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ted kurland

The Marketing Dance: Doing The Jerk part Two

David Greenberg shares monthly tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

Last week we dissected the wrong way to get anyone to be interested about you and your stuff on social networks. Like those cheap commercials on Late Night TeeVee with the announcer yelling at you…wait, there’s more.

Let’s drop on over to the message boards of LinkedIn. This could be a great place for real professionals to discuss real life situations amongst themselves or rearrange the brain cells of the newbies so they get the complex issues. Instead, there’s the bands with the demos who want to be signed. There’s the wedding videographers who want to do music videos. Which is too bad, this kind of hanky panky, just demeans the site, and the members, and drops it, and them, down a notch from being Professional.

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The Marketing Dance: Doing The Jerk

David Greenberg shares monthly tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

Selling me crap in an email is justified, because I can label you junk and, hopefully depending on the reliability of my MacMail, never see you again. On TeeVee, that’s a little different as I revel in a good advertisement, having been in that world for a bit back in the ’80s where I was even tapped to look at, and judge, animated commercials for the Cleos. But sell me stuff on Facebook and LinkedIn, man, that’s like tossing a leaflet at my front door and having it end up on my lawn. I then have to throw it out. Is that anyway to get me to buy your stuff? I don’t think you’ll find that in any Dale Carnegie course.

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Marketing 2OH!2: Who Are You? Who, who, who, who?

David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

Yes, as Roger Daltry fades out in the background, we’re going to get on down to writing up your Bio. Now all of you non-artists out there, don’t start texting or chewing your gum louder, or figuring out what you’re going to do this weekend. This is for you as well. When you get out and start interviewing, a concise bio will be a very good tool to have in your back-pocket. So take what you can from this, though we are focusing on an Artist Bio to be sent out to the media, promoters, slapped onto CD Baby to nudge your sales up, and onward. If you are not an artist, take notes and use this to craft your own through-line for interviews — the story you are going to tell to those on the other side of the employment equation.

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Burn After Reading: Tips For Interviews, Take 2

David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

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When there are two or more people up for the job you want / need / desire, or the internship is with a highly prestigious place of work, like WME or UMG and they only take the “toppermost of the poppermost,” you need to do everything you can to make sure you are the person they hire, right?

That includes reading last weeks bloggette and taking most of it to heart. Especially the part about FZ, because you never know when you will meet one of us greying statesmen / stateswomen of the business who have a fondness for all things Zappa. Or you get hit with it as a pop reference in pop culture, like the kid in “Valentine’s Day” who uses FZ as a touchstone for being cool. Anyway, you need more music history in your back pocket, not less, if you want to succeed in making great music, or making your mark in this crazy business of entertainment.

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Talking To Strangers

David Greenberg shares tips from his experience as Director of Marketing for Ted Kurland Associates, a boutique booking and management agency where Berklee interns gain insight into a successful career in music and business.

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As a kid, I had always wanted to sell enough stuff to absolute strangers in order to get those amazing prizes as advertised lavishly in comic books. You know, sell an inordinate amount of Peony seeds, or magazine subscriptions, or wrapping paper, and obtain a shiny new Schwinn Stingray Bike with a banana seat. Unfortunately for both the seed company and my parents, I couldn’t walk up to strangers and sell them junk they didn’t need, even when I was desperate to have that very thing that would make me cooler than my younger brother. I had the dream but not the wherewithal, so I needed my folks to spend real money in order to get the bike.

I’m not a great salesman for even my own creativity. It feels weird to me to proudly show off my wares, my talents, my ability to do just about anything — or at my ability to at least figure out how to do anything. I can write about that here, but one-on-one with someone gets me all goosebumply and my mind trips on the order of the pre-scripted-in-my-mind presentation. I was able to convince Arish Fyzee of Berkshire Motion Pictures to hire me as the Purchasing Agent for the most expensive film I ever worked on, Back To The Future, The Ride, that ran about 10 million dollars a minute and was chock-full of special effects, stop motion animation, and the like produced out of a studio BMP built in a mill in Housatonic, MA.

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