03: Actionable First Steps in PR
with Beth Stewart
Thinking about some nuts and bolts of how an artist could begin to approach their own PR, their own publicity. We just talked about sort of cultivating a vision for where they want to go. How do they figure out what their story is or what are the parts of what they're doing that they can share that will be of interest to others?
Yeah. Okay. So actionable things that you can do early on and easily. I think one of the first things that I like to see, particularly young people do, is figure out how to succinctly describe what sets them apart.
So a good exercise is trying to describe yourself in 3 to 5 words. I would recommend finding ten people who know you well family, friends, people from gigging, who kind of get to see the different sides of you and asking them to describe you in 3 to 5 words and then looking for patterns.
That's something I did when I started Verismo. I recruited a bunch of different people and asked them essentially what they thought of me. And it was really fascinating to see, like how quickly those things slotted into some easily meshed groups.
So for me, genuine, engaging, driven were ideas that came up again and again. I also people highlighted my candor, very candid person, very into the real talk and my curiosity, which is something that I really prized about myself. So those five things kind of became my personal brand, what I wanted people to know about me.
And I think it's important to note that you can't just kind of pull this out of a hat, right? Like there needs to be some basis. In this instance, it was other people's perspectives from having known me for years. For a performer, a good exercise might be to take all of your press reviews and put them into like a wordle - is a wordle still a thing? It's a word cloud - and looking for which words and which ideas pop, which ones are very large on the screen that might provide you a place to start.
You know, you don't just get to say like I would never say my personal brand as "I'm very lithe and like dainty" because I'm not. And anybody who looks at me would know that.
So it's important that you stay rooted in reality. But I do think that there are I don't want to say sexy because I don't know what age people are tuning into this. I do think that there are captivating ways to describe yourself.
So I think starting with those 3 to 5 words is a good place. And then I think looking at your bio, which I know everyone loves to do, so much, I do it for a living and I don't even love it.
But figuring out a way to describe what you do and what motivates you. So it drives me absolutely nuts when I see bios that are essentially just a string of credits, because really, who cares? Like once you get to a certain point in the career, everyone's debuted at the same places.
Everyone's gotten a certain number of prizes or alma maters in their bio. What I want to know when I'm looking at a bio is like, what- What is urgent to you? Like, what gets you out of bed?
And I love to see a bio that starts with 1 to 3 sentences about what drives that person as an artist and then threading that idea throughout those credits so that it's not just kind of an encyclopedic list.