March 1, 2007

What Strategy Should Drive Dance Publicity?

Should dance marketing and public relations people be driven by a mass-market mentality or a relationship-building mentality?

Here's what I mean:

Should PR people promoting dance companies and performances simply email press releases to a lot of writers and hope that they get write-ups or should they send individual emails with customized messages?

I can only speak for myself, but most of the press releases I receive are completely meaningless and incoherent. Even if I'm interested in the topic of the press release (which is rare), it takes too long for me to figure out the basic factual details that I need in order to write a story.

But in the end - and maybe this has something to do with a blogging mentality - I usually only respond to personal messages that are relevant to the topics I cover. Plus, I'm human - I like people to acknowledge that they have a clue what I write about.

I'll give two examples of what I like:

First Example:

On January 9th I received the following email from Charley Hayes of PR firm Immediate Future (strange their website is under development just as I'm about to praise them). In any case after receiving below email, I wrote this post "Sanex Choreographs European TV Ad Campaign" on January 10th.

Hi Doug,

I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year.

I represent Sanex (the Sara Lee body care brand) and we are working with them to launch their new European advertising campaign which celebrates skin and its natural process, through use of human bodies acting as skin cells.

The new pan-European advert, which is now showing on TV, is a big departure from traditional skincare ads.

Sanex has teamed up with Cuban dance choreographer Alex Verona to create dance routines to bring human body ‘skin cells’ to life, as part of its new pan-European advertising campaign, ‘celebrating skin’. The adverts feature three different dance vignettes, visually representing how Sanex protects, hydrates and works with the skin. Modern dance improvisation was used to physically represent the fact that our skin is alive and relies upon natural processes to remain healthy.

A behind-the-scenes choreography video has today been uploaded to the Sanex Skin website and I thought this might be of interest to you?

Would you be happy for me to keep you up-to-date with any further developments in the campaign?

Do let me know ….

Thanks Doug,

Best
Charley Hayes

Second Example:

Last Sunday night Chris Elam of Misnomer Dance sent me an email that described the innovative ways that he is using his website, social networking sites and video to build dance audiences. I published his email in full the next morning (with an embedded video) with a couple of minor changes. You can read "Email From Chris Elam of Misnomer."

Additional Thoughts...

Of course, I could just be vain and want people to write me nice personalized emails. Or there could be something more important here, which I think is the case.

The broadcast era is coming to an end. The publicity framework in which most organizations operate - including dancers and dance companies - does not really exist any more. How many stories really result directly from the press releases you send out? Does anybody read them? I don't.

If you want stories - especially blog stories - you have to address the specific interests of the writer/blogger - or you are probably not going to generate the type of coverage you want.

But then why spend energy trying to get coverage in dance blogs? Does anybody read them? I'll post my stats for February tomorrow and you can decide for yourself :-)

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