April 21, 2006

Build Buzz with Dance Event Photo Contest

I was just exploring the community-oriented events calendar Upcoming and I came across an event listing for the Bay Area National Dance Week, which starts today (link to National Dance Week website).

The Upcoming event tracking website, owned by Yahoo, is part of the Web 2.0 trend in that it allows users to tag events of interest and network with others who are tracking the same events. If you visit the profile page for Bay Area National Dance Week on Upcoming, you'll see a list of who's attending this event and whose watching this event (just a handful of people so far). At this point, nobody has added any tags for this event.

Bay Area National Dance Week

On the Bay Area National Dance Week site, you can explore all of the performances, demonstrations and classes that are taking place over the next 10 days. Sounds like a lot of fun.

As part of this dance event, the organizer is promoting an amateur photo contest. Participants/attendees can take pictures and submit them with the opportunity to win plane tickets and other prizes. I like the idea of a photo contest, but the way this contest is structured does not help promote this week's dance event or future Bay Area dance programs. Essentially, this is an old-school photo contest. You actually have to submit pictures by snail mail.

If I were organizing this photo contest, this is what I'd do:

1) I'd offer a competition for both videos and pictures.

2) Encourage all performers/instructors/lecturers to provide a blanket waiver that allows pictures and videos to be shot during any of their programs - no flash photography.

3) I'd include on the dance event website a listing all of performers who have signed the blanket waiver and who have not signed the blanket waiver. This way people who want to participate in the photo and video contest would know when they are allowed to take pictures and video.

4) I'd encourage everybody who participates to post their pictures and videos on high-traffic multimedia hosting websites.

5) I'd create an online submission form so that anybody who took pictures and video could submit their entries for the competition along with a URL for the location of their files.

For starters, my approach would get more people involved in the competition. It is too time-consuming to print pictures and submit them by mail. If participants can upload their pictures and video to any website(s) they wish, thousands of people can look at them and learn about this dance event while it's taking place, which is likely to build a much larger dance audience as this 10-day event progresses.

My approach instantly builds large-scale world-of-mouth marketing with zero investment on the part of the dance event organizer. The dancers get more exposure and more people get excited about dance.

Technorati Tags: calendar, dance, performance, upcoming, web2.0

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