Hi,

As many of you know I’ve decided to give a virtual gallery launch event another try this evening.  https://www.virtualgallery.com/galleries/leigh_kemp_a14490717/twelve_of_one_a_dozen_of_the_other_s13338

With that in mind one’s thoughts turn to “how do I publicise this?”. My previous efforts at launch events have, in total honesty, not met with a lot of success so this time around I’ve adopted a different approach. It’s nice to e-mail invites to contacts in the arts world, friends, the neighbour and their cat 🙂 etc. but I really don’t have that many contacts but I have sent e-mail invites to those that I have an e-mail address for. But this time I’m in a much stronger position with Twitter contacts (and indeed other social media contacts) than was the case previously including some well known fellow artists, galleries and art websites so I’m trying that way of publicising the event and it has been quite successful so far.

Then there comes the issue of automating general speculative tweets. What frequency should one send out a Tweet?. One tweet is going to disappear unnoticed in to a sea of tweets faster than tipping a water droplet in to the ocean. Too many tweets are just going to annoy folks as I know that they do me, so I’ve settled on sending out three or four a day for the days leading up to the event. Twitter is also great for re-tweets and thanks to some kindly folks re-tweeting me I’ve managed to spread the word further and faster than I could hope to do through entirely my own efforts. I also think that having a tweet character limit forces one to be succinct and avoid pretentious waffle :).

Of course it’s great if quite a few people turn up tomorrow evening as, and I can speak from previous experience, there’s little more boring and soul  destroying than sitting at a keyboard for three or so hours and chatting to oneself and hoping that someone might turn up, sort of like hosting a party, sending out invites to which no one turns up and ending up feeling like “Billy-no-mates” and sitting eating cold party food and drinking wine on one’s own 🙂

But there’s perhaps another side to this not quite so obvious, it’s not all about how many people turn up at the end of the day but also the whole act of publicising the event generates gallery views and hopefully interest in one’s work so that is an important aspect to things and every time one tries something different one learns a little more from one’s mistakes, experience that can hopefully be brought to bear next time around.

Other considerations include what time and day of the week should one set the event for?. I’ve decided that a Sunday at 6:00 GMT might work allowing for the time differences around the world, particularly in Europe and North America and I’ve tried to also bear this in mind with automated tweets.

How effective or ineffective all of this might prove to be I’ll find out tomorrow evening 🙂 If one virtual man and his virtual dog are the only visitors then I only hope that it’s a different man and his dog from last time around so that I have someone new to chat with 🙂

Kind regards