WanderingSalsero

Like a virus that all the 'healthy' people are afraid to talk about

I still find it hard to believe that nobody seems to have gotten very enthusiastic about Kizomba in the US yet (except for those 'cool' people up in Seattle :-).   I still think it's going to be the next 'big thing' and this exerpt from a poster over on my other site, www.kizombadancer.com is indicative of what we can expect. 

It's like the Salsa-powers that be just don't want to consider there might be another dance to take their customers away.  It's like a killer virus that nobody wants to talk about. 

Bachata and Jorge Elizando went through the same thing.  Very few people in his 'local' market would give him a chance so ......he took his talents on the road.  And today he's built quiet an empire and is having a helluva good time.

I'm telling ya'!  Somebody could do the same thing with Kizomba in the US right now.  Whoever gets into this market in the US and establishes themselves as teachers and/or performers....they're gonna do very, very well.

Kizomba in New Zealand I've been dancing Salsa for years, and just before I left the UK some friends from the Salsa scene were starting to get into Kizomba. It seemed to be replacing the Salsa and... that would be a regular of any salsa night: Salsa and Merengue, Salsa and Bachata, etc etc. So, in the interest of keeping up to date with the latest Dance obsession I'm on a bit of a mission to learn Kizomba!! Anyone have any tips/starters? Where do you get the music from?

What could a Social Media/Public Relations Manager do for you?

Image via CrunchBase

I've been trying to crystallize the answer to that question in my mind lately.  It's of concern to me first of all ...'just because' I'm a naturally curious kind of guy.  But secondly, because I'm kinda getting 'ants in my pants' to get outta the English teaching business and start using some of the skills I've developed (some more fully than others) since I've been over here in Korea.

As I've said several time before, I because aware several months ago about this field called 'social media management'.  As you'll recall, "social media" refers simply to user generated content shared with other....e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkeIn, Digg, Posterous, et.al.

I read that more and more companies, from big to small, are spending money and lots of it on social media.  It's spent in a variety of ways that are sometimes pretty simple and other times very sophisticated.  But what I wanted to know was, "What exactly do these 'Social Media Managers' do?"

Well, how 'bout things like these?

• Set up any important social media platforms you don't have yet...e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn and possible others.
• Clean up social media sites that you have which might be perhaps kinda neglected and junky by now.
• Help you with growing your follower list through selective targeting and inviting...and maintaining those relation ships through constant communication....e.g. 2 status posts/tweets a day on each of your major platforms.
• Help with reputation management....e.g. monitor the 'net' to immediately catch anytime somebody says something good or bad about you/your company/your brand.  And respond accordingly.
• Function as a first-line of customer service(especially valuable if you have actuall products to sell)
• Function as your eye on the market...e.g. monitor your industry and keep you advised of any new developments you need to be aware of.
• Function as the publics eye on you.....e.g. as you become better know, people are curious about what you're doing.  You might not be comfortable with the task of telling people what you're doing......you might be reluctant to toot your own horn.  So let somebody do it's who's presumably better at it that you are.
• As you get more successful and your goals get larger, you can use your social media/PR manager to actually generate more extensive 'content' for you....blog post, reports,  make appointments, etc.

Undoubtedly there's other things that go on too but these things listed above should serve to illustrate that there's more to it than maybe you realized.

So let's go to the dance business that I know a little bit about because I've been a serious 'social dancer' for a long time. 

There's no doubt that the dance business is just as competitive as anything else.  There's still a lot of money to be made.  But I don't see much, if any, high powered 'social media' in it. 

What I do see is inward oriented....i.e. to the people who already dance.  They're 'preaching to the choir.  In my opinion, very few of the major players in it think as big as they could and use social media to expand their market.

Should you be thinking bigger?

Well, I don't know for sure.  But ask yourself this question:  "Is there anybody else out there who doesn't know how to dance but would probably like to learn?"

Related articles

• Why a Social Media policy is imperative for any company (globalthoughtz.com)
• What Companies Want in a Social Media Intern (mashable.com)
• Social Media Kiosks - The Public Twitter Booth Lets the Smartphone-Free Tweet On the Go (GALLERY) (trendhunter.com)
• How Executives Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] (penn-olson.com)
• Top five social media destinations (gadling.com)
• How to Integrate Social Media With Traditional Media (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• Professionalism and Social Media (e1evation.com)
• What do Social Media Managers do? Part 1 (econsultancy.com)
• Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism (mashable.com)
• Is Facebook Suffocating the Rest of Social Media? (e1evation.com)
• Three ways to use social media for cheap travel (gadling.com)
• Social Media Programs: The Sweet Spot Between Strategic Planning and Tactical Implementation (gauravonomics.com)
• Why Media Agencies Can 'Do Social Media' (adrants.com)
• Communications, Social Media Marketing and PR Manager for AppCircus (m-trends.org)

In Seoul on Aprl 24th? Attend the free Kizomba class!

If you're a dancer and you're anywhere near Seoul, S.Korea, from 1:30-3:00 pm., on Saturday, April 24, 2010, you're invited to the free (yes......FREE!) Beginner Level Kizomba Class being conducted by Art Williams (that would be....... me :-) at beautiful Candela Dance Studio, in the Yangjae area of Seoul.

How do you keep up with all your 'social' media?

I've been looking at some stuff tonight on all the tools that are becoming available to help manage the multitudes of social sites that many people are on today.  There's quiet a selection.  I'm speaking of sites like Grouply and Friendfeed (I'd put the URLs in there but I can't seem to get them right and my brain isn't functioning too well because it 5 a.m.).  But there's several others too.

Watch for some more post's I'm going to be doing about it soon.  I'm not sure that deciding which one to use is a decision a person should make too quickly but I know for sure that once you find the 'social media aggregator' that suits your style, it oughta save you a lot of time and make you a lot more productive.

Also another very interesting thing I just discovered is that the quality of the transmission seems to be very good for sites like Ustream and Livestream.

Just tonight I was getting ready to shift my www.kizombadancer.com site over to Grouply but I saw there is a controversy about the privacy policy of Grouply.  So I don't think I'm going to do it.  But I still need another 'community' platform alternative for KizombaDancer.com

I like www.screenr.com

I'm glad that not many people read my blog because if everybody did then I know that the servers at www.screenr.com would be instantly overloaded and I wouldn't be able to use the service.  Yeah.......I think Screenr is that cool.

Who wouldn't like it?

• 5 minute audio/video screen captures
• Adjustable screen resizing
• Automatic integration to Twitter
• One-click upload to YouTube
• Embeddable URLs and HTML code
• .....and totally free!

New Item on Horizontal Navigation Menu...."Kizomba Dancer"

Another change in the blog's navigation today....I took my Ning.com site on Kizomba dancing (www.kizombadancer.com) and added it up on the horizontal navigation menu.  I realize that most of the people who read WanderingSalsero aren't Kizomba dancers.....not now anyway.  But I think that could change in the future.  So....lemme know if you have any opinions on this change or recent changes.

And IF you're at all interested in Kizomba, please register as a member over on www.kizombadancer.com .  We've got some very knowledgable kizomba dancers and prominent instructors over there.  For linking purposes, I'l also going to try to put a link over there to this blog.  Like......a "reciprocal" thing.

Does innovation always win?

I just read an editorial discussing the big winners and surprise losers at the Oscars.  The biggest surprise apparently was that Avatar didn't win more than it did in spite of how profitable it's been for the studio and how innovative it was technically.

I'm thinking that there's some similarity in the dance world.  It's been a while since I've been to a congress but I do remember dance groups, performing couples and solos who were very innovative in what they did yet they lost to more traditional routines from by other entrants.

Strange, isn't it?

But I saw something else recently that relates to this phenomenon. 

It was a video about leadership and it's point was that it's not the 'leader' (or the innovator) that starts a 'movement'.  It is instead the first follower.

In this video, which didn't have any sound, it was a scene of a buch of people, apparetnly at some kind of park and obviously listening to some music somewhere (off camera).  Then it focused on one lone, shirtless, goofy guy dancing to the music and looking very silly. 

This continues for about 20 seconds or so.  You can tell the surrounding crowd, although themselves pretty mellow about it, were somewhat amused but still thought the guy was nuts.

Then, from 'stage left', another guy comes up and starts dancing with him.  You know the style.....totally silly and zero actual skill involved.  Just two guys tripping the afternoon away.  Then eventually a third person joins in.  Then a whole group of people join in.

And that accelerates until eventually darn near whole park is dancing with this guy and it's no longer about 'that guy' but rather 'that movement'.

The narrator (of the video I saw) describes how the pivitol moment in this occasion was when that second person joined in.  It wasn't the first guy.  The first guy was a 'nut job' until somebody else, the 'first follower', joined in.  That first follower changed the dynamic of the whole scene.

I think dance can be like that.  It's just my opinion of course but I think Jorge Elizando could be an example.   When Jorge first started out, my perception anyway was that nobody gave him very much support or respect.  And for that matter, bachata itself was sorta the 'scruffy little salsa step-child' of the dance business.  The 'why's' of the matter are a separate topic.

But the point is......Jorge had strong convictions.  He didn't mind the lack of support.  He didn't mind that bachata wasn't regarded as 'prime time'.  He kept dancing. 

Primarily because he 'kept on keeping on' Jorge slowly but surely built up the tsunami that bachata has become.  Whereas before having a bachata class wasn't a class that had very high expectations, nowadays dancers expect a lot more content and a lot more 'wow'  when they attend a bachata class.  And nowadays people are eagerly trying to capitalize on the 'bachata rush' that was, in my humble opinion, pioneered by Jorge Elizando. 

I'm not saying that there weren't people who were doing a good job in other parts of the country or the world.  There's 3 that I can think of right now.  All I'm saying is that Jorge was the first to push the tradional concept of bachata out of it's old skin into the new,  much more exotic and flexible dance it's become now.

Jorge has been proactive and busy and focused enough to basically not have time to be bothered especially by who is or is not supporting his 'bachata fusion' concept.  But I suspect that in the cosmic scheme of things he's not hurt anybody's existing dance business but has rather made it even more lucrative. 

If anything, I think Jorge's efforts somewhat paved the way for the current interest in 'bachata Dominicana'. 

It's forces of change such as Avatar and 'Bachata Fusion' that although they sometimes don't initially win the 'Academy Awards', are suquently recognized as the major turning points in their industry.

I read somewhere that the Avatar guy (i.e. the director...what's his name?) is planning a sequel.  What do you suppose Jorge is up too?

Two questions come to my mind now:

(1)  Is Kizomba such a 'new' element, a game changer, in the dance game?  I think so.

(2)  Will successful dance entrepreneurs of the future make better us of "PR campaigns" (public relations)?  I think so.

P.S.  I'll post that video I referenced....if I can find it again.

Short notice...free Kizomba class in Seoul 02/27 (Saturday)

Kizomba in comparison to other dances

I did this video as a response to a dance friend if mine in Seoul named Michelle.  Michelle is a member of a salsa social group I'm part of up there.  She likes casino rueda and came to several of the casino rueda classes I did up there.  Plus she also likes Kizomba and I was able to show her what little I knew about it at the time I was living up there (near Seoul).

Michelle is also a member of my site, www.kizombadancer.com but I hadn't seen or talked to her for several months because I'd actually forgotten my ID and PW.  Well, I recently remembered my ID and PW so I sent everybody a group message to let'em know I was still alive and still interested in Kizomba.

Thus......the motivation for this video.  The reason I'm putting it here is because I thought what I had to tell her might be of interest to anybody else interested in Kizomba.  Here's the video:

The gist of my thoughts are that, as I get further into studying Kizomba, I'm more and more getting the feeling that lots of what's in Kizomba can be integrated into Bachata.  

I haven't talked to him lately but I wouldn't be surprised if Jorge Elizando isn't working on a DVD product right now called something like........ Bachazomba or something like that.

Why might he want to do that?

Easy.....

As Jorge himself pointed out to me in a previous conversation, there simply isn't any kizomba music in the US right now.  Nor are the clubs familiar with it at all.  So that means it would be hard (although not impossible) to birth a totally new kizomba culture in the US market.  

But there is another way to get kizomba into the 'body social' of American dance.

The answer is to take certain attractive elements of Kizomba and integrate them into a dance that is well accepted...i.e. bachata.  Isn't that the exact thing that Jorge did with tango and his 'bachata-tango'?

It's always been my belief that it's a lot easier than most dancers realize or even think about to integrate elements of one dance into another.  Jorge did it and he, or anybody else, could do it again.

Online Meet 'n Greet for Nelson Campos in 45 minutes!

TONIGHT!

You're invited to an online Meet 'n Greet for Nelson Campos in just a few minutes.  It'll be on the www.tokbox.com platform.  It's totally free.  It will not be record (because we can't....but we'd like to :-).

Actually, you know I've been trying to perfect the use of these kinds of tools.  I've been satisfied with TokBox so far except for the fact that it doesn't record.  So.......this'll be just for fun.

I'm going to put this post up here now....to give you a heads up.  And then in about 30 minutes I'm going to open up the TokBox session and I'll have the actual URL you need to click on to get into it.  

Also, if you want to try to get ahead of the curve, you can go to www.tokbox.com and open your own free account and look for me as a 'friend'.  I don't know how that works but you can probably figure it out.  My ID there is the same as most places I use.... 'wanderingsalsero'.

Or this eventing....depending on where you are :-)

Here it is:

http://www.tokbox.com/conf/hyo6nw4yzyq6izmx