I finally gave it up
A phone call I have been anticipating for a while came the other day. I thought it would probably come from a new energetic volunteer or maybe a seasoned volunteer roped into one of the important tasks that always pile up in organizations like this but it didn’t. Rather it came from much higher up in the food chain than that.
I wasn’t trying to pull something over on anyone and I always honored any commitment I knew about on this matter and I knew I was overdue for a while.
Even though, we weren’t really a working band these days, I checked on it fairly frequently and it always rotated up for everyone to see. The “powers that be” would give it an occasional shout out or a highlight on the splash page. I always enjoyed that too.When I first signed up for it the reason was very straight forward, get publicity so that better opportunities would come our way, festivals, clubs, big coffee houses, all of those and more. With all those views, how could we miss? We would be turning gigs away.
Well, it didn’t quite work out that way but I kept it anyway. The main reason I did keep it was because supporting the organization and the website was now the driver not any potential opportunity for us.
I would’ve kept it now too if we were still a working band but it just didn’t make sense any more. You know what they say, “any publicity is good publicity.” I’m not sure “they” is right about this though but it really doesn’t matter now because we really don’t have a lot to publicize. We are still doing it some but it is much more casual these days. So is “any publicity really any publicity” if you get my meaning.
You know this coy thing really isn’t my style, I wonder if anyone can guess what I am talking about or even interested enough to keep reading this far. I could try to keep this up for about as long as one of Bert’s monthly Trivia contests but I don’t have a tee shirt to give Bob Palasek once he come up with the answer.
Last week I received a call from Tim Edes (you know Chairman of the Board Tim Edes) asking me if I wanted to continue the ‘bout Time! ad tile that rotated through the top border of the California Bands page for the last 6 years or so. Telling him that we were going to discontinue the tile was difficult as it means acknowledging where we are as band and there is some regret about that……but not too much. It was time to move on from the big time.
As I said, over time the ad tile became less about band publicity and more about supporting the website and the organization and I plan to continue to support the website and the CBA as much as I am able to going forward just not with an ad tile.
Getting back to this publicity thing, I’m fairly sure I don’t understand it. Over the course of the last 7 years or so, I have been trying to get a couple of bands on someone’s (anyone’s) radar so that we could get hired for all the big club and festival gigs that are apparently available but manage to allude us continually.
The argument remains for me, is any publicity good publicity. ‘bout time! had a website for awhile. The website was maintained by a former band member who left the band when he moved away. For those who don’t “read between the lines” the operative word in the last sentence was “was”. It still exists out in cyber land but without any activity. In our heyday it didn’t generate much activity either. We got more calls for gigs by being the first band listed on the California Bands Page (we’re apostrophe enabled) by far than the website ever generated.
I’m not sure of the point here except to confirm that I really don’t understand publicity. There has to be something to it or why would Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. keep throwing all those ads at us.
This conundrum continues for my other band. Using a nifty little musician/band friendly website development company called Bandzoogle, I built a website for the band about 6 months ago. The content is current, there is current music and video, CD’s and merch for sale. Our band pushes it at every opportunity online and at appearances but the results are still pretty dismal. In the last two months more than half of the 100 hits we got were from a spam bot in Russia.
So what is the answer? Is any publicity, good publicity? Let me know if you know or figure it out.
