Thinking Globally and Acting Locally - A Prescription Bluegrass Editorial

As a phrase, Thinking Globally and Acting Locally, has now been around long enough to acquire it's own Wikipedia entry.

However, I'm going to suggest a different connotation when it comes to promoting and marketing your bluegrass band, your record label, your recording studio, festival or any other business with which you intend to have an on-line presence of the world-wide web. In this case Thinking Globally but Acting Locally is not at all what should be done.

We THINK globally and therefore send out our newsletters, email and such to everyone on our contact list. I don't know why. Perhaps because we think they want to know. Or could it be that someone on that list might share the information and help us to go VIRAL as the term is now used in the Internet circles.

We ACT locally though, when our message says things like:

“We'd love to see you this Friday at Central Market Westgate from 6:30-9pm and share our new songs with you”

Let's see now, the Central Market, Westgate … that must be somewhere near the White House in Washington … oops no, that was Watergate … ok, must be the Westgate City Center in Glendale, AZ … no, can't find any Central Market there. We had a West Gate on campus when I went to college, but it was always locked down after dark for security reasons … must not be that west gate either.

How am I supposed to know where you want me to be in order to hear your music? Oh well, if I miss it, you gave me another opportunity to hear you.

“If you can't make it this week, next Saturday 3/25 we are excited for our first show at Cafe Medici on Guadalupe.”

Wow … I know exactly where that is … used to work at a radio station on Guadalupe, just south of Tempe … well no, that's not the one you meant either.

Read On ...

I love the end of the email that says,

“Hope to see you soon!!”

REALLY?

OK, enough of the ranting … but did you get the picture that many of your readers will adopt that very same attitude, or worse, very quickly and begin tuning you out? Once they do that, it's only a very small step before they begin SHUTTING YOU OUT and then you've lost them.

What's the secret? What am I missing … or did you just happen to forget to include the name of the city in instance after instance, time and again?

Don't feel lonely. You're not alone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of bands who self-promote will follow in the same tracks and make the same oversights. But do you want to be in that number?

Time to get with the program. If you're going to use the tools, learn how to use them. Take a class if you need to. There are even FREE classes. Community colleges offer short courses. On-line webinars exist by the dozens and some are FREE. But you have to invest your time – just a little to get out of the rut and rise to the level where you want to be.

Seriously, with today's volume of email newsletters and publicity statements crowding up in-boxes, can you afford to alienate some fans because you didn't take the time to send enough information?

Every band is scrambling for more of their share of the fan base. More fans means more money at the bottom line. So why do we want to think of the fans with such disregard as to send them something that is pretty much useless for them?

Writing an email marketing newsletter for your band is not really that much different than writing anything else in this respect: The first rule of writing anything is to KNOW THY READER. When a band sends out blanket emails with local information to thousands who don't live locally, can they say they really “know their reader”?

Originally, I wrote this piece for publication about four or five years back. I remember running an updated version of it just a couple of years ago and just this last week I decided to go fishing for it once again in the pool of archived editorials because it is still so very relevant and necessary.

We wanted to publish a news story this week about an on-line streaming feed that gave us the web page and all over the web page was everything we needed to know – including the time of the broadcast, 8:00pm. What it didn't tell us was the time zone. Another example of ACTING globally but THINKING locally. The address was there and everyone who lives in that town and in that state already KNOWS what time zone they're in so what's the urgency to include it in the information about the show?

Simple little thing! Add “EASTERN”, or “EDT” or “EST” for the appropriate season, and the world of readers will have something to calculate from. If that show was only an hour in duration and the readers were forced to guess the time zone, they could easily miss their guess and then miss the show. The other rule to know when working with the public is to MAKE IT EASY for them. Don't make them work to discover you.

When this piece was originally written it seemed like we had been inundated with e-blasts and newsletters from local and regional bands. Since that time, however, I've discovered that they're not alone in this short-sightedness. Even major businesses with advisers on the payroll, conglomerate newspapers and firms specializing in marketing are also guilty of thinking on a local scale but publishing to the world on their web pages, social media sites and elsewhere.

We're in a global world. The Internet has shorted up the distance from hither to yonder with the speed of light. So it's time to begin thinking globally with everything that is connected to our businesses. If we don't we may be singing that old Eddy Arnold song, “Make The World Go Away,” but if we embrace the change, we could easily be singing the old American standard, “Sitting On Top of The World.”

 

---