We attended a wedding last weekend, and I noticed a couple of things that I wanted to share.

Multi-talented DJ

The guy running the sound for the wedding was quite a character. Not only did he handle the microphones, play the songs and compere the evening, he also put on an impressive song and dance routine from Grease at one point, led the guests in their dancing, and somehow persuaded the single guys to perform some very strange feats of skill before they attempted to catch the garter. I didn’t necessarily love everything he did, but he definitely stood out from the crowd and made himself memorable… almost as if he’d been reading my blog.

Business cards

More impressive though was the photographer, who had produced a special run of business cards consisting of an engagement photo of the bridge and groom, with contact information for the photographer on the back. There was a pile of these on the welcome table as you came in, and I thought this was a really neat trick – she had provided something of value to the guests (a free photo of the couple) which demonstrated her skill, and which included contact details when needed. I bet a bunch of people stuck this card to their fridge, and when they need a photographer, that’s who they’ll call.

It’s odd in a way to think that business cards still have value in the internet age, but I have no doubt that they do. So many contacts are established in the real world (at gigs, conferences, etc), and business cards still play a valuable role in providing contact information in that environment. They also say something about you – the picture you want to paint of yourself, the type of career you’re pursuing, and how professional you are. So although they seem anachronistic I think business cards will be with us for a long time to come – at least until we get a button on our phones that sends an electronic business card to the people we meet.

Posted in personal branding, printed publicity | | Comments Off

Most of my posts so far have consisted of my thoughts and ideas on various topics – but this one will be more journal-like.

Erica is putting on a concert next Sunday afternoon here in Cleveland Heights (see her website’s calendar for more details), which includes the world premiere of Jeremy Allen’s string quartet “Mercury Retrograde”, and I spent yesterday afternoon pounding the streets of Cleveland trying to promote it. At this point I’ve no idea whether my efforts will bear any fruit, but I thought I’d share our experiences in trying to publicize this concert, and ask for input on what has worked for other people.

Website

Erica keeps an updated list of upcoming events on www.ericaward.com, so obviously the first thing we did was to add this concert to her calendar – including all the details of the concert, and an embedded Google Map showing the concert location. She also added some more interesting content with a ‘blog-interview’ with Jeremy Allen, where he talked a little about the piece and composing in general.

Email newsletter

Erica has a mailing list of friends, colleagues and supporters who are interested in her music, and so she put together an email newsletter highlighting her upcoming concerts, and sent that out this past week. I think our plan is to send out the initial email a couple of weeks ahead of the concert, and then send a reminder email a couple of days before – to cater both to the planners and the spontaneous folks on the list.

So far people seemed to like the email – which looked very impressive (in my unbiased opinion).

Printed materials

Having done some electronic promotion, Erica then moved into the physical realm, and designed both a poster and a flyer for the concert (which again look pretty snazzy).

• She got 1000 postcard-sized flyers printed at http://www.hotcards.com (who have a Cleveland location).
• For the posters we took a USB drive with the 8.5″x11″ size PDF into Kinko’s, and had a few copies printed on Lazer (LZ) paper for $0.69/sheet. It wasn’t worth using proper commercial printing for the number of posters we wanted.

So far so good (thanks to Erica’s graphic-design skills), but distributing them is the hard part. That’s where I came in…

Distributing the flyers and posters

Given all the work Erica has done so far, I wanted to be a good husband and contribute, so I took on this task. I started with Google Maps, centered on the venue for the concert (Fairmount Presbyterian Church, in this case). I searched for coffee shops in the area, and came up with a few options, and I also searched for music (which gave me one result).

After looking at the results, I realized that there were basically four ‘hot spots’ in the neighborhood of the church – Shaker Square / Larchmere, Cedar-Fairmount, Cedar-Lee, and Coventry Village. I visited each of these areas, with a backpack full of flyers and a few posters – plus some thumb tacs, and magic tape. I knew that there were some venues that would be happy to help, as I’d seen flyers from other events on their noticeboards, but in general I didn’t know what to expect, and found myself practicing my lines as I approached the first couple of stores.

In the end, people were much more willing to help than I’d expected. When I entered a store/cafe/restaurant I would say “My wife’s giving a concert next weekend, and I have some flyers. Do you have somewhere where I could leave them?” In almost every case the answer was positive (although I was rejected by a knitting store, of all places!), and some of the store-keepers wanted to know more about the concert, and some even sounded interested in attending. A couple of people offered to put up a poster in their windows, and many more had noticeboards set-aside for local events, which they were happy for me to use. [Interesting aside: Starbucks will only allow you to advertise events that are free.]

In the end, I distributed a lot of flyers, and was surprised by how willing people were to take them. Admittedly I didn’t enter every single store – but I left flyers at coffee shops, hair salons, restaurants, florists and even a hardware store. Some venues (such as Dewey’s coffee, or Tommy’s restaurant) were overflowing with flyers and posters for different events – so in some ways I’m wondering whether we might actually have more success with those I left in the less likely locations – since they’ll stand out more. However we won’t really know until next weekend whether my efforts were worthwhile – and even then, it’ll be tricky to actually figure out how people came to hear about the concert.

I’d be interested to hear (in the comments) of what techniques other people have used to promote concerts/events, and whether they were successful. I’d be particularly interested to hear of any unusual tactics – even if they didn’t work!

Posted in concert promotion, printed publicity, website | | 1 Comment »