March 9, 2007

Should You Use Upcoming and Eventful to Promote Dance Performances?

I was curious how good two popular social calendar applications were for finding and tracking dance performances in the Washington DC metro area. I explored Upcoming and Eventful to find out.

As a baseline I used the online dance performance calendar that is managed by Dance/MetroDC. If your goal is to find a well-organized, up-to-date listing of upcoming dance performances in the Metro DC area, this calendar is a very good place to go. It is comprehensive and includes most dance performances in the area. Here's a screen shot of their calendar - you can click for larger image:

Outside of the local dance community - dancers, students, teachers and those with a very close connection to dance - I'm not sure how many people visit the calendar on the Dance/Metro DC website. So my recommendation is that all local dance companies and all venues that offer dance performances in the area take full advantage of Upcoming and Eventful. They are both popular calendar applications that offer good functionality and multiple ways to track events.

The main problem at this point is that neither of these calendars has comprehensive listings of local dance performances that are regularly updated to reflect the latest changes. If all local dance companies and venues, however, did add and update their listings regularly, then more people would know that they could turn to these calendars to find upcoming performances. There's no charge for listing your events.

Here's a screen shot from Upcoming that reflects a search that I just conducted for dance performances in the Greater Washington, DC area. You can visit this link to see the search, but, I believe, the calendar will default to whichever metro area you are currently in. Here are the results I found:

You'll notice on the results page that you're not presented with a lot of summary detail about each performance, the Dance/Metro DC calendar lists more performances for the month of March, and not all the listings are really for dance performances - the first listing I saw was for a movie that had dance in it. But the performance listings are better than Eventful that I discuss below.

Here's a screen shot of a dedicated event page on Upcoming for this weekend's performance of Edgeworks Dance Theater at Dance Place, which I'll probably go see:

You'll notice on the right side of the above screen shot (click for larger image) that the number of Upcoming.org users who are attending or watching this event is listed. This mean that once you log-in to your Upcoming account, you can track your own events. The events you're tracking can be accessed from the "My Upcoming" link at the top of the page. Plus, you can also track the events of your friends. But from the perspective of dance companies and venues, these social bookmarking tools are only helpful if a large number of people know that they can track dance performances in the area on Upcoming - I'll return to this idea below.

And here's a search I did on Eventful for dance performances in the Washing DC metro area for March 2007 - I had to specify March 2007 because I was having trouble getting a good listing of results. And I sorted the results by "Venue" instead of "Date" because the date-ordered sort was confusing:

Another reason the search results for Eventful are annoying is because all dance events are merged together. I tried to search for dance performances, but as you'll see, there are dance classes and all kinds of MeetUps among the results. Plus, it appears that not as many dance performances are listed as on Upcoming.

But I do like the dedicated event pages on Eventful. Here's the page for this weekend's "Teen Dance Project" at the Jack Guidone Theater at Joy of Motion.

On the above screen shot on the right of the page, you'll see that there are a number of ways that you can share this event with others and post to social bookmarking sites. Plus, you can save the event directly to different online calendar applications or import to your calendar software on your computer.

Recommendations

My recommendation is that all local dance companies and venues list their events in both Upcoming and Eventful. They are both popular services so they offer a good way to attract audiences. Plus, the more comprehensive the listings for dance in the area, the more people will turn to these online calendars to learn about upcoming performances.

Plus, as more people use these calendars to find dance performances, more people will use the "MyEvents" and "MyFriends" functionality to track their own events and those of their friends. This type of online community-sharing of events is a great viral tool for building audiences.

I also think it might be helpful if local dance companies/venues decide on a tagging nomenclature. In other words, the tagging systems in Upcoming and Eventful are not always helpful for people who specifically want to find dance performances as opposed to other dance events such as classes or workshops. It might be helpful to create a tag such as "danceperformances". This way when people search specifically for dance performances by using this tag, they will usually only see the desired results.

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