September 7, 2007

Creating and Promoting City-Wide Dance Calendars

In a post on The Evil Imp blog, Article19 writes that while dance performances obviously draw much smaller audiences than the movie industry, there's still much that presenting and dance organizations can learn from how films are promoted.

The movie studios spend a large percentage of their budgets on marketing, they do joint-promotional campaigns with food companies and game makers and there is considerable cross-promotion of films from rival studios. (Actually, I'm not sure about this last point - I think that movie chains run trailers of films that the studios pay to have promoted. So you'll end-up seeing promotions for films from different studios).

In any case, Article19 sets the stage for asking why presenters and dance companies don't follow in the footsteps of the film industry:

1. Why don't dance companies promote each others shows on their websites?

2. Why don't theatres run video trailers, prior to dance performances promoting other dance performances in the same theatre or nearby venues?

3. Why don't NDA's [National dance agencies in England that provide professional support services to dancers] carry a synchronised listing of all dance performances on their websites for the whole country?

4. Why don't big, successful companies promote the shows of smaller, new companies?

These are all important questions to consider because much can be done without significant financial resources to promote dance more effectively. This Article19 post points out that even though they've set-up a free listing services on Upcoming for dance companies to promote their performances, nobody has taken advantage of it.

I just talked with Neil Nisbet of Article19 via Skype a few minutes ago because I didn't know what NDA stood for. During our conversation, he mentioned that Article19 has also been experimenting with Twitter for updates to dance auditions. You can go to their auditions page and you'll see a link for Twitter that you can follow to sign-up to receive audition updates by SMS. While it's an interesting idea that may prove to be worthwhile, at this point there are only 4 subscribers - myself included. So either there is very limited interest or people don't know about this offering.

Using Free Internet Marketing Services for NYC Dance Community

I think it would be incredibly helpful if presenters and dance companies in NYC used popular event listing services such as Upcoming and Eventful to list their performances. These are very flexible listing applications that let users add your events to their own calendars, provide RSS feeds, and let you embed listings in websites and blogs.

But I think the trick to ensuring that free services like this work is making sure that they are comprehensive and updated on a regular basis.

Personally, I'd like such an offering because it would save me a lot of time, energy and hassle. It takes me too long to find all the dance performances and related events in NYC. I just want to go to a single location and find everything that I want.

I've written about this topic before, primarily with a focus on Washington, DC:

- Should You Use Upcoming and Eventful to Promote Your Dance Performances?

- Adding Upcoming Event Badge to Your Blog or Site

- Promote Dance Performances with Google Calendar

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