Recap of PATA Life After Print Event

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I wish that the event from last night had been recorded. I did my best to take some notes but I didn’t get all of it because I was on the panel. Here’s the best of my memory. The Life After Print event was designed to help arts organizations (performing arts especially) move beyond dependence on print marketing.

Social Media is relationships enhanced with technology. Many people think that social media is just traditional PR/Marketing. If you approach it that way, without taking the time to build real relationships, then you will fail.

Demographics: Facebook’s fastest growing demographic is women over 55. Twitter users are between 35 – 45 years old. Facebook offers cheap advertising that can target users by age, occupation, location, and interests. You could target all the people in a zip code that have an expressed an interest in theater.

Read Jeff Jarvis’ book What Would Google Do to get a good understanding of how the Internet & social media are changing the way advertising & media works. Dell computers fixed their customer service issues by engaging one to one with their customers. Sharing email lists, contact lists, is important to the future growth of organizations. Companies that try to hold their mailing list close and not let anyone see it will eventually die from isolation.

Everyone at your organization needs to be involved in social media. Whether they contribute blog posts, Twitter, Facebook content, videos – whatever. Some management may be resistant to change but Portland Center Stage has found that most employees who are engaging with audience on behalf of the theater are more careful with what they say than anyone expected. This has encouraged senior management to become more engaged.

Social media strategy: Listen, Measure, Plan & engage, repeat. Use Google Alerts, Twitter Search w/ RSS, Facebook search is now real time.

PDX Ticket Network has a reach of over 100,000 people in the Portland, Oregon area, with 90 arts organizations involved. There’s a huge collaboration opportunity for each of these orgs. Companies who are part of the network can contribute to the community calendar which is syndicated out to dozens of other places, as well as send their info out to ticket buyers who have expressed interested in receiving info on other shows in the area.

In the near future, PDX Ticket Network will be rolling out recommendations based on what people have bought. This is huge because it will work like Amazon’s recommendations. Right now it’s based on categories that customers have pre-selected.

In addition, the network is rolling out tracking software that will show how many people saw your org’s information and how they interacted with it (email, on the site, forwarded, etc). They will also be strong on Search Engine Optimization so that their network (with your shows included) shows up on searches for regional events.

Cross promoting your shows with other shows is important. You reach more audience.

People who have purchased a ticket to any live event are 10x more likely to buy a ticket to live theater than someone who has not. People who read less than 4 books per month are less likely to purchase tickets.

Turn your organization inside out. Turn your promotion over to your audience. Offer incentives like free tickets to get volunteers to run your Facebook, Twitter or blog pages. Run promotions or contests through your channels and make each channel unique in order to add value. You can even do crazy things like offering to let patrons sit in on rehearsals, help pick the season, or other creative ideas.

Don’t over-moderate your comments. If you have a blog, social media page, then let some of the negative comments stand, but respond to them right away. Usually if you provide quick, public customer service then people will be very fast to praise your responsiveness. If people are just being mean, usually your other community members will be quick to defend you.

Trish from Portland Center Stage doesn’t think print is dead – yet. She said that her organization still gets a lot of value out of advertising in the Oregonian (the local paper). She also said that within about 5 years that print very well might be dead.

There was a lot more that we discussed, but this was the gist of it. Thank you to all who attended, and if any of you have follow up questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

Tagged as: internet marketing, pata, social media