My name is Robert Holt, and I work here at KCSM helping to promote local artists in our “Jazz Datebook”. This post is directed primarily at artists and venues, telling you a little bit about our datebook, how you can promote your events and hopefully answering some of the questions you might have.
Use our submission form
It’s Free!
What many don’t know is that the jazz datebook service is free. Yes, FREE!! If you want to promote your band, all you have to do is go to kcsm.org/datebook and use the simple submission form. Your event details will be listed online, even with a photo or graphic if you prefer. A quick note on photos that can be submitted; we only accept a certain resolution and pixel amount, but if you don’t have the know-how to change or crop your image, just forward it to me by email and I will deal with it for you. That’s what I do, I’m here to help anyway I can!
Online and On-air
Another thing many don’t realize is that it will get read out on air once it is in our online datebook. That too, is absolutely free. The event is read out 3 times a day, 8am, 1pm and 5pm Mon-Fri and on Sat and Sun, it’s read out 10am and 3pm. If that isn’t a good enough reason to submit an event online, then I don’t know what is!
Where we are going from here?
So what direction is the datebook going to go from here? Well, we are looking to expand the Jazz Datebook in different areas. There is talk of an east coast Jazz Datebook in the pipeline… You heard it here first!
Lesser news is that the number of venues in our database has grown to 930 strong. A victim of our own success! The result is a long drop down list on the submission page is that it is not really user friendly. So I am looking to group the venues into either city locations or bay area locations (east bay, south bay, San Francisco etc.,) but I believe the latter may not be a good choice. This is all for the benefit and ease of use for web users so let me know what would work for you.
We are always looking to promote the radio station without giving it an ‘infomercial’ feel. There is no need to have a buy one get one free approach. The exposure of the Jazz Datebook for me should include special offers for you the submitter and useful tips on how to promote yourself in a professional manner. How about pictures of your band or venue! Or even an artist bio?
Please leave your questions, comments or suggestions by using the form at the bottom of this post. If you need to discuss more ways of advertising yourselves, please send an email to jazzdatebook@kcsm.net.
My name is Robert Holt, and I work here at KCSM helping to promote local artists in our “Jazz Datebook”. This post is directed primarily at artists and venues, informing you what our Datebook is and how you can promote your events on our datebook and hopefully answering some of the questions you might have.
It’s Free!
What many don’t know is that the jazz datebook service is free. Yes, FREE!! If you want to promote your band, all you have to do is go to kcsm.org/datebook and use the simple submission form. Your event details will be listed online, even with a photo or graphic if you prefer. A quick note on photos that can be submitted; we only accept a certain resolution and pixel amount, but if you don’t have the know-how to change or crop your image, just forward it to me by email and I will deal with it for you. That’s what I do, I’m here to help anyway I can!
Online and On-air
Another thing many don’t realize is that it will get read out on air once it is in our online datebook. That too, is absolutely free. The event is read out 3 times a day, 8am, 1pm and 5pm Mon-Fri and on Sat and Sun, it’s read out 10am and 3pm. If that isn’t a good enough reason to submit an event online, then I don’t know what is!
Where we are going from here?
So what direction is the datebook going to go from here? Well, we are looking to expand the Jazz Datebook in different areas. There is talk of an east coast Jazz Datebook in the pipeline… You heard it here first!
Lesser news is that the number of venues in our database has grown to 930 strong. A victim of our own success! The result is a long drop down list on the submission page is that it is not really user friendly. So I am looking to group the venues into either city locations or bay area locations (east bay, south bay, San Francisco etc.,) but I believe the latter may not be a good choice. This is all for the benefit and ease of use for web users so let me know what would work for you.
We are always looking to promote the radio station without giving it an ‘infomercial’ feel. There is no need to have a buy one get one free approach. The exposure of the Jazz Datebook for me should include special offers for you the submitter and useful tips on how to promote yourself in a professional manner. How about pictures of your band or venue! Or even an artist bio?
Please leave your questions, comments or suggestions by using the form at the bottom of this post. If you need to discuss more ways of advertising yourselves, please send an email to jazzdatebook@kcsm.net.
Thanks for maintaining this! It’s a great resource for helping keep the Bay Area jazz scene going.
Thanks for posting this. I’m a big fan of KCSM and love what you all bring to the community – THANK YOU. You are in a unique position (as I’m sure you know) to do even more. The datebook is one area and I’m glad you’re talking about it. Here’s my 2 cents….
1. Search should be done by venue type (restaurant, club, open air, etc…) and by location. Use a radius option as is done with some other search tools. For example, search venues within (5, 10, 20, 50 miles) of city center… This gives us the ability to choose a small area on a week night when I don’t want to drive Or a wide area on a day off…
2. You might want to have a special option for jams. Sometimes those get mixed up with the performances and it would be good to separate.
3. I believe a lot of places, i.e., restaurants, town centers, etc don’t know what they are missing by not having live music so it would be great to get some info from venues to help convince others to present live music. I’m not sure about the details but I think you could have something that targets the proprietors and business managers that helps them make a good decision about hiring artists….
Thanks for listening.
Rich
Hello Rich,
Excellent suggestions, we value your input and strive to improve. In response;
1. Search should be done by venue type (restaurant, club, open air, etc…) and by location. Use a radius option as is done with some other search tools. For example, search venues within (5, 10, 20, 50 miles) of city center… This gives us the ability to choose a small area on a week night when I don’t want to drive or a wide area on a day off…
Venue type selection is a great idea. I’ll start off by working with the web guru (Chris) getting him to add a ‘type of venue’ drop down list for when new venues are submitted to the Jazz datebook for approval. I will also look to editing the current venues listed with a description addition. The location search we are already looking into to a solution for. With regards to the radius search, that will take some thinking…I know that the current database provider doesn’t cover that functionality but there may be a way of including it. I have this ‘can do’ attitude when it comes to problems with limitations; I always want to know ‘why can’t it be done?’
2. You might want to have a special option for jams. Sometimes those get mixed up with the performances and it would be good to separate.
Again, I think that we can edit the submission form to ask that question in the form of a tick box/drop-down list. It’s fairly easy to do and won’t take long.
3. I believe a lot of places, i.e., restaurants; town centers, etc don’t know what they are missing by not having live music so it would be great to get some info from venues to help convince others to present live music. I’m not sure about the details but I think you could have something that targets the proprietors and business managers that helps them make a good decision about hiring artists….
We are gathering speed with our e-marketing program. Mostly thanks to Chris helping all to realize that the internet is the future and snail mail etc. is slowly fading away. Who isn’t connected to the internet these days? We have geared towards e-newsletters, email auto replies, Facebook, Twitter etc. etc. to promote and spread the word about Jazz. The most important thing to me here at KCSM as the administrator of the Jazz datebook is rich, interesting information. Not loosely directed babble that can be conceived as spam. I think that our listeners want editorials, opinions and interactive information.
Again Rich, thank you for putting forward your ideas, we listen and act. I will be mentioning these items in the upcoming weekly meeting and working closely with the web designer to implement.