Last Friday night I attended 10,000 Invites, an event that was part of The New Communicators un-conference. Here’s my recap of the event, with some of my thoughts on what we discussed.
I’m sharing this not only because The New Communicators organizers asked us to share, but also to share with the larger art community and to help with the discussion of taking advantage of technology to promote the Arts.
The panel consisted of representatives from several major arts orgs in the Portland area. Please keep in mind that these are my observations only and not representative of anyone but me. They videotaped the whole thing, but I don’t know if they plan on sharing that video.
Major takeaways:
Personalities Rule. Portland Center Stage not only has individual employees Tweeting, but they also created a @FakeScrooge and @PCSGhost account which have been very popular. One of the museums created an @MC_Escher account on Twitter that recounted Escher’s entire life over the length of an exhibition. That was so popular that they were asked to do it again. PICA employees have lots of followers on Facebook. The individuals within the organization make real connections with their audience. Company accounts, not as much.
Crowdsource & give up control. PICA has had an all volunteer blog since 2004. They mentioned that even though they don’t have editorial control, they’ve had a great experience with creating context for the work they present. Flickr was mentioned multiple times as a source of pictures created by staff & audience members. Staff was able to incorporate Flickr pics into their presentations, and audience & media outlets used these same photos on blogs & in major media outlets.
Spread out the implementation. Every org mentioned that they have multiple people Tweeting, Facebooking, and blogging. Those reponsibilities were shared around to minimize the heavy load. Reluctant participants in the org became very enthusiastic (maybe a little too enthusiastic) after they saw results of the ‘free’ advertising social media brings. No formal plans to incentivize fans to evangelize the brands, but it is happening in a scattered sort of way.
Tracking & reporting is an issue. No definite benchmarks were discussed in the measurement of social media. While everyone felt that they had been successful, no one cited traffic driven, sentiment measurement, or other technical analysis. A couple of people even expressed that they were not aware of what technical tracking tools were available, besides Google Analytics. Interestingly, one survey PCS did said that 46% of their audience used Facebook, 11% use Twitter, and 24% use blogs. Their top referral traffic sources were: Facebook, Twitter, Travel Portland, and OregonLive.
We are changing people’s relationships with art. The social media efforts that these orgs have made have created safe, casual environments where people can experience classic works of art in new & powerful ways. People feel more comfortable attending theater & knowing how to dress. People can have conversations with others who are on their same level of knowledge about the art, as well as learn from those who are more educated.Social media creating context for people to understand the art.
Relationship with the press. Press releases still go out, but they are mostly full of links to the appropriate information. More reviews are being done, but they are usually appearing in the paper’s online versions, or on local niche blogs. PR employees are treating bloggers like regular press agents, offering them free tickets and inside access to the actors & staff. Bloggers are generally more open and enthusiastic about getting cozy with the staff than journalists are.
My thoughts: Learning how to formalize and use technical tracking tools can go a long way towards helping this group develop their social media strategies.
Arts organizations have always run on very tight budgets, but they’re doing an amazing job with the limited resources that they have. There is a real danger of employee burnout because of workload, and several of the orgs have individuals who are cults of personality. If that key employee decides to leave, the org could suffer because of that.
Creating a planned strategy for brand evangelism by audience is a major opportunity.
I’d love to hear from some of the other people that were there in the comments. What were your big takeaways, how can we help the Arts community grow? For those of you outside of Portland, let me know if I can clarify any of this for you or if you want to get in touch with anyone who said any of this stuff.
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