Engaging Bloggers

My blog is a small blog with 11 followers and about 29 readers per day. Not too bad for starting less than four months ago. Today I received a press release and invite from Fire! New Play Festival 2009. They invited me and, I’m sure, hundreds of other bloggers to be part of a conference call with the Directors and Playwrights of their festival.

I wouldn’t normally have written about it, but I thought the idea of engaging bloggers to market for you I thought was great. For the fee of a conference call, they can get who knows how many bloggers to write about their festival for free. What a great way to get the word out. True, you would have less control, but you'll reach a whole new group of people who might not ever have heard about you or your company.

I have copied and pasted a little bit of information from their press release since I can’t participate in the conference call, but way to go!

WHAT: Fire! New Play Festival 2009

WHEN: August 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, and 20th @ 7:30pm; $5 Suggested Donation

WHERE: Freedom Train Productions
138 South Oxford Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Brooklyn, NY: On August 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, and 20th @ 7:30pm, Freedom Train Productions will open Fire! New Play Festival 2009, three weeks of political theatre featuring black queer protagonists. All staged reading performances will take place at 138 South Oxford Street in Fort Greene Brooklyn. A StoryCorps interview with a resident playwright of Freedom Train Productions will be played at 7pm, a half hour before the start of every show. There is a $5 suggested donation.

Google Toolbox

I love Google. I have found so many useful and free things on there. I talked about Google Analytics a while back, and today I will share another favorite, Google Alerts. Google Alerts will send you updates of anything you want as they happen on the World Wide Web.

If there is a project I am interested in, I “google” it. I have alerts tagged on myself, my employer, theatres, and things I am interested in. I have chosen to get the once-a-week option, so once every a week I get a report on my name. Who knew there was a promising high school athlete with the same name? When he makes the news, I get updates. When I start to make the news, the updates will be about me. But my blog and twitter accounts show up every week. If someone else blogs about me, it shows up too.

In the age of the Internet, there is no excuse for not knowing what information is out there on you. I was speaking with a writer last week about a show he is producing. He thought he had an original name for the musical about an assisted living community. Well, when I “googled” it, I found a dozen such communities with that exact name. I was surprised to hear him say he never looked up the name online.

Have you “googled” your name lately?