question I got: someone suggested I make a strong show reel, which got me exited thinking about it. However, listening to you about understanding the audience, who is my target audience? Should that be addressed first before I start creating a new show reel? Love to hear your thoughts.

answer:
yes! 100%

you don’t need all the promo materials that other performers have. you only need the ones that bridge the gap enough for people to hire you

for instance when I was making websites for performers, I didn’t even need my own website to promote my business. The performers already knew me and were already friends with me on facebook mostly.

All i had to do to bridge the gap was communicate through facebook posts ..1?? i am making websites 2?? i am more responsible than you might remember me being 3?? i am successful

those were the three things they didn’t know about me. Then, when they contacted me, they might ask for more information, like “could you send me some examples of your sites” and i could send them examples that were pertinent exactly to the kind of site they need

just a list of links, not a full portfolio or anything.

I knew who my potential clients were, so i knew what the gap was, then i could do the work to bridge the gap most effectively without doing some crazy youtube channel building or renting a billboard, or making a promo video

1. Imagine a Tide with bleach commercial made for a single mom with weak arms… really do it. imagine it.
2. now, imagine a Tide with bleach commercial for a hospital purchaser who buys in bulk

You don’t have time to make promo videos for every person. and if you show the weak arm video to the bulk purchaser, they will think this detergent is not for me. If you show the bulk commercial to the mother, she’ll think this is not for me. if you make a general commercial about the detergent just getting things clean, neither person will buy.

if you call the mother and ask her what she’s dealing with, it will save you from having to make a commercial at all.

start with the strategy, then work on the tactics for that strategy.

Think about their “pain points” what’s going to cost them time, money, and headaches. Give them three options (three isn’t a rule). Give them the best advice we can think of. One option might be free / cheap and partially effective, one option might be easy and effective, and one might be custom and achieve every dream.

Don’t propose the options if you don’t think they’re totally awesome for the client and well worth their money (even considering that they might not have budgeted for it). For example, someone comes to me for a taco for $1.50 i find out they’ve been working all day and are really hungry and feeling kinda dragged down by the day, I tell them they can get the taco for $1.50 and i’m glad to sell it to them. I don’t think they’ll fill up on 1 taco, so i can do 4 tacos for $4. They might want something that’s going to fill them up and also something they’ve never tried before, so i can give them something that will make their day feel special and energized : snake tacos for $6.

Each price is not about a huge payday, it’s about what’s the minimum we can ask so everyone walks away giggling. The only reason off the top of my head why the price would go above your lowest feeling of satisfaction is when the client will not value what we’re doing in that price range (like if they’re used to hiring $20k speakers and we would normally be at $10k) this is not just them paying arbitrarily, but they may have more value that they’re getting out of us than we might appreciate at the moment.

I was dating someone and i was doing all kinds of stuff for her that i thought was sweet, but didn’t really seem to affect her. One day, for some reason, I told her how hard it was to get her flowers because i went to 4 different stores to get the right ones ( there was no event, i just wanted to get her flowers that day). When she saw the flowers, she said thank you, but when I told her the story of what i did to get them, she was over-joyed. 

She didn’t really care about flowers. The work i was putting in to getting her flowers and doing these other things were not were not apparent to her, and the resulting stuff (flowers, finding her favorite cereal, etc.) was not super important to her. I could do less and still bring her the same joy or maybe even more joy if i did it in a different way.

I want you to think of value engineering. This is when someone’s making a 100,000 toy cars and they ask…

1. can we save 1¢ per car if we don’t paint words on the tires?
2. would this change nothing for the customer level of satisfaction?

The second question is crucial. Sometimes we could even sacrifice a tiny bit of satisfaction for the sake of saving ourselves from a lot of time, money, or headaches.

If we’re already over-delivering massively (which is usually the case with the people reading this), maybe we can cut back a little and focus on the stuff that’s most crucial to our people. If I’m running a 5 person show, at 110% audience satisfaction, could I do a 4 person show and still get 100% satisfaction?

The question often comes up “I want to shoot footage of my show. What camera do I get?”

The short answer is “get a pro to shoot it for you.” Someone who’s good with a camera will get a few great, useful minutes from the show. Someone who’s an expert at shooting live performers will capture the whole event for you.

comparing cameras and goals

Most people are thinking they’ll either buy a DSLR, a go pro, or a compact camera like the ZV1.

Settings are difficult on all cameras because I don’t know any camera that had automatic settings that are good for stage lighting. Stage lighting has very harsh contrast.

I recently tried to record a friend’s show passively and for fun on my ZV1 and he was pretty washed out until I realized I needed to turn off all the auto settings and adjust things carefully.

If you set all the settings at tech rehearsal, with someone else’s help, you can make things good. It’s possible. The lighting may change at showtime

Image size is also an issue. Placing the camera at the back of the room will often get you a shot that is mostly stage. The subject will be small. These kinda shots are not usually useful for promo.

You can shoot in 4k and crop the image to make it 2x as large for HD. I don’t know for sure: these cameras may overheat filming longer durations in some situations at 4k

If you can change the lens on a DLSR to a 200mm you could shoot from the back of the room. You’ll be carrying a camera body and lens to every show.

The Sony rx100 vi has a long lense and is compact like the zv1, but can only shoot for 29min in HD

If you’re shooting for promo, I would get something small and easy like a GoPro or an iphone, put it close to stage at an interesting angle with the hopes of getting 5 seconds of usable footage

If you’re shooting for your records, same a little further from stage.

I don’t use my camera for long recordings.

When I was a virgin christian, people would try to hook me up all the time with other virgin christians. It was specific – especially in the atheist circles where I hung out. My buddies that were trying to get laid were bummed about it because I wasn’t going to do the good stuff with any of these girls if I met them. My buddies were not getting voluntary matchmakers like I was.

Friends were not thinking “I need to introduce Scot to every girl I know.” They weren’t even thinking “I want to find someone for Scot.” They were thinking “oh! I know another person that’s a virgin christian”

We can get more specific

If we can work with one person in a powerful way and sustain that way, imagine the impact we can have on that person! Usually, we need more than one.

Entertainers are often afraid of pigeonholing themselves to a really specific type of client. We usually don’t need to be. We usually have the opposite problem.

If we can plan to serve one kind of client, we can get really really good at that, then we can expand from there. A company needs to profit first, then grow. A creator needs to express first, then grow. A craftsperson (which is what entertainers are) needs to serve first, then grow.

When we go too broad, we …

• have trouble serving our dream clients
• don’t have enough bandwidth for our dream clients
• don’t feel fulfilled
• have a lot of work to do marketing ourselves
• don’t know how to create the next thing

It leads to vetted connection

I went on a few blind dates with virgin christians. I didn’t really care about dating very much at the time, so I didn’t follow through much… and, as I said, I preferred to hang with atheists at the time… just like Jesus did. I was willing to try the dates (and I think the girls were willing) because I thought “This person is specific, they might be right for me.”

What if every person we meet has only one lead for us? What if every lead we had was very close to right for us? There are 8 billion people in the world. Would that be enough, or do we still need to be right for everyone?

Email lists are my favorite way to gather my audience. Scot Nery’s Boobietrap sold out most of the tickets last year just through the initial announcements. When it was running weekly, 43% of the audience was repeat visitors due to the email list.

With Boobietrap, we sent emails immediately after the show with a complete playbill so they could see what they saw. We have easy unsubscribe options. Our emails SERVE people instead of asking them for things. You can search my blog for more details about how I think about newsletters and emails

I am aggressive with gathering the right email addresses for my lists. I don’t need the lists to be huge. I need them to be full of the people that I think I can serve with the list. My aspiration would be to stay in touch with, and connect with every person who likes something that I do.

When I was building my list as a solo performer, every time I did a performance where it would be appropriate, I walked around with a sheet of paper on a clipboard and asked each audience member if they’d sign up for my email list.

When I got the signup, i’d read it back to them because I could usually only read 70% of them.

This technique gave them social pressure to sign up (me looking in their eyes), and got consent, and kinda said “I’ll read at least the first email you send me”

We want to make the experience of signing up easy and fun…

• Don’t ask if we’re not going to give them something
• Don’t make it hard to signup
• Don’t ask for too much info at once
• Don’t make busy work (if they gave their email somewhere else, harvest that instead of asking them to write it out or type it again)

When I ran Slapcon, I proposed the idea of a slapstick convention on Facebook and I wanted to gauge interest and have a way to follow up. Instead of having a signup form, I just asked people to email me. When they emailed me; it was easy for them, casual, and I got their email address. Was a tiny bit more labor for me moving their addresses over to my list and responding to emails, but worth it. Success for a small list and a fun event.

Boobietrap’s current capture on the website is a signup form. We offer people something for signing up – find out when tickets go on sale.

If these options aren’t available and addresses need to be captured at a live event, I have seen venues use comment cards. I would recommend adding the email address as a required element for a promised reward. EG: “Give us a comment and receive a free ticket to a future show. Email address where we should send the free ticket __________” I’d also follow up the positive comments with a message asking them if they would mind making an online review to share with the world – links to yelp and stuff.

An email or text action could also be included in the event. eg: “We have a photoshop expert coming out here on stage in a few minutes. Email us a photo and she’ll retouch it on screen”. after the event give them an offer of adding them to the email list (because it will serve them)

My small town school teachers said over and over again I had lots of potential, but I needed to do my work. This made me feel like a total nothing. 

After traveling the world and meeting the best creators in the world, I see that I wasn’t limiting my potential. The teachers were. 

When I was a class clown, or creating games on my calculator to share, or learning magic tricks, I was trying to engage other kids. I loved learning. I wanted my classmates  to wake up and love it too. 

All the crazy things I do performing, creating, fathering are about leaving no potential wasted. 

Hey teachers, I didn’t have to work harder. I was doing my work, it’s just that I wasn’t doing your work. I had already started my career.

Potential is not assessable

We can’t see what the future holds. We can’t tell what’s next. We can’t correctly evaluate what’s in a person or a group of people. When we start to estimate potential, we’re pretty wrong.

Potential is myopic

Just like my teachers, when we look at potential, we’re looking at it thru a limited view. We’re determining what’s possible in a certain small goal (eg: what will get this kid into a local college?). This eliminates possibility, it undermines available resources, and it most likely has too low of a bar.

When people say “You can be anything you want to be.” It’s trying to break from the idea that we have limited potential, but it’s still based on the idea of potential. It’s a different perspective on potential – one that we don’t really believe anyhow.

Now is the alternative

Let’s let the whole idea of potential go. When we’re trying to activate a group of people, here’s what we need to do…

1. Evaluate our current situation
2. Agree on a goal
3. Check our resources (even just a few of them)
4. Make a plan
5. Take action

In the case of my teachers, they could have…

1. looked at my grades. asked me why i wasn’t getting better grades and why I was getting in mischief. asked me how i was spending most of my time.
2. talked to me about what I wanted to become and what I liked about life. Come up with a goal / mission for me – even in the short term (the actual goal was not to get good grades, but to make me successful in life)
3. Look at my strengths and assets
4. make a plan
5. give me next steps for that plan

This would have taken maybe 30 minutes and would have saved them from having to meet with my parents or deal with my constant disruptions. I’m sure handing out detentions wasn’t easy for them either.

Dealing with a group

When we have an hour with a group of people, we have to take care of those 5 things quickly. Mostly, we gotta get everyone on the same page and give them a simple directive. It can be as easy as this…

“We had an incredible year and one of our strengths has been enthusiasm and connecting to each other(1). If we can build on this, we can experience even more growth… what do you think(2)? We’re all here together(3) and we can celebrate who we are to refill us with fuel for more enthusiasm (4)… so I want to hear you cheer your socks off(5)! “

I listen for a buzz. We want to create an environment and a setup before an event so that people are buzzing. When it’s over, we want that same buzz or more.

The good buzz sounds like people talking to each other excitedly. They will be talking a little bit loud to be heard over those around them. Laughter. Dynamic range in their voice tones and volume.

If we don’t have this, we’ve failed. I’ve been to some events where the thing ends in applause, then silence as people shuffle out of the theater with smiles on. This is the worst! This is what happens when the energy and motivation has been sucked out of the audience. Someone who’s not looking for the buzz might think this was successful.

Applause, smiles, and even compliments are fools’ gold. They could be signs of a good moment, or they could be signs that the audience feels they need to perform for the creators.

We want to strive to open folks up to the energy within them. Power them up and set them free. Let them feel life!

We might feel like frauds. We might feel like we’re not qualified to do our job — whatever that is. We might feel like we have nothing to offer

… until we see how bad the situation is.

When I go to an event to perform, I might think I won’t be that great for a certain group. Then, I see someone introducing me, I see how bored the audience is, I see how poorly something is planned. Suddenly, I know exactly what my purpose is. I know how to fix it.

When I talk to a potential client and I feel nervous that they might not hire me, sometimes they’re just not right for me, but sometimes it’s really obvious to me. Sometimes I think, this person’s really stuck and it’s easy for me to get them out.

I can usually find the problem, and if I have the solution, I’m grateful that I’m there to help.

Our value is invisible to us, so we gotta stay conscious of that fact. And sometimes we can gain confidence at the last minute by examining the situation and looking for ways that the people we’re there for have got it bad.

This is about how I’m raising my kid.

I’m not really into celebrating history, so let’s just start where we are now and treat Thanksgiving as a meaningless holiday for the purpose of mega-gratitude! This is a holiday for everyone in the world. Let’s be grateful.

People have told me that you can’t be grateful and fearful at the same time. Let’s apply this to crowds of people. Let’s embolden groups to take action using gratitude.

1. remind folks of goodness

My first thinking of how to communicate something to people is always just say it bluntly. We can say things like…

• “We lucked out with a beautiful day today!”
• “Can you believe who you’re here with!?”
• “Look at what we accomplished in the past year!”

2. get them to remind themselves

Hearing questions engages our brains more than hearing statements. We feel compelled to solve a problem and think more deeply about the topic.

• “Are you good at your job?”
• “What’s your home like compared to this picture of a shack?”
• “Are you dying in a hospital? Raise your hand if you are.”

3. get them to imagine and reframe

When I walk around in Hollywood, it really helps me to get grounded. I see people from all walks of life. It reminds me of who I am and what my life is. I have chosen this life and I love it. When we tell a story, it can help our people walk in other shoes and imagine. It can help them be more grateful.

When we want to energize a crowd – move them to move themselves – we need to stir their own inner energy… Or maybe distract them from their own tiredness.

Animals Need Calories

We need to eat enough, and be able to process the food that we eat to have usable energy in our bodies. Usually, we do. Usually we’re good on calories.

Humans Need Game

Our mindsets can make us feel extra tired. Our mindsets help us decide where to put our energy, or make us decide that it’s a time for rest.

If our dear group of people is in rest mode (or anything less than motivated), it’s time to take action. They need the 3 parts of gamifying.

1. The right amount of challenge
2. A feeling of control
3. A worthwhile goal

If we can make a group activity a game in this sense, we can tap into amazing group energy.