Facebook is the new e-mail
Back in the day, when you were a new band and you wanted to get a gig. You would get some photos taken and professionally printed on glossy stock and submit tapes (yes, dear readers at one point in time people had cassette tapes duplicated en masse for people to listen to) to a booking agent. The better quality your tape was (in terms of music, recording and especially packaging), the more likely you were to get a gig.
Along came a new fangled technology called the compact disc. Initially the duplication costs on cds were so prohibitively high, that booking agents (who sometimes didn’t even have a cd player) would often book bands just because they had a cd under the assumption that if they were willing to spend that much money on product that they must have a draw.
Eventually, cd prices came down and soon everyone had a cd. The cd soon replaced a cassette tape as an essential piece of a promotional package.
Next was the website, then the myspace page, mp3s, epks, facebook, etc. etc. In other words, the standards for what was required for a booking agent to take a music submission seriously kept increasing over time.
About a month ago I posted about paying dues vs paying wages based on an experience I had with my graduate school’s Alumni Office.
Not long after, I was on facebook and someone had posted about the big upcoming alumni event. I replied to the post by saying that I sent an email with a question, and no one could be bothered to send me a reply. This started other people chiming in, and when asked about what approaches should be taken to pay artists, I asked again where the money was going and why they had such a low opinion of their alumni that they should be willing to work for free.
Some other people posted and then I received a surprise, The Director of the Alumni office posted a public reply. It was a thoughtful reply which apologized for not responding to my e-mail, explained that the school of music was responsible for selecting musicians for the event, and went on to detail the challenges of organizing such an event including efforts to lower costs of producing such an event and how many faculty, students, staff and alumni were donating their time.
Of course this doesn’t address the scenario of a tuition (rather than solely endowment) driven school with ever increasing enrollment or who actually made the decision to have free entertainment (and what that meant in terms of potential alumni perception)- only who chose the entertainment – but it’s about little gains one at a time. A month old e-mail that I had given up on receiving a response to actually got one.
Just as the materials for taking submissions seriously have increased, many companies have shifted their damage control tactics to the online arena. First, people who complained about something would call. If they were really mad, they might write a letter. If it was a completely egregious break with customer service expectations, perhaps they would call a radio station, or a TV station with a local beat angle and try to negotiate it that way.
It’s easy to ignore an e-mail. It went to the spam filer. It got passed around between departments. It’s hard to ignore yelp or any one of a number of other online review sites.
If you think this doesn’t affect academic institutions, one internationally recognized design college had the board of trustees refuse to renew a presidential contract after an online petition, blog and assorted flap for current students and alumni over their dissatisfaction with the direction of the school forced action. Colleges look at rate my professor more often than you might think.
Companies take their PR very seriously. I can not find the source right now, but I remember reading an interesting article about the Sarah Palin facebook page and how it was closely monitored and edited to attempt to control public perceptions of her. (I did find this Gawker post however).
If you want it changed, you have to draw attention to it. The place that people are looking is not in their e-mail box, it’s facebook and yelp and that’s where you’ll find companies looking as well.
