Life's a Twitch, Part 1

I wasn't about to write this post without using Twitter myself, so on I went, last Friday morning. I liked designing my little page (obviously), I liked having a forum to mention that I was excited to meet Thomas Cott at The Chase Brock Experience the night before. Oooo Matt from Carnegie HALL is FOLLOWING me. My hero! A friend in the wilderness! I start following Hilary, Gabriel and The King's Singers and wait about 10 minutes for them to notice me (Hilary and The King's Singers still do not care about my Tweets. I find this awkward.) By 7:30pm, I was unimpressed. Why were my clients not @thelateshowwithdavidletterman, yet?? I'm bored; let's take this baby out for a spin! My client Sondra had gone through a series of unfortunate ordeals over the past few days that I thought were media-worthy. Surely the New York Times blog ArtsBeat has a Twitter account.

I had this drink at the Dove Parlour in the West Village once that supposedly had absinthe in it. Everything I know about absinthe I learned from Moulin Rouge, so I sat on a barstool waiting for Tinkerbell to fly out and summon me, all the while warning my friends that I might start to act crazy.  Posting the above Tweet was basically the same: lots of devilish anticipation with zero result. At least this didn't leave a nasty licorice taste in my mouth. After a half hour I e mailed a contact at the Times and explained the Sondra situation, and a blurb was in Arts, Briefly on Monday. Who says e mail is dead?  (Did everyone notice that was the Most E-mailed Story on the Wall Street Journal website for about two days?)

At that point I'd been on Twitter for, oh, eight hours. So I tried it again yesterday:

Ever so slightly more success! (Although not actual success, because Eric's concert isn't getting reviewed.) No response on Twitter, but I did hear from someone that no one would be reviewing the concert. But again, that was via e mail about other work matters, not a dedicated response to my Twitch. I didn't expect a dedicated response; I don't know what I expected. Tinkerbell again, probably.

My antics aside, real live classical music publicists do interact with real live classical music journalists very day. Since Friday is Interview Day here on Life's a Pitch, we'll hear from the following publicists and journalists about how they use the Lord Twitter tomorrow.

For the Publicists, we have:
@cjpr: Christina Jensen, Christina Jensen PR
@dotdotdottweet: Steven Swartz, DotDotDot Music
@SarahBaird: Sarah Baird, Boosey and Hawkes
@BklsweetMedia: Amanda Sweet, Bucklesweet Media
@CarnegieMatt: Matt Carlson, Carnegie Hall
@glennpetry, @seanmgross, @PhilipWilder: Glenn Petry, Sean Gross and Philip Wilder, 21C Media Group
@mlaffs: Maura Lafferty, New Century Chamber Orchestra

And for the Journalists, we have:
@nightafternight: Steve Smith, New York Times, Time Out New York, et al.
@anastasiat: Anastasia Tsioulcas, Gramophone, Billboard, et al.
@gsandow: Greg Sandow, Wall Street Journal, ArtsJournal et al.
@sethcolterwalls: Seth Colter Walls, Newsweek, et al.

I'm @amandaameer, and this post was too long to Tweet.