No Marketing in Social Media Marketing

I think I am going to close this "policy week" (that I am quite happy to leave behind for a while) with a cool thing I read in Rebecca Krause-Hardie's blog archive. I was looking around for policy posts and found an interview that Rebecca made with Jo Johnson, Digital Marketing Manager at the London Symphony Orchestra. Read the whole post because it is an interesting interview with a serious and obviously very skillful social media manager. Here I just want to underline what caught my "policy eye".

The LSO has successfully built a social media communication with over 13000 Facebook fans and more than 10.000 followers on Twitter. When Rebecca in the interview asks Jo if they have a policy or a strategy for their social media marketing at the LSO, Jo answers that after having started without a policy she and a colleague wrote down

what social media was, how they were using it and what benefits it had, to answer the questions that the bosses had started asking.

When they then were writing some rules for themselves and the people involved, they came up with something like:

"…remember that you are the LSO and everything you say will be viewed as official', 'no swearing or nudity', 'don't drink and tweet' and 'NO MARKETING!!". 


No marketing. That's the interesting part. Jo Johnson and her colleagues at LSO have been working according to this rule ever since they begun using Facebook and other social networking sites. Too many theaters use social networking sites as pure information sites and miss out on the great possibility to communicate with their audience and create a community. When I look at LSO Facebook page I see a lively debate with photos, discussions, comments, comments on comments etc. It is a great community gathered around the love for music consisting of over 13.000 people. Wow! Imagine that you live on the country side somewhere in the UK and happen to be a classical music passionate. The LSO Facebook page would be an extraordinary forum for you to learn, listen and discuss. And when you come to London you would probably go to LSO, because you're their friend. But the main goal with their Facebook friendship has never been not to make you come every time, and that is probably what made you stay on their fan page. As Jo says in the interview "People do not use social sites to be marketed at, they use them for friendship and keeping in touch."

I think that the short rule above can work as an excellent policy for theaters and other performing art organizations: This policy makes you understand who you are, how to avoid problems (swearing, nudity, drinking…) and it makes you understand how you reach success (no marketing). As marketing professionals we have to learn to see when marketing becomes a "massive turn off".