December 13, 2006

Increase Dance Coverage with Multimedia Releases and Open Rehearsals

It is challenging to get press coverage for dance performances. In recent years, this situation has become even more difficult for dance companies and presenters because many publications have reduced or discontinued their coverage of dance.

Given this challenging media environment, how can those responsible for generating press coverage ensure that as many articles as possible are written about their upcoming dance performances?

In this post, I'd like to offer my answer to this question. I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts and reactions as well. Do you agree or disagree with my recommendation? What are your recommendations for increasing coverage of upcoming dance performances?

Game Plan for Increasing Press Coverage and Generating More Buzz

Initial Premises

1) If fewer dance critics are writing previews and reviews of dance for large-circulation print publications, then it's necessary to reach out to other journalists such as theater and arts critics as well as journalists who write about the themes you address in your dance pieces.

2) Publicity campaigns are not just for print publications and are not just for professional journalists. There are thousands of websites and blogs that may be interested in covering your upcoming and current dance performances. Also, it's helpful to keep in mind that many bloggers are not traditional writers and are not just looking for standard press releases - more about what they are looking for below.

3) Dance is visual. So the best way to generate interest in dance is by making online video and pictures available to anybody who wants to cover your dance performances.

Action Plan

Part I: Create a Multimedia Press Release

Press releases that promote dance performances don't do justice to the art of dance. Dance is, of course, about motion in space. So why not add videos and other multimedia content to your releases so that recipients can have instant visual access to your work?

So my first recommendation is that dance companies and presenters create their own customized version of a "social media press release."

Earlier this year, public relations firm, Shift Communications, introduced what it called a "social media press release." You can view a PDF template of this new type of press release and you can view an actual example. (I wrote about this new type of press release earlier this year.)

You'll notice that when you look at the PDF template that this release format gets right to the point. First you'll see bullet points that highlight key news developments in an easy-to-digest manner, and then follows relevant multimedia content. These multimedia links are critical for dance. If you want to grab the attention of journalists, videos and pictures are much more likely to capture their attention as opposed to plain text.

I do not believe that dance companies and presenters are well served by placing a line at the end of a release that says, "Pictures are available upon request." The multimedia content ought to be front and center as the example of a Social Media Press Release shows.

There are many types of videos that you can make available:

- Interviews with artistic director and dancers
- Behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsals
- Clips from dress rehearsals
- Videos of performances, and
- Video that is likely to appeal to non-dance audiences

You'll want to put both the videos and pictures on your website (or a third-party websites that hosts videos and pictures) so that journalists have instant access to this multimedia content.

A word about creating multimedia press releases that appeal to writers who do not write about dance. One of my points at the beginning of this post is that fewer newspapers are including articles about dance. So as you prepare your press releases and corresponding video content, a lot of thought should be devoted to story angles that are broad enough in nature that they will appeal to any and all writers covering theater, the arts, entertainment and, possibly, topics outside of the arts all together.

Part II: Use Popular Video and Picture Hosting Websites

Since you'll be creating and uploading videos and pictures so that they are accessible to the press, it is also worthwhile to place this multimedia content on popular video (YouTube and Google Video, for example) and photo (Flickr, for example) sites. Plus if you visit the following article, you can find a huge list of video hosting applications.

There are four main reasons to place your videos and pictures on the more popular video and photo sites:

- More people will come across your multimedia content and thus learn about your upcoming performances.

- Many of these sites make it easy for anybody to embed these multimedia files on their own blogs and websites. For example, newspapers are beginning to embed videos directly with the text versions of articles that appear on their websites. If you upload an engaging video to YouTube or another video hosting service, it is very easy for an online newspaper to place this video directly on their website. Readers will find the stories about your dance company more engaging than just reading text alone.

- But your audience does not consist only of professional journalists. Your multimedia content is likely to be of interest to bloggers who write about dance, theater, the arts and entertainment. Plus, bloggers who write about topics related to the themes of your dance may be interested too. For example, if your work deals with environmental issues, there are many bloggers who might be interested in providing coverage of your performance - especially if they can easily add video and pictures directly to their own blogs.

- For practical reasons, you may not want to put large video and picture files on your own website if you're not certain that your website will be reliable for this type of high bandwidth content.

Part III: Dress Rehearsals for Local Photographers and Videographers

If you invite photographers from local news organizations to take pictures of dress rehearsals, why not open these events to both professional and amateur photographers and videographers?

Imagine that 10, 20 or more amateur photographers and videographers came to your dress rehearsal to take lots of pictures and videos. This multimedia content would then be posted to blogs, websites, video and picture hosting websites as well as personal pages on social networking sites such as MySpace.

Plus, you could encourage everybody who creates online content to use the same tags to identify your dance performance. For example, the tag "holidaydanceinbaltimore2006" - well, you could probably come up with something more specific. But the main point is that if everybody uses the same tag, you can easily link to all the videos and pictures from your own website. Your website visitors could click on a link that would, for example, take them to all videos from your dress rehearsal that have been uploaded to YouTube or another video hosting service.

There are potential problems to this open rehearsal idea. First, there may be copyright issues to deal with. And, second, the quality of some of the videos and pictures may be terrible - whether or not this potential quality issue makes this open rehearsal idea a bad idea is up to you. The upside is that you can generate a lot of publicity.

Summary

That's my recommendation for increasing publicity for upcoming dance performances in an environment when the amount of space devoted to dance coverage in traditional publications is dwindling.

Let me know what you think.

• Scottish Ballet Sells Dinner Dates with Dancers, and a Letter to Merce
• Hybrid Performances Build Audiences and Sell Tickets
• Building an Online Marketplace for the Licensing of Dance Choreography
• A Chorus Line Promoted Through Word of Mouth Reviews
• Marriott's "More Room to Move" Dance Promotion

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