June 4, 2008

Part II: Vertical Marketing Tactics for Dance Companies

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post, "Vertical Marketing Tactics for Dance Companies."

The overall goal of this series, as I outlined Monday, is to leverage interdisciplinary dance works in order to reach new audiences. These new audiences will not be traditional dance-goers but the themes and focus of your work will resonate with them. On Monday, I offered the example of a dance piece that explored quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity as a performance that would be of interest to the "universe" of people that make-up the theoretical physics community.

Three Additional Tactics for Reaching New Audience Niches:

1) Encouraging the Creation of User-Generated Media

The YouTube era has ushered in the age of user-generated media. Anybody and everybody can create video and other types of content and post it for the world to see.

The question I would like to address here is: How do you engage your target audience in a way that will encourage them to create and upload content that is related to what you do?

If you created a dance piece about chemical compounds, why would chemists be inspired to create this video of a chemical dance party:

I'm not much of a fan of the above video from the European Commission. But it is an example of the type of interdisciplinary performances I've been discussing and this clip has been viewed almost 13,000 times.

And a related question, if you were performing a dance piece inspired by organic chemistry, how could you encourage people from the chemistry community, especially bloggers, to come to your rehearsal and take videos and pictures for the purpose of uploading to the Internet afterwards? This approach could generate considerable exposure.

In 2006, I first recommended opening-up dance rehearsals for the purpose of generating user-generated media. See my post - and read the antagonism it generated from Article19 in the comments section.

It wasn't until this year that we saw the compelling results of what happens when bloggers are invited to create their own content of a dance performance and spread it online. See the pictures that Cedar Lake uploaded from dance bloggers who took pictures at the GlassyEssence performance. Dance bloggers also posted these images to their own blogs. The same can be done with video clips of a performance as well.

2) Teaching Dance Moves

Teaching non-dancers new dance moves is fun and an effective way to get people excited about your dance performance.

Here's the leading instructional dance video of all time (in terms of numbers). "Soulja Boy Tellem - How to Crank That". The embedding is turned-off so you have to watch it on YouTube. You'll see that there are 325 video responses - that's impressive! I can't say the responses are compelling, but they offer good food for thought.

Continuing with the chemistry theme, how would you go about creating and teaching a dance routine that made for a good YouTube video and inspired large numbers of users to create their own renditions? I think there are hundreds of possible approaches - some more artistic than others and some definitely cornier than others. In the end, it depends on how you want to present your work and what type of response you want to generate.

I don't have a chemistry-specific example, but here's a success story from two pre-med students (read about the making of this video on their MySpace page):

The above video has generated 4 million plus views and 38 video responses. Not bad for a video made during exams.

3) Social Media Press Releases

Since May 2006, I've written about the value, importance and benefits of Social Media Press Releases (SMPR) for the dance community - here's a January 2008 post I wrote about this topic.

An SMPR is a deconstructed press release with a social media focus. It includes videos, pictures and links to helpful bookmarks and other resources. Most importantly, it gives bloggers and journalists instant access to the media and information that they need to write their stories.

Here's a video introduction to SMPRs that I came across in an excellent in-depth overview of this new approach to publicity in MasterNewMedia:

But today, I'm writing about SMPRs from the standpoint of targeting specific niche audiences based upon the themes and focus of your dance performance.

I think SMPRs, especially the inclusion of videos and their modular format, are ideal and essential for generating publicity within a specific non-dance community. Realistically, you can't send out traditional press releases to non-dance audiences because they won't make any sens and they will be completely irrelevant. As I've written before, my mind was never wired to read standard dance press release - I simply can't follow what they are about.

So to properly use the SMPR approach, I think that a specific implementation strategy has to be implemented for reaching your desired audience. To continue with the chemistry theme, why not create a SMPR that is updated once a week with a new dance video that highlights the latest chemical news in the form of dance? Once again, there are many possible approaches that you could take.

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