GODDAMMIT!
You see?
THIS kind of shit! I am in NOTO all the time, and Im am on facebook/internet all the time.......
And as Chis Chris Schultz bemoaned last week on his page about people saying "I only heard about it AFTER the fact........I just NOW learned about this!
I love Volkswagons! I've owned a dozen or so of them. I would have peddled or walked down there just to look at the VWs and hang out. Maybe spent a few bucks on.....uh.....Well, a coffee and a burrito maybe? And just people watching.
Where am I not looking that I am missing being informed about these things?
Theres a rule in advertising and marketing: NEVER blame your customer or audience for not know whats going on. (OK, so thats a rule I made up....but its there now. My father worked in advertising, and I spent enough time hanging around his office that I DID learn a little bit. Also in my different forays into being a promoter and live event producer I picked up a few things)
Facebook is an awesome and powerful was to "promote" and "Advertise", and as such, it is way over-saturated and easy to miss things. And you get what you pay for: Its worth what you pay for it.
SO, if there IS some central (web) location for events and things in Topeka (Or just NOTO) then I am not seeing it, or what I DO see is always out of date, lacking real info or confusing.
I have one little voice (Out of dozens) in my head telling me "Well Bob, you are seeing a need, and a vacuum, and that can equal "Business opportunity".
In the past I have run and operated or published punkrock scene fanzines and websites. And part of those was always a calendar.
And the calendar was always the hardest and most tedious part of the whole thing. Even in the online versions where anyone could type in and post their own events (Thats the "DIY" nature of my old TopekaDIY websiote).
It was like pulling teeth to get people, promoters, clubs, venues, band etc to just post their events or to just send me the info and I would enter it. Contrary to what one might think, a simple calendar is time-consuming and tedius. And NOT something anyone (Much less Mr ADD/ADHD poster child ME) would want to do for very long without some sort of PAY or REWARD.
Convincing people and promoters/venues that listing their events in a calendar is for their OWN good and benefit them is surprisingly difficult.
"Let people know about my even? Well I pout up a post about it on facebook, and that has billions of people on it, what more should I need to do?"
And then trying to extract a few bucks out of them in exchange for listing their events and distributing those to the masses and drawing peoples attention to them and the calendar is another mission entirely.
Its a JOB. And its work.......and because the rewards are so low and so few I dont think people stick with doing these things for very long.
I think in Topeka people are much more likely to play "Sour Grapes" in their views and reviews of things .....partly because we keep hearing about things AFTER the fact. And then we feel like someone threw a party and WE werent invited.....so of course we have to throw our noses into the air and scoff at things (And make fun of them for being un-attended: "Look! There was no one there! It must have really sucked!")
Topekans, and humans in general have become pretty lazy, and they need their faces rubbed in things.
I have done shows where I took out news paper and radio ads, as well as flyers and posters stapled to every phone pole within 50 miles, and emailed thousands of people and posted it non-stop on every social media site in existence.....and then only had 50 people show up, and later one run into people I thought for sure would have attended only to hear them say "I never heard anything about it. Did you put up flyers?"
So am I just missing the boat somewhere? Is there some big awesome repository of information about upcoming events somewhere that I am just missing?
Yes, Volkstoberfest DOES (did) compete with news of Miley Cyrus and the Flaming Lips performing nude.....somehow I am fully aware of THAT spectacle long before it is officially booked.
http://www.wibw.com/home/headlines/Volkstober-kicks-off-Saturday-in-North-Topeka-333567691.html
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