Posts filed under 'Techniques'
Outsourcing has been a bit of a four-letter-word with how the US economy is doing, but it mostly relates to offshore outsourcing.
What I’m talking about is delegating repetitive tasks to others, preferably others who will do it free or cheap. I’ve tried hiring interns in the past, but I didn’t have the volume of work to make it a regular gig for them. I’ve used the site Elance.com for finding web development projects, but I was tipped off after reading the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss to the breadth of outsourcers available on Elance.
I decided to give it a shot with some press kit mailings. I posted a project on Elance for someone to print press kits, package them with a CD, print labels, customize cover letters, and take it to the post office to ship. I immediately received over 10 bids on my project and I quickly picked one. It was a woman who has 3 kids and works from home on many projects of this type. Her rate was very reasonable and she was excited to work on the project.
I sent her a box of CDs, using the cheapest shipping possible. I wrote out all the instructions in an email and I gave her permission in Google Docs to view a spreadsheet that I keep contacts in. She completed the entire job within a couple days and about 50 packages were on their way to their destination. Before shipping, the cost was about $50. So $1 per package. At higher volumes, it would’ve likely been cheaper per package.
Being able to hand this task off and simply send a few emails was a HUGE weight lifted. And now I have a trusted contact and I can go back to her with future projects.
Check it out: http://www.elance.com
I’m hoping to outsource more tasks in the future, if it’s not cost prohibitive and it can free me up to attend to more creative pursuits.
May 1st, 2009
I’ve noticed that a lot of radio stations (college and commercial) are getting on Facebook recently. MySpace has always been a great venue for radio stations with its “band” style profile that allows for posting of shows and music. More recently, stations are popping up on Facebook with either profiles or Pages.
When it comes to promoting a band, record release, or tour, “friending” these sites or commenting on walls and profiles is a GREAT avenue for making contact, passing along relevant press, or just keeping the name recognition going.
For the current THE VITAL MIGHT tour, I have a block of text that I’ve written up for college radio stations that have been playing the band’s recently release. It says something like:
You’ve been spinning our record RED PLANET, thanks!
We’re in Cambridge on Friday 2/6 at the Middle East.
PLEASE LET YOUR LISTENERS KNOW!
I paste that into the box that allows for a personal message when adding a friend. Since those boxes (at least on MySpace) have a character limit, you need to say what you need to say succinctly.
For example:
The next time around, if they’ve accepted your friend request, post the same text on their profile, wall, etc. It’s a great way to keep the artist’s name in their minds. With Facebook Pages, all you need to do is Become a Fan and then you can post right away.
Network away!
January 28th, 2009
I’m in a predicament right now where THE VITAL MIGHT’s tour got here faster than I had time to get everything done. While I should be sending out press releases and following up, I’m writing this blog post instead. I’ll make it fast since I need to tab over to my spreadsheet and get crackin’!
If you’re got something date-dependent on the near horizon, like a tour, record release, TV appearance, or anything else that requires lead time for press or radio coverage, don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t think that it’s too late and you need to throw your campaign out the window. Just sort it by date and do what you can.
THE VITAL MIGHT is in Worcester, Brooklyn, and Philly this weekend and I’ve gotten press releases out to NYC and Philly press, but haven’t done any followups, haven’t contacted college radio nearby that played the band on the last campaign, and still need to send out a mailing list update.
What do I do first? I sort it by show date and start on Worcester. I’ll bang out college radio, press release followups, and move onto Brooklyn.
It’s really that simple. Don’t give up on your campaign because you ran out of time.
January 13th, 2009
Posters for essential for promoting a band. Most of the time, there isn’t a direct correlation between posters and people at shows. A lot of the time, they’re simply a large business card for a band. Until a band is really sought after, they might only have 1% effectiveness for getting heads in the door. So 100 people see your poster and 1 of them come to the show, or tell someone about the show.
THE VITAL MIGHT is heading on a tour in January and February and I just spent about an hour marking up some posters, packing them in envelopes, and writing addresses on the packages. This simple hour of work will go a LONG way for the band, but as I said, not directly related to people streaming into the shows because they saw a poster.
Then what do they do for the band?
1. They show professionalism to anyone who sees them. Club owners, managers, booking agents, bartenders, patrons, other bands, etc. Anyone involved with the bar or venue (whose job is to get people into the venue and potentially buy booze) will see that you’re making an effort to develop a following at the venue or in the area. If you’re trying to get heads in the door (to pay covers & buy alcohol), you’ll always be the venues’ friend. This goes a long way towards booking more and better shows in the future at the venue.
2. They create some subtle name recognition. If you send them every time you head through Philadelphia, and you play similar clubs, the people who go out to shows will start to see the posters a 2nd and 3rd time and subconsciously think, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of those guys.” In some cases, just by seeing good looking posters several times, people will have a positive impression of the band, even if they haven’t heard a note. There are SO many bands out there and so many ways to hear about them. Any name recognition edge you can get may help.
A few tips on posters:
- I highly recommend creating a somewhat generic poster (that is very compelling visually, 11×17 if you can afford it) and leaving a block of a light color somewhere on the poster where you can write in details of the show. For instance: Sat Jan 17th at Dr. Watson’s Pub. That’s all you need. The posters will be in or around the venue, so people will know what you’re talking about. For example:
- Reuse posters and buy them in larger quantities. They’re cheaper and you don’t have to deal with the hassle of remaking, reordering, and paying for more shipping, so they’re cheaper. We’re still using 2007 posters for THE VITAL MIGHT (that have a silhouette of a band member who’s no longer in the band and that says “Aught Seven” on it). But as I was putting these guys up one day in 2008, I bumped into a guy at the Sound Museum in Brighton who said, “Hey, nice poster! I do screen-printing if you ever need more.” I said, “Yeah, I might since these say Aught Seven and have an old band member in them.” He said, “Who cares! They look great! No one will notice that!” So we’ve continued to send them and post them and no one has said a word.
- Make specialty posters for special shows. This one sort of goes against the last bullet, but I think it’s important to change up the posters from time to time. If you keep posting and sending the same design over the course of a year, people might tune it out and think it’s the old poster. At LEAST make a specialty web flyer, since those are free to make. For instance:
- Packaging. Try to stay cheap. You don’t need to buy poster mailers or giant 11×17 envelopes. I have catalog envelopes that work very well. You can fold the posters the long way (without creasing them) and push them into the envelope and tape up the opening. Also, mark the envelope well so the club owner or whoever gets the mail knows that there are posters for a show inside. If you’re helping them promote a show and get those drinking mouths in, they’ll rip it open and get someone to put them up ASAP. For example:
-
CD with the posters. Drop a CD in the envelope. The club owner or bar manager might take it out and put it in the rotation of music that plays at the bar, or in the jukebox.
- Send them for every show and poster in your main cities for EVERY show. Even if you know you’re going to bring 200 people to the next show, send ‘em or post ‘em anyway. The people who went to the show might see the poster and get even more excited and bring more people, or brag about it after the show.
That’s my take today on posters. I’d love to hear what other people think or if they have different techniques than I do on postering.
January 5th, 2009
For this past release of Red Planet from THE VITAL MIGHT, we put together a release plan that included PR, print advertising, online ads, college & specialty radio promotion, social networking, tour support, and a bunch of other pieces. Being the small label that we are, we can’t handle all of these tasks ourselves. We also have other jobs that take up a significant amount of time and if we wanted to get any sleep or have any sanity, we had to outsource parts of the release plan.
For Red Planet, we handled as many tasks as we could, but a college & specialty radio campaign would’ve pushed us over the edge. We didn’t have a database of contacts and we hadn’t done a campaign like this before, so we decided to go with The Planetary Group again, who did an admirable job on the band’s debut release back in 2006.
Before deciding to outsource, we laid out a plan for doing it ourselves. We filled up the calendar with deadlines for compiling and checking our contacts database, deadlines for mailing packs, dates for following up, and some other details. When piled on top of the other tasks already in the queue, it looked like too much. So we spent the money to have a third-party company handle it. We were very happy with the results, especially given we would simply receive an email update and a report every week from the guys and gals at Planetary. Instead of dozens of hours compiling, mailing, calling, and emailing, we got one email per week summing it all up for us.
We are ALL for being DIY and indie in everything we do, but sometimes you just run out of hands and hours.
December 18th, 2008
For many years I’ve dug around for the best contact management software. I’ve used Outlook, Outlook with the Small Biz Contact Manager addition, Highrise, FreeCRM, Salesforce.com, Access, and I even built my own web front-end for my contact database. They all had too many features. Even Highrise, by the 37Signals guys who are famous for limiting features to create better functionality, didn’t fit what I needed.
I wanted a very easy way for me to see who I need to contact next, in what order, how to contact them, what happened the last time we interacted, and maybe some email notifications if I needed to followup with someone.
Recently I decided to stop looking for the perfect tool and just use a spreadsheet. It’s been a huge success. I keep at simple as possible. I have a separate worksheet for each category of contacts (i.e. press, blogs, venues, other bands, etc.) and they all have roughly the same fields:
- Contact info (name, address, email, web site(s)
- Preferred contact method (email, web, phone, myspace, cave drawings, etc.)
- Last contact (the last date I sent them an email or called them)
- Notes (I usually throw in a date and a quick note like “12/1/09 - booked show”)
One of the most basic features of spreadsheets is the sorting capability. When it’s time to run through some contacts and get in touch, I sort by “Last contact” (oldest to newest) and I start down the line. If it’s time to promote a show in New York, I sort by state and secondary sort by city and then start through the “New York”s.
Sound simple? It is. But it works far better than a bulky, over-priced, feature-”rich” CRM system.
And I love Google Docs for my spreadsheets. I can share and collaborate the contact lists with colleagues and interns and I can access them from anywhere. With Google Gears, I can access them offline too. Google Docs also limits features compared to Excel or Numbers, so there aren’t 100 extra menu items to get in the way of simple contact management.
Sort away!
December 11th, 2008
Head over to Google Alerts and setup an alert monitor for ALL your artists, your label, your song names, or anything else you want to keep a close eye on. It’s great for finding press clippings, event postings, blog postings, rants by crazy fans, or even misinformation. It helps you to maintain a link list, some of which you may want to promote via email lists, MySpace/Facebook/Purevolume/Twitter, your blog, etc. And it’s always nice to know what people are saying about you or your artists before someone walks up to you at a party and says, “Wow, they really ripped you to shreds on iamamusiccriticwithnotaste.com!”
This is what one looks like in my email:
December 10th, 2008
Break up your tasks into 1-2 hour sub-tasks, or you’ll get overwhelmed and burnt out
I often will list out several tasks that need to get done. For example:
- Contact college and non-commercial radio spinning the new record
- Followup with national blogs about new record
- Followup with NYC press about release party
Those looks like tasks that can be easily tackled. The problem is that each one may have more layers than what you see on the surface. If you take the first task to follow up with radio, for instance. I grab my list of stations to followup with; let’s say it’s 120 stations. I don’t have any contact information for any of these radio stations.
So I start out on my task and I begin by searching for the stations online. I find that some of them have web sites, some have contact forms, some have email addresses, some have MySpace pages, some have Facebook profiles, or any combination of those methods of contact. Next, I need to determine what I’m going to keep track of. Do I just email them? Should I add them as a friend? Should I send them a message now? If I start sending messages and friending them right away, it’ll take me an hour to get 10 of them done.
I need to break this task up. I determine that all I’m going to do in this first sub-task is to collect contact information. If they have an email address or contact form, I’ll store that (in a wonderful sortable spreadsheet, which I’ll describe later). If they also have MySpace and/or Facebook, I’ll store that as well. As I get going, I realize that it’s still taking about an hour to get 20-25 sets of contact info. So I set my sights on 50 contacts for the first sub-task. When I get to 50, I feel accomplished and not overwhelmed.
If I hadn’t broken them up, it would’ve taken me 2 days straight to get all the info and to contact the stations. This way, I can complete the contact info collection in 1 or 2 more sub-tasks and then move onto the actual followup (which should also be split up into 2 or 3 tasks).
Another benefit to this approach is sticking with the overall task. If I tried to do it all at once, I’d be doing a LOT of boring work in a row and my mind would wander onto the next big task, and I’d also question if my approach to this task made sense. If I stick with 1-2 hour sub-tasks, I have a goal that keeps me motivated and keeps me on task. Between sub-tasks is a good time to lay out some more big tasks.
Ah, now I’ve finished my sub-task for “write blog on splitting tasks into sub-tasks” and I feel accomplished. Another brick in the wall of the big task of “write blogs to help others manage and market musicians and bands”.
December 2nd, 2008
I’ve added a new category on the blog here called “Techniques”. I’m going to start posting here and describing how we get things done here. Right now, THE VITAL MIGHT is the only active band on our roster so most example will revolve around them.
I’m going to start with a fairly straight forward and simple one: email.
Email probably makes up 90% of the tools we use to book, publicize, and promote the band. In the past, it used to be using Microsoft Outlook but I’ve switched to Gmail, in my opinion one of the most powerful tools available.
Here are the reasons we think it’s the best and how we use it:
- Searching
Finding emails in folders in Outlook was a pain in the ass. Every time an email came in, I had to make sure I put it in the correct folder to find it in the future. Up until the latest version of Outlook (or without a 3rd party plug-in), it was horribly slow and ineffective and searching for and finding emails. I often times label emails in Gmail, but if I’m moving too fast or I’m too busy, it’s ok. I can find it with a quick phrase, the same way I’d find something on Google. It’s the same algorithm, so it works the same way.
- Multiple “from” addresses
My Google account is for my personal email address, but I’ve added the band email address as a “from” address so I can switch to that when sending messages on behalf of the band. It doesn’t require me to have multiple email addresses, so everything is in one place. (Note: you’ll have to setup with your band’s email provider to forward incoming emails to your Gmail address to get this working properly.)
- Labels & Filters
I have a Gmail Filter to Label anything that comes to our band email address as “Band”. I can scan my inbox quickly to see what is “Band” and what isn’t.
- IMAP
It automatically sync’s with my iPhone (which I’ll get to later). I can be sure that I’ve always read my emails, since when I read a message or Label it on my iPhone, it automatically does the same in Gmail, and vice versa.
- Threads
This one was a little hard to get used to but I don’t know what I’d do without it now. Instead of 20 emails back and forth from one contact, like a booking agent, you have 1 thread where you can easily see the history. Even better, if I use the same subject to communicate with many people (i.e. I used the subject line “the vital might - new record” for about 100 contacts this fall when we were doing PR for the new record). When I’m doing followups with all my contacts, I can jump into one huge thread and hit reply, paste my response, change the name I’m sending it to, and Send. WAY better than opening 100 separate emails. I’ll get into more detail about my followup process in another post.
- Labs
The new Google Docs and Google Calendar Labs plug-ins for Gmail are quite nice. I haven’t taken full advantage of them yet, but I like getting Calendar reminders in Gmail and be able to jump into one of my band or label documents right from Gmail, rather than the extra click to open Google Docs. (sure you say, “What’s the big deal about an extra click?” Trust me, they add up over time)
- Speed
Some of the time, I have things planned out and scheduled. The rest of the time, I get things done based on what is foremost on my mind. I find that if it’s important, it’ll trickle to the front of your brain and get done first. Gmail makes it very easy to find emails, send a quick reply, and move onto the next TO DO in your head (or on Basecamp, which we’ll get to later)
You might be tethered to Outlook or some other contact management system like I used to be, but the searching and speed in my opinion makes it blow away any desktop or web email app out there.
November 25th, 2008
Magma Music is a small record label and publishing company located in Cambridge, MA founded by Andy Milk. This site showcases the label's artists and approach to producing and promoting records, booking tours, and all sorts of other tasks related to marketing independent music.