This is an exciting time to be involved with marketing events with an abundance of tools available literally at our fingertips.  Today with electronic marketing taking a bigger piece of the pie it has become easier to get the word out, but also if you don't have a handle on the technology, more overwhelming at the same time.  In my previous two articles I have touched on some of the social networking sites that have become large players in attracting audiences: Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.  Today let's take a closer look at how we might take advantage of some of these and other tools that will make our jobs more affective.

I just received a report that stated internet radio is taking away shares from traditional radio, 42 million people listen to online radio, up 27% from 33 million in 2008- a very strong trend.  With that said, "Event Radio" will not be far behind.  Adobe Flash, which creates some of your fancier, eye popping graphics and moving objects on a website, is coming out with a Flash-based media player.  What that means to us  in the industry is we will now have the ability to plug-in the player and establish our own radio station related to our event on the event's site.  This will not only give us a broader brush with which to advertise the event, but we will be able to create a 24/7-environment that will continue to help our branding and maintain visibility in the clutter of electronic marketing year round, truly a valuable tool.

YouTube is not usually thought of when we talk about marketing our events, but I have found using YouTube can be extremely useful and inexpensive.  An example would be to script text, have one of your celebrities, guests or artists create a short video welcoming everyone to your event, upload it to YouTube and then embed it to your website  in a prominent place on your site. The script might run something like this: "Hi, this is Jack Thibault from the Straw Hills Fest, which will be held July 23rd-25th in lovely downtown Web City.  Come and join us for a weekend of great music.  Look forward to seeing you there."  Doesn't that sound exciting?

I have found Twitter to be another useful tool.  Much and little has been made of Twitter, which allows you to  deliver messages in 140 characters or less, which I think is great.  You can think of it like sending out headlines to all of your subscribers or shorthand blogging.  Once again you can keep your subscribers "in the loop"  all year round.  Great for updates, sponsor ads, ticket deadlines, etc.

As you see there are many tools available to use.  Should you have questions on how to use these to give your marketing a boost, give me a call or send me an email.  No pressure, advice is free. You can contact me at thibault@teaprod.com or 952.543.1384.

T.E.A. Productions | Minneapolis MN | 952.543.1384 | thibault@teaprod.com

Sir Paul's remarks in full, via the BBC:
"Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that... I'm in favour of that sort of thing."

He added: "The problem is you get a lot of young bands coming up and some of them aren't going to last forever so if they have a massive hit that's going to pay their mortgage forever."

"They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity.

"I've been very lucky because my main era with the Beatles was at a time when everyone did get paid.

"Particularly for young bands and they've got a young family, I don't want to see them destitute after a couple of years when they were mega. So I think it's fair."