My previous posts have been mostly about the improvements to the submission review process from the artist’s perspective.  We’re making a number of improvements to the way promoters review submissions on Sonicbids as well.

Firstly, we’re giving our promoters more control over their listings.  Promoters will now have the ability to close their listing, and/or extend their notification deadline date right in their EPK Inbox.

In addition to more control, we’re also making the process of notifying artists much easier with automatic notifications.  With the Submission Tracker, promoters simply need to reach out to the artists they’re interested in working with and the rest of their submissions will take care of themselves.  This will give promoters more time to review submissions (since they won’t have to individually reach out to all of the artists they aren’t interested in working with), while still giving everyone that submits an update on time.

I know that artists who are turned down for gigs would like to get more feedback from promoters about why they weren’t interested.  Promoters using Submission Tracker still have the ability to provide personalized messages to all of their submissions, however it is not required.  We felt it was most important to first make sure that all submitting artists get an update on time, and once that is in place we can start building better tools to let promoters give personalized feedback to artists during their review process.

Earlier this week I posted a screen shot of a “Not Interested” update from the new Submission Tracker.  Since submission updates will now include review tracking, we thought it’d be a good time to give the EPK Visits Tracker a new look.  Check it out:

Next week I’ll share some of the cool stuff we’re doing for promoters to make their job of reviewing submissions a bit easier.

Hey all,

As promised in my last post, I put together a screen shot of what you’ll see when you check the status of a submission.

In addition to the new look, one change you might notice is that the date your submission was reviewed is now clearly noted.  That way you’ll be able to check your EPK Visits Tracker to see what kind of hits your EPK got on that day.  Speaking of the EPK Visits Tracker, we’ll be giving that section a bit of a facelift as well.  Stay tuned for some more screen shots.

Lou

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m working on improving the submission process with a new tool called the Submission Tracker.

When the new Submission Tracker launches we’ll no longer be using Selected, Not Selected, and Standby as submission statuses. Selected and Not Selected in many cases are a bit too strong. For example, an artist can be “selected” for a gig, but might not be able to make the date they’re being offered. To set better expectations for both promoters and artists we will be renaming Selected and Not Selected submission statuses to Interested and Not Interested.

We will also be disconinuing the use of Standby as a submission status. We have heard from a lot of members who are unsure what Standby means (I’m not sure myself sometimes) and have also heard from artists who have submissions stuck in Standby with no resolution. Getting rid of Standby as a submission status will force promoters to make a clear decision for each one.

The submission status popup windows will look a bit different too (hurray for ajax!). I’ll see if I can track down a screen shot to post next week so you all can check it out.

Enjoy the weekend,

Lou

Hey all,

During my 3 years on the Artist Relations team at Sonicbids I’ve had the privlage of talking to thousands of our members from all over the world.  I’ve recently moved out of Artist Relations to join our Product team as a Product Manager where I’ll be taking all of the feedback, critism, suggestions, and great ideas our members have shared with me and putting it into some exciting new features.

My first assignment is to overhaul the submission review process to make it easier for promoters review submissions and to give artists more transparency and control over the process.  The new tool we’re building to allow for this is called the Submission Tracker, and I’ll be posting information about it every week right here on the Builder’s Blog so stay tuned.

Lou

PS - I’ll also occasionally tweet about new stuff I’m working on via Twitter. This is of course in addition to tweeting about the music I’m listening to, cool stuff I find online, and whatever else happens to pop into my head.  Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/SonicbidsLou

Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a minute and introduce myself and tell you about some things that we’re working on. I’m Tricia Nardullo and I started at Sonicbids a few weeks ago, heading up the Product team. We will be focused on keeping you in the loop about any key features we’re working on, bug fixes that you guys have been waiting on and anything else that we have brewing. Make sure to check in just about every week when we’ll have fresh news to share. Right now, the soup du jour that we’ve been talking about is the new and improved Status Manager. Lou will be posting more on that shortly so stay tuned!

-Tricia

As most of you know Sonicbids has been handling the voting for Lollapalooza’s Last Band Standing competition. The voting application is built off of our core technologies and I have been excited watching the voting take place. Check out the microsite to see how it works.

John

As Lou noted in his last post we are focused on changing the status manager. Lou is working with our engineering team to ensure that the functional specification is defined so the engineers can make the magic happen.

Functional specifications, for those who do not know, are detailed descriptions of how the product should look and behave as users interact with it. It’s important to spend some upfront time documenting the changes in order to ensure that we build what we believe is the right solution. Our designers flesh out the look and feel to ensure that it makes sense, and our engineers code and test the changes with the goal of matching the specification. Of course, what looks great on paper does not always look good in reality, and that’s when we go back to the drawing board.

Our goal is to have most of the status manager updates available to you by the end of September. This is, to be honest, slower than I had originally desired, but is a realistic goal and one I’m excited to share with you. As things continue to take shape up I will post more details.

John

Hey all,

John wanted me to take a sec to post here in the Builder’s Blog about a project I’m currently working on.  We’re planning a major overhaul to the Status Manager tool that promoters use to notify artists of their submission status.  I’m not going to go into all the details here, but I did want to drop a hint about one feature in particular.

The way the status manager exists today it’s not possible for a promoter to asign a status to a submission without reviewing it first.  However, it is possible for a promoter to legitimately review a submission in a way that’s not tracked in the EPK Visits Tracker.  First and foremost we’ll be closing out those loopholes so all submission review activity will be accurately captured. In addition, the new status manager will include the date that your submission was reviewed with your status update.

We don’t have a launch date for the new status manager yet (still working out some final details), but as soon as we do it will be announced here.

Rock on,

Lou

The team continues with our regular weekly updates. This week’s updates were primarily focused on home page cleanup, but planning is moving ahead quickly on the transparency changes I have been discussing.

I have asked Lou to post some more information tomorrow.

-John