Summer Plans

Day two and I feel like we’re getting into the swing of things. It’s really cold in here! But now I know.

Ron asked the PR interns to think about ways to reach out to bands. I’ve looked at so many websites over the past two days. I knew before about the vastness of the Internet but stayed in a comfort zone on my ten or so most frequently visited websites. It’s easy to look up specific things on the Internet but I think that our searches are progressively more superficial; we find out a few details and don’t bother to look further than the first page of results, if we even look past the Wikipedia article. We don’t care that more information exists. The Internet is so scattered, it seems like it’s starting to negate its own efficiency. When we have even five different options for major social media sites and five databases and five retail supersites and endless spam websites, we don’t have the time or the attention span to look everywhere. There are so many websites with varying levels of data and accuracy that it takes so long just to compile a thorough understanding of one thing. Looking for leads is involved, not because Massachusetts is lacking in businesses, but because there are so many and their information is all over the place. Likewise, there’s no one “band website” where all local bands have an account and it’s simple to review and communicate with the groups in one region. Even if someone did create a site with that as its intended purpose, it would then face the same problem we do now-how do you find the bands and then get them to join?

That’s not to say that scattered isn’t the general nature of information, just that the Internet is usually regarded as an advanced source of information while it really still has a long way to go. Finding the bands won’t be as easy as scrolling through a single list on a website, but we can track down a lot of them if we put in the effort. Each band will be earned with a little office sweat. We’ve already begun to talk about our strategy for communicating with and appealing to these bands, which I think is a great sign for the future. It’s knowing what we want for the future on a smaller scale-this summer instead of our whole life (although, as Ron pointed out, we need to start thinking about the latter as well). 

Hanna Lane