Our diva was less likely to go searching for reviews right after her New York City performance, but she had learned that the post-performance time was still an important moment. She remembered writing to Nick at Hail House when she was first pitching the idea of her residency there. It had been almost a year ago now! “Wow, time really does fly,” she noted aloud. However, she remembered during her branding outline that she had been instructed to create a “three-part experience.”
“Well,” she thought, “this is the time to do it.” So she brewed herself some coffee (she still couldn’t resist its siren song although she had switched to an alkaline version), put her hair up in a ponytail, and got down to business. It was tempting to just move on to the next thing on her calendar. In fact, her calendar was starting to fill up with various singing activities that all stemmed from her residency. “Isn’t it funny,” she thought, “that even though it didn’t seem like the residency was that successful that all of these new things came from me just putting that idea out there?”
The Day 28 challenge on your journey is to create post-performance marketing procedures.
Our diva was truly beginning to realize the positive effects of action toward her goal. It stung a little every time she had her own “Rome wasn’t built in a day” experience. She started to figure out just how keen and sharp it could feel to continually put herself out there knowing that conditions would never be perfect. Unbeknownst to her, she actually started seeking that feeling as a marker, or metric, of what would be an exciting and worthwhile project.
Returning her thoughts to the final step of her three-part experience, she asked, “where do I start?” She hadn’t thought of this at all after her Hail House residency because she felt so burned by the finicky review. It was too bad too. Those would have been some nice contacts with whom to continue building relationships. “But, the best time to get started was then,” she posited, “and the second best time is now.”
Start With The Strongest Connections
She decided to start with the closest connections she made during the process. She wrote thank you letters to the ensemble, the ensemble’s administration, and her composer friend for making the entire performance possible. She was very grateful for their desire to work with her. She didn’t ask them for future performance opportunities in her thank you note. She simply thanked them. Then, she grabbed a couple of business cards from an interior pocket in her purse. These were cards from people she had connected with either during the rehearsal process or after the performance who were not directly tied to the ensemble. She spent a half-hour writing individual emails to ask them about what they were working on and offered to buy them coffee if they happened to be in the same city again soon. After that she needed to go run some errands so she tucked her laptop away for the rest of the night.
Settling down to her work again the next day, she realized that she had received links to the audio recording and photos from during the performance. This was so exciting. She normally hated listening to the recordings but she was determined to bring a new sense to this process. Instead of listening critically to beat herself up for any little thing that seemed out of place, she decided to grab a notebook and play “critic/cheerleader” while listening.
The Critic/Cheerleader Post-Mortem
Clicking play, she listened intentionally all the way through the performance. She made two columns on her paper and titled them “critic” and “cheerleader.” The things that she wished she could have done differently went in the critic column. The things that she really liked went in the cheerleader column. It wasn’t a difficult concept but it helped her reframe the way she had been listening to her documentation in years past.
The other aspect she added to her critic/cheerleader post-mortem was paying attention to any extra-musical factors that took place in the recordings. She noticed that there were certain spoken introductions that she found more interesting than others. So, she slid the cursor back and restarted the track to figure out what about them was more compelling. There was definitely a distinctive “storytelling” fashion to the introductions that she favored. She wrote, “practice story-like (anecdotal, allegorical, and narrative) introductions for pieces” down under a third section called “next steps.”
Post Those Tracks to Social Media!
While she did her intentional listening, she marked down the start and stop points for the sections that she thought highlighted her strengths best. Then, quickly importing the tracks into Audacity, she exported those clips to be used for social media posting. She turned to her Facebook and Twitter and immediately scheduled a handful of posts with the various tracks with pictures from the performance. She didn’t want to forget to share that media widely.
That made her think of her email list. It was still in its fledgling stage because she had only started one six months ago. She saw all of these Pinterest pins exclaiming, “How to get 1,400 followers in 14 days” and felt a little overwhelmed. But, she didn’t push herself to have thousands. “Just get it started,” she kept telling herself. Pulling together some text about what the experience was like working with the ensemble, how much she enjoyed learning the composer’s piece, what had surprised her during their rehearsal process, and then ending with the audio files, she felt like she had a pretty decent newsletter ready to send. She desperately wished that they had good video from the performance. She knew how much her friends liked video. But, “I’d rather send this out than nothing,” she decided.
Creating a System
Before her working time ran out that day, she made sure to update her bio, resume/cv, website, and sound files with the new information and materials. “It always pays to have this stuff organized,” she reasoned. In fact, she started a document that she entitled “post-show procedures.” She knew that she wanted to be busier with performing so she decided to do whatever it would take to put these details on autopilot. It’s part of how the business works, she thought. So, she decided to make it as easy and streamlined as possible.
Whew, our diva was tuckered out after two days of post-show organizing, sharing, connecting, and more. She rewarded herself that night with a just a little bit of Netflix binging. Oh, who are we kidding? It was a lot of Netflix binging.
