A New Internet and Social Media Strategy for Dancers and Dance Companies

[Doug Fox]

I just wrote post on my Great Dance blog:

"A New Internet and Social Media Strategy for Dance Companies."

I look forward to thoughts and feedback. And I'd also like to know if there are dancers and dance companies who are more or less pursuing the strategy that I describe in my post.

Thanks!

Doug Fox
Great Dance

[Doug Fox]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about my Internet/social media strategy for dancers.

No question that such an approach does take considerable effort and planning. But, as you point out, a social media-enabled strategy is pretty much the direction things are going in. And for some dancers and dance companies, their primary online activities revolve around communicating with their friends through Facebook.

On your point about the limitations and drawbacks of video sharing sites: Personally, I like sites such as YouTube and Vimeo and I especially like watching the increasing number of videos in high-quality and HD formats. And users of these video sharing sites can always embed their videos on their own websites and blogs.

I'm going to learn about your FRAMEWORKS Dance Film Series now.

Best,
Doug Fox
Great Dance

[Michael Bodel, FRAMEWORKS]

Certainly a great list of goals Doug. Of course it takes a lot of time and energy to be constantly posting/compressing/responding/befriending etc. For some, this activity seems fun and natural, for others it is a total chore. I guess either way, it may be becoming essential for marketing, whether you like it or not...

My one other comment is about the media capabilities on external websites. Just a small counter-point to the idea that posting tons of video everywhere is good for a) your artistic process and b) getting people to become interested in your show. I am frequently frustrated watching video clips/trailers/excerpts of dance work on external websites that are a terrible environment for watching dance video (youtube is the most glaring): bad compressors (or fast-stream defaults), slow frame rates (terrible for dance) and a cluttered environment of text, photos, banner ads etc. surrounding the frame of the video. There are many cases when seeing such videos has made me much less excited about the project, even if I would enjoy the live experience of attending the show. All I'm saying is there is something to be said for presenting your videos at higher resolution in the closed context of your own website where you can control (how novel) how your artwork looks.

Thanks for opening up the subject.