{"id":491,"date":"2010-07-07T14:00:32","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T14:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp\/?p=491"},"modified":"2010-07-07T14:00:32","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T14:00:32","slug":"lifes_a_shameless_self-serving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/2010\/07\/lifes_a_shameless_self-serving\/","title":{"rendered":"Life’s a shameless, self-serving pitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week from today, I’ll be participating in a live chat on behalf of my client, Chamber Music America, focusing on an article about artists using social media that appears in the July\/August issue of Chamber Music <\/i>magazine. Since the thesis of the piece is that we need to continue the conversation off the stage and the page (zing!), Chamber Music America wants to do just that with this chat (see, I rhyme on Wednesdays). Click here<\/a> to download a PDF if you don’t receive the publication. I sound terribly un-smart, but I’ll\/you’ll\/we’ll survive. My colleague Christina Jensen<\/a> comes off much better, so she’ll be on hand for the chat to offer another publicist perspective. The author, Dave Allen, will also participate, and hopefully SO WILL YOU.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:<\/p>\n

Pianist Stephen Hough joined Twitter in January as an outgrowth of blogging. In his blog for England’s Telegraph website, he covers a lot of intellectual ground, ranging from religion to politics to his favorite restaurants, as well as strictly musical matters. He is now covering an equally wide territory in his tweets. “I’m enjoying it as a kind of online notebook–a place to jot down ideas, thoughts, poems which before I would write on the back of hotel envelopes,” he says. “I don’t want it to be a networking tool–it’s something private which I allow people to look at. And it’s a remarkable way to get to know an audience.”          <\/p>\n

Tim Munro became eighth blackbird’s official blogger when he joined the group in 2006. But like Hough, he has turned to Twitter; in fact, these days Twitter has largely supplanted his blog posts. (Dedicated applications on his iPhone make the process especially easy.) Munro’s tweets cover a wide range of cultural terrain, including links to news articles and reviews; he has even linked to bad reviews. But it all helps to keep the public conversation going. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Do you think Facebook and Twitter should be used to promote concerts and recordings, or should they simply be outlets through which fans get to know artists as people? Is there strategy involved? Should there be strategy involved? Could either replace traditional press entirely, or is an NPR<\/i> hit or a New York Times<\/i> review still what all artists really want? What artist Twitter feeds and Facebook pages annoy you? Which ones do you like? Have any presenters found ways to track ticket sales based on social media, or is their effectiveness still unknown? <\/p>\n

Provided I don’t royally mess up this very cool (free) chat site, this is what we’ll be discussing next week. I’ll post to this blog, like so…<\/p>\n