Last night I attended the Ottawa Fringe Festival’s Blogging Wine and Cheese event. Kristina invited me to go with her. We started out with dinner at Perfection, Satisfaction, Promiseon Laurier and then meandered over to the event.
The point of it this event, ultimately, was to get the word out about the Fringe Festival and draw more people to the shows. I love this idea. More organizations should embrace social media and learn how to do it well. Social media is essentially word-of-mouth marketing. Good word-of-mouth is gold, especially in a market that is highly competitive for the event dollar (in a short festival season to boot).
The blogging event itself was okay. There was wine, there was cheese, there were interesting folks to talk to, but it could have been better. It could have worked had it been organized a little differently, and it got me thinking (again) about marketing and media and blogging and how it can all fit together, and actually accomplish some goals, many of which remain elusive to traditional big media.
Imagine the setting: a corner of a Fringe Festival venue. Plastic chairs, plastic tables. A couple large trays of cheese and crackers and someone dishing out the wine. Local bloggers, many of whom didn’t know each other, filtered into this small area. It was awkward (at least it was for me). This was supposed to be set up for mingling, yet mingling is next to impossible in plastic chairs anchored in grass.
It was a mixed group – the only person I recognized was Zoom, and our tables weren’t aligned in such a way that made it easy to chat. Chantal was there too (who I don’t get to see enough of!) and she brought a non-blogging friend who probably thinks we’re all nuts. ;)
You know, I;ve been to a couple of these kind of events, and as a blogger I have realized that being introduced to other bloggers can be kind of painful. Why can’t someone dole out some name tags? The conversation almost always goes something like this:
“Hi, i’m Andrea.”
“Hi, I’m Joanne.”
“Where do you blog?”
“Oh, my blog is hackerslacker.” (I’m making that up, just bear with me).
“Oh,” I say, nodding and smiling. I am not familiar with hackerslacker. Should I be? I feel guilty for not being more in tune with the hackingslacking scene.
“And you?”
“Oh, my blog is called apeekinsidethefishbowl.” I am suddenly wondering why I chose that name, and why it had to be such a mouthful.
“What’s it about?“
Oh,” I say, struggling for the right words, “Nothing much.”
For chrissakes. I need to do better than that, don’t you think? Gah!
Anyway, had I been the organizer I would have done it differently. I would start with inviting the right bloggers. I am exactly the kind of person they’d want writing about Fringe, but would a tech blogger? Someone who blogs about politics? Much less likely.
Not that the Fringe folks did this, but good marketing practices don’t include P.R. officers sending form letters to bloggers they don’t know. And this has, for some reason, become the norm. I get a ton of emails asking me to write about fancy cameras, video games and cleaning products. Marketing folks – you need to give bloggers freebies to try, otherwise, why would I write about your product?
In the case of Fringe, if the goal was to have more people writing about Fringe and draw more people out to experience the shows, they could have done what bigger companies do for the traditional media, given away tickets to a sneak preview (they could have invited the bloggers en masse) and done a wine and cheese afterwards to discuss the show. That would have been great. It could have lead to a slew of positive posts, spread the word to a whole bunch of new people, and could have driven more traffic to the Fringe blog too.
I should point out they did give away passes, but it was at the end of the evening. It was done exactly in reverse as it should be. I’d really like to go to some Fringe events, but honestly, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to swing it. It’s almost too late in the game.
I’ve been considering whether or not I should be approaching these blogging/networking events from a business perspective, which is harder to do given that this blog of mine is a personal one and is not necessarily a calling card for me or my business. The next time someone asks me what I write about, maybe I could say something like:
I post a variety of written and photographic essays on domestic, artistic, and personal issues, taken from a creative and journalistic perspective.
How else can I put it?
I am really grappling with this issue, because a small part of me feels that I’m losing potential business opportunities. Balance that with the fact that this website is very much a reflection of who I am and it is not overly crafted and edited. Seriously folks, it’s as if I’m laying out the contents of my brain for all to see. Yet the blog can also be a tool. Should I get in the game? Or continue to be myself. Can I do both?
