening my inbox had an unusually high number of notifications for new followers and retweets.
Then I noticed where all the attention was coming from – I’d been retweeted by The Smashing Pumpkins!

Paper Crows were really excited about the sudden influx of traffic and new fans and wondered if there was any way we could get the song posted on the Pumpkins’ Facebook page.

A few months earlier I’d had a similar Twitter experience when Billy Corgan retweeted my feedback on the first of the two Smashing Pumpkins gigs I went to in London. That retweet gave me two important new followers @SmashingPumpkin and @Rynda. The latter being the digital manager for all the official Pumpkins online destinations.

I contacted Rynda and she agreed to post the song on Facebook as long as it was a video so we had Hugh Denn edit together some super-slow motion footage of a burning paper crow, previously used for the band’s take on Cloudbusting.

The video was very well received after being posted on The Smashing Pumpkins’ Facebook page and Twitter feed. It was incredible to be directly involved with my favourite band and fascinating to see the influence that one well placed tweet can have.