86: Behind The Scenes: Classical Music PR (Part 3)
Real and actionable first steps
with Beth Stewart
The people that you work for are very blessed to have you in their life. There's a lot of musicians who haven't quite reached the level where they have the resources to hire a PR person. What can somebody do to tackle this on their own? To be their own advocate?
Yeah. I think the first step is to have a really honest conversation with yourself about which parts of yourself you want to share and what are the ways in which you could reliably share them. So if you're someone who's super into taking pictures on the road, Instagram might be a great place for you. Twitter might not be. If you find that you want to connect with family, older family particularly, and fans at the same time, Facebook might be a great fit.
So I think the first step is that you want to have a really frank conversation with yourself about what parts of your story and your life you're willing to share with folks and how you might reliably share that.
So don't back yourself into posting on Instagram every day if you hate being in pictures or you hate taking pictures. I would advise you, however, to reserve your handle on all social media. So Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, whatever else they come out with tomorrow, make sure that your handle is reserved, even if you're-- even if you aren't going to have a presence on that platform.
It just means that someone else isn't going to have a presence on a handle that people associate with you. The next piece of advice I have would be to use your resources. So there are so many fantastic resources available at free or very low cost to us these days. Canva is a great resource for graphic design, so when you see people doing those season announcements, sort of, photo with all the text to the side of all the gigs they've got coming up, Canva is a great way to do that.
I'm a big fan of Squarespace. All of our client sites and our company sites have been built on Squarespace. It is historically a very stable platform and they have a ton of templates. If you have a weekend and you already have photos, you can sit down and have yourself a reasonable facsimile of a professional website at the end of the weekend.
And I think the third piece of advice would be to barter. I would bet you any amount of money that you have a friend who has an iPhone and has really gone down a rabbit hole about how to take incredible footage on that iPhone. Maybe they could get some clips of you performing or rehearsing.
You probably have another friend who's a word nerd and would actually find it kind of fun to help you have a bio that doesn't start out, "Equally comfortable on the operatic and concert stage...". And I bet you have something you can offer your friends, too. Maybe you have an incredible sense of style and you can be the person who helps everybody put together their outfits for their professional photo shoots.
We all have special skills, and I think musicians in general tend to be pretty well-rounded, pretty artistic folks. I would bet you that in your group of friends and colleagues, you have lots of people who have skills that could help you at this point in your career.
Kellogg:
Is it also useful to simply follow people you think that do it well?
Stewart:
Absolutely. So when people are just getting started on social, my best advice for them is really just to lurk for a while, meaning setup your account, with your handle, and then follow just a big swath of people, people you admire, maybe people you aren't as big a fan of, people that you respect musically, people that have huge followings and you're not sure why and just stay on top of what they're posting, particularly stories, because those are only there for 24 hours.
People tend to be a little freer with stories, us and our clients included. I think that when it goes in the feed, we're very aware that it's going to be there forever and it feels like it needs to be perfect. Stories might be-- like last night we did a story about our feet masks and the anime that we were watching while getting ready for the gala.
So I think that that will give you a fairly broad range of input as far as what's out there, what people are doing and what works well in your mind to you. And then that can inform how you yourself approach your own social media.
Kellogg:
We could fill several hours of best practices around social media and websites, but how about just a few tips around a website and maybe a few tips around working with one social media platform?
Stewart:
Yeah. Okay. Website tips. I hate fluff. Don't be fluffy. If you haven't done that much stuff, I would vastly prefer you to have a two or three paragraph bio about what you've done in school and what you value than a Sally Soprano bio that goes on for five pages and is mostly fluff.
Think about logistics. When you're thinking about a website, think about who's going to come. That's probably fans, presenters, press. Think about what they're going to be meeting when they come to your website. If it's press, they're probably coming because they need photos that have already been approved with clear photo credits and/or a bio or schedule. If it's fans, they're probably coming to see videos of you singing and/or get to your social media are all in one place.
So think really carefully about how people are likely to be using that website. And I would urge you, especially if it's your first one, to really think about function over form. If you're using something like a Squarespace template, the form is almost taken care of for you. It's going to be attractive. Your job is not to get in the way of that template.
So, for example, if your photo on your home page has a dark background, you probably want your name, your logo to be white so that it will pop. But that means that on subsequent pages you probably shouldn't use photos that have a light background because your name will disappear. It's really interesting how many websites we see where just the very basic functionality seems like an afterthought.
So I would encourage you to think about it sort of as building technique like those functional pieces have to be in place before you can get super fancy and interpretive. I think that's helpful.
Kellogg:
That's very helpful. Okay, Now let's pick a social media platform and some tips.
Stewart:
Yeah. Okay. First tip already said this, but in case it doesn't make it in, reserve your handle.
So we have @verismocomm everywhere it exists, I hope. Don't go booking it if we don't. So I would really encourage you to reserve your handle and include a short social bio on all social platforms. It is completely fine to then lock down the profile and not post content there. For some of our clients on Twitter, we say something like a sentence about who they are as a musician, and then “We post regularly on Instagram. Head over there for the latest updates” so people know that yes, you've got the right person, but this isn't where we're really going to be posting frequently. I would also encourage you to get into the habit of posting regularly and you can decide what frequency is achievable for you. That might be three times a week, once a week, maybe even twice a month as you work up to things, I would encourage you to get into the habit of posting regularly because so much of this field is-- can feel like feast or famine. Right? You've got four gigs in the same weekend in December and then you've got two months where you're doing a lot of catering.
Kellogg:
And that's okay.
Stewart:
Yeah, and that's okay.
That's such, such a relatable part of this industry, right? Most of us have several different jobs and several different forms of income, and come tax season we're juggling 20 different 1099s. So rather than flood your followers with content during that one weekend in December and then not posting for three months, I would encourage you to get some videos, some photos, some stories, jot down some bullet points from that time that then you can dole out over time for our clients in addition to the timely things they're working on, we have evergreen folders.
We use Airtable to organize all of our social content. We keep our client hashtags there. We keep tags of the companies they're working with, and we keep a backlog of photos and videos that could really work at any time. Maybe-- Eun Sun Kim gave a magazine interview in which she said something really brilliant about a particular piece.
Maybe she's not performing that piece this season, but during a week in March when she has nothing going on, that might be a great time to loop back around to that content we've been holding back in the evergreen folder.