TPD Presents Seattle Prom 2010

Benefiting the Global Music Project

Hosted by LushLife

It’s finally here, after years of attempting to produce a legitimate formal event, Seattle’s top event production companies bring you Seattle Prom, the first event of it’s kind in the NW.  This once a year occurrence will feature the following:

• A nominated group of local celebrities vying for King & Queen
• A nominated group of your peers vying for 6 spots in their court
• Legendary Producer & DJ, DJ Solarz from the RockIt Scientists
• Live music provided by one of Seattle’s top retro cover bands
• Aerial Acrobats
• Discounts on Tuxedo’s from Men’s Warehouse
• Discounts at local hair salons
• Gift Bags from local businesses
• Prom Pictures
• A Red Carpet entrance

This is prom just like you remember it, with an endless amount of excitement and flair on top, oh, and this time, you don’t need to sneak in your own alcohol.  Remember, this is a formal event, and we plan on following that format.  Not only will we have entertainment playing you the hottest music out (as usual) there will also be a few slow jams.

Maybe….this is the most common responses when it comes to people committing to anything, from events to date nights, this answer plagues calendars everywhere.  I’ve decided to blog about this, because i am guitly of taking it even further, i am slowly becoming a flake full of false promises, sometimes I flake on purpose, other times on accident.  Rest assured I will be taking a lot of my own advice.  On a side note, seeing as most of my blogs are nightlife centric, i’ll try to keep the rest of this relative to nightlife, but, feel free to extrapolate my points as you see fit.

One of the first things you learn as a promoter is that “maybe” normally means “no”.  I’m not sure why it’s so hard to say no, especially to a promoter, but, apparently it is.  I feel like the “maybe or false yes” is the easy way out for the time being, giving no thought to the bigger picture. Imagine spending 20hrs asking people to come to your event, imagine having a pretty good response, 150 yes, 150 maybes and 30 no’s.  Imagine being really excited for one of your first events, only to have 50ppl show up.  Imagine losing hundreds, even thousands of dollars because you planned for a much larger group.  This kind of situation is what causes the floods of event invites and mass messages.  Promoters quickly find out how unreliable/cowardly people can be so they begin increasing their invite capacity based on their initial return (ex. if i only got 50 out of 300 then i need to invite 3000). Older, more seasoned promoters just work harder on the relationships they have with their current friends/customer base.

If I have any advice to offer, i advise everyone to be up front (i need to take this advice myself).  If you’re tired of telling someone no over and over again, then let them know you’ll be in touch when you’re at a point in your life that going out makes sense.  You have to realize that you don’t owe us anything, just because we’ve let you in free doesn’t mean that you have to come to each and every one of our events, even though we do recognize and appreciate it.  I have people that i see 4x a year, and I treat them like kings, often better than people i see 2x a month.  I do so becuase these particular people respect me and put effort into our relationship.

You start being more up front with your responses and i promise you the spam and aggressive promoting will retreat.  If I send out an event invite and get a %5 response, i’m more likely to stop sending them.  If I get a %40 response, even if most of it is false, that’s large enough for me to keep taking the chance.  The bottom line is this….if i’m not human enough to recognize that most of my friends don’t like going out 5x a week, then there is something wrong with me.  Personally, i’m just as happy when someone tells me they are staying in with their significant other as i am when they say they are coming out (even though it makes me a little less money).  The word no pushes me to create events that make friends/clientelle more comfortable, it pushes me to create events that are more desirable to attend, and, it pushes me to create new relationships that value the commodity i have.  Going out doesn’t make everyone happy, but, for some, it’s the release they need when it comes to handling a stressful daily life, we as promoters need to help those people, not annoy the ones that are at a different stage in their life.  So, unsubscribe from my email list, my text list, block my event invites, it won’t hurt my feelings, it will actually help me.

This blog will probably make very little difference in how people respond to promoters, there will probably be the exact same amount of “maybes” as there always have been.  If you do take anything from this, please cut down on the “false yess”.  Think of it this way, most of us have no problem telling someone yes and then coming up with an excuse or just plain no showing, yet, they expect their friends to be there when they have something important going on.  How would you react if we actually returned the favor by throwing fake events.  How would you feel if you were ready to show some friends a good night only to show up at an empty venue.  At this point, I may know that “maybe” normally means no, but, every time it happens, it still takes a little piece of me, it still lets me know that people really don’t respect what it is I do, don’t take me seriously, or just don’t think about consequences.  Something that may seem so miniscule to you may not be to someone else.  Just because I have 200ppl bail on me every week, doesn’t mean I don’t notice when you do it.  In closing, have a great weekend, no matter what you do.

I was a victim of an account suspension about a year ago (if not longer) this was because i was importing my TPD contacts to my PERSONAL Facebook, 1 by 1.  Luckily I had obtained this contact information legally and was within Facebook’s TOS.  They did warn me that I needed to cease adding at such a rapid pace.  Since that day (over a year ago) I have probably added under 100ppl, although I do approve nearly every request.   This experience alone makes me sympathetic to certain situations.  There are people out there with large personal friend bases that have been wrongfully terminated and I’m working to help some of these people restore their accounts.  This post is for the people who have had their accounts deleted multiple times and still don’t get it.

It seems that there has been quite an influx of people losing their Facebook accounts lately, and, I hate to say, I told you so. It’s been a number of months since I put a Facebook post up complaining about the number of people using the Facebook platform as the sole marketing tool for their small businesses. This total reliance on Facebook is pushing people to use every facet of the medium for self promotion, resulting in an over abundance of business centric status updates, completely random friend requests and massive amounts of event invites.

The reason people are constantly losing their accounts is simple.   What you are doing on Facebook is considered SPAM. Rest assured that Facebook is going to do all they can to PREVENT themselves from going the route of MySpace.  If you spend your days going through the “People you may know” section and adding everyone, you will get your account deleted.  If you go to someone’s account you know and add all of their friends, you will get your account deleted.  If you are posting 10 events a week your account will get deleted.  If you are continuously representing a business opportunity or entity through your personal Facebook, your account will get deleted.

It’s really frustrating to still see these practices.  There are so many people out there doing it the right way, so many brilliant ideas.  Take advantage of Fan Pages, take advantage of the amazing Facebook advertising system, take advantage of the talented developers out there that can really make your Facebook work FOR you.  Seeing people attack the marketing challenge in a more subtle way is so much more exciting.  Anyone can post 100’s of events, but to go through a post a relevant comment on each of those, closing with a link to your business or cause, that takes a brain.  Interjecting yourself into friendly conversations resulting in furthering your network takes some social talent….Randomly adding people all day and night…well…the lack of effort is rewarded with a lack of results….

If you hadn’t heard, and some of you probably haven’t, a number of different restaurants/nightclubs/lounges have closed in Bellevue over this past month. I didn’t really pay it any mind, until someone took a shot at TPD when commenting on a Blog Post. This ignorance has prompted me to deliver one of my most opinionated and aggressive blogs ever. So, sit back and strap in, this time, I pull no punches.

So my friend “sushisnob” (our blog poster) do you want to fill your empty head with a few legitimate reasons as to why vertigo closed. Well, here you have them.

1. Location - You are at the bottom of an apartment building (okay 2nd floor) but still, you are by absolutely nothing, learn this, unless you have a built in following that has been loyal to you for years, you have a 2yr shelf life when located out of the central clubbing district. Unless of course you have something unique to offer, which, you didn’t.

2. Design - Your club resembles a bar bell. This would be absolutely fine if the bar was located in one of the open areas and the dance floor in the other. Unfortunately your bar is in the wrong spot, it completely ruins the flow. This is something that people will put up with for a period of time, but, fighting for a drink week in a week out makes your spot a little less desirable.

3. Creativity - With such a great bar staff, the management really should have done more. Guess what, everyone advertises in or with D List/The Weekly/The Stranger/Local Radio Stations. That takes no ingenuity what so ever. Just throw money at an advertising platform and hope the people come. News FLASH, you aren’t the only show in town, you have to set yourself apart.  You got monotonous, it really sucks that such a great staff went to waste.

4. Demographic Selection - In the beginning your drew the support of the local Bellevue community, once they realized there was no special reason to go “off the reservation” your demographic became heavily European. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this demographic, except that it does not mesh with with other demo’s and, it’s not large enough to support more than 1 or 2 good nights on a weekly basis. You then moved to working with some of the more established promoters in the sound, like PURE, who were able to bring you some really spectacular events, however, the location and design of the building began to wear on their following, especially when the events went from monthly to weekly. Next up you went with the Urban crowd, initially, it was a grown up and respectful crowd from the likes of Marlon & Dru, but then, you went hood. Unfortunately, once you go hood, you don’t go back. It was all capped off by the last event that I saw heavily pushed, the Snoop Dogg after party. This just blows my mind, did the owners that took over the lease from Bill do ANY research at all, ANY !?!?! Who in their right mind would allow an event like that knowing how concerned the Bellevue police already are in regards to nightlife. Those going around bitching about the Bellevue Police need to learn who is in charge and need to not try and bring that type of event into the city, it will NEVER work.

Being a club owner myself I will be the first to tell you that losing a club isn’t always in your control, I’m learning this first hand right now, but, some things are.  The bottom line is this, you can build the Taj Mahal, with the best of the best of everything, but, if you don’t work hard at what you do, it doesn’t matter one damn bit.  Understand the market you want to go after, realize what it is that they expect when they come to an event.  Make sure that you’re dialed ACROSS the board, and know, that you are going to have to make some concessions and you’re going to have to reinvest if you want to make things work over the long haul.  It’s sad to see any place go, ugh..

So there you have it “sushisnob” the more likely reasons as to why Vertigo closed.

There’s only one place to be if you’re in town this Memorial Sunday and that’s Venom - TPD & Pak Pros bring you the swagfest of all swagfests this holiday Sunday !