Sometimes a tiny note can be more efficient than social media.

Today, almost every small company has a social media precense. Social media fascinates us all because there is still much to discover and new ground to brake. We want to embrace it totally. Immediately. It is however important to remember that social media is not automatically equal to marketing. In social media discussion forums I sometimes get the impression that social media is seen as a custom-made marketing tool: How can it be used? How effective is it? How can it be analysed? How much should we budgetize for social media marketing?
But social media are not custom-made for marketing purposes. It is new and cool, but as always in markeing we need to focus on who we want to communicate with and why. The wide range of social media allow most companies to find something that fit their communication, but social media do not necessarily fulfill all the company's marketing needs.

Social media is not exclusive, sometimes a hand written note can be a better way to reach out:

In Gothenburg in Sweden I saw all those spades in a sand pit. On each spade there is a note attached saying that a daycare nearby are having some places open for new children. It is a small local parent run daycare, that value engagement and  communication. Those parent run daycares are quite popular so they do probably not want to open up their communication to wide. But they want to commnuicate with an engaged parent living nearby, probably on maternity or paternity leave spending the day with their child in the sand pit. Quite a good idea I think!  


    

If people don't come to Facebook, let Facebook come to the people

I have now relocated to Zurich, Switzerland, and haven't had much computer time lately. But you don't necessarily need to be connected to get into social media networks. One day when I was walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, the big buzy shopping aorta in my new city, I passed a "Facebook Photo Box" that caught my attention. The clothes store "Big Boyz" has placed a "FOTOBOX" in their shop-window. Bypassing people can pose for a photo that will immideately be uploaded on the Big Boyz Facebook site as well as on the shop's website. They call the project "Big Züri Smile" and mean that it gives the whole world the possibility to get a vision of the Züri-style. "Real time. Real cool." And it is really cool! When visiting the Big Boyz facebook fanpage and website I see that I am not the only one who likes the idea. Over 2000 people have uploaded pictures where they are posing to show their best "züri-style".Unfortunately the FB fan page has a lot left to wish for and the Fotobox idea could be drawn a lot further, but the basic idea is really good. As the "züri-style is spread over the world" the Big Boyz is generating trafic to their website and gaining new local customers.

Wouldn't this be a great idea for an opera house, a theater or a cool art gallery!? Place a Fotobox in the foyer and let people take their picture, tag it, and click: their networks will know that they have been to a certain performance or a vernisage before they have even left the building. I think that a Fotobox would be actively used because it is a fun, and also, people generally want to get the word out when they have been to the theatre/opera/art exhibition and gained some cultural capital, n'est-ce pas, Bourdieu? Great way to get the word out!

Don't believe that you own your FB fan page

I was recently at a restaurant here in Sydney. In the ladies room I saw that they really need to work on their social media strategy... The sign above was  hanging on the toilet doors.

The text says:
 "To win a free bottle of wine, all you need to do is to share your experience with us on Facebook! The most creative comment every week will receive a free bottle of wine."

Hummm... the most "creative comment"?

Everybody is trying to figure out social media for the moment, and it is good to give it a go... but I think this is an extraordinary example of a bad strategy. Today everybody is talking about the "new marketing": the customer oriented marketing that  is based on listening to customer needs and creating relations. The restaurant's idea is probably to create a big fan base: by posting you let your friends see that your are their friend etc. But really, with social media they got a brilliant possibility to see what people really think, respond to that, create a great experience for their guests and then let the guests do the positive marketing for them. Instead, they ask their customers, without even having created a relation, without even bothering to ask what people really think, to do the marketing for them. For a bottle of wine..?

I think that one golden social media rule is: Always remember that your fan page is actually not your fan page. You are monitoring, listening and communicating. But you don't own it, you don't have the right to tell people how to act and what to think. In social media everybody is the owner of their opinion.

How the art sector can design Momentum Effect

Many organisations run in to trouble when it is time to analyze the ROI of social media marketing.When I started reading about how to measure the return of social media marketing,  I immediately ran into the expression "momentum effect". Momentum in combination with social media was highlighted in April 2007 when Market Evolution revealed that the momentum effect had counted for more than 70% of the ROI for a certain number of examined companies using social media marketing. 

Jean-Claude Larréché, professor at Stanford University has written the book “The Momentum Effect – how to ignite exceptional growth”. His definition of momentum is: “The momentum is a tremendously potent phenomenon by which under specific conditions, exceptional organic growth is created - growth that feeds on itself... momentum growth requires a delicate combination of a number of specific elements, working cooperatively and simultaneously. This combination can occur by chance or by design.”  

In the art sector we are very well familiar with theatre productions or art exhibitions that attract big audience groups when we least expect it: An artistic production that just gets the pieces right and the word of mouth effect takes off. I suppose that this word of mouth spin off is a fair part of the momentum effect by chance. 

It is difficult for the art sector to secure "word of mouth" about artistic products because of their unpredictable nature. It is therefore difficult for us to design momentum effect. The "product" is partly born in the meeting with its audience, when it is already sold. But if the companies in the 2007 survey answered that momentum effect counted for more than 70% of ROI, then we definitely need tools to design momentum in the art sector.

Social media never sleep

If I was a company I would have to recognize a certain failure in my social media strategy right now. My trip to Europe destabilized my regularity on social media sites and I haven't been a very active blogger lately. One of the most important mantras to keep in mind when trying to achieve a successful social media marketing is REGULARITY. Social media never sleep. There is no such thing as not having time, being sick, having to pick up the kids from school, lack of inspiration or quality time with the family. A successful social media presence implies spending quality time with other community members on social media sites, not your family. However, even if we do have a life there is still hope for social media success.

Just as just we schedule our personal meetings throughout the day, we should also schedule our social media appointments

We shouldn't publish everything all the time, but we should be consequently present and publish regularly

Luckily I am not a company but the social media mantra is now also my mantra: Consistency and Regularity. See you soon. 

Personal vs Professional in Social Media

I am back home after having spent two long summer months in Europe. I have been embarrassingly disconnected, but my social media reflections haven't been completely switched off though. For example, even if I would have wanted, I couldn't have missed the Facebook scandal that filled the media for a couple of days when I was in Sweden.

In Sweden EVERYONE is on Facebook. And so are the employees at the National Immigration Office. The scandal was about an employee that had published a "what's on your mind"-update with a racist undertone. This was seen by another employee at the immigration office, communicated to the direction, and the racist-accused employee was now threatened to lose his job. The man said in interviews that he did not understand why the phrase was experienced as racist. He was also shocked over all this attention that this little meaningless text got.

Well,

1. Things are not longer what they are, they are what they seem
   
2. One person does not get to chose what's meaningless and what's not. Loads of people chose together what they find interesting and meaningless
   
3. And at last, times have changed and our private and professional persona has merged.

How to add value in social media networks II

A common imperative amongst social media experts is: “Add value!” To be able to create active communities and a strong social media presence, we have to contribute with “valuable content”. Okay, but how..?

I have been doing some research and found some points that might guide us when we try to “add value”. In my last post I wrote about how we can add value in our own created communities on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, but working with a strong social media strategy in the performing arts we also need to be present in forums, blogs and other social media sites. Here are some thoughts that we should have in mind when “visiting others”: How we can add valuable content and contribute in a way that will be noticed by the community members.

How to add value in social media networks I

To be able to create and maintain an active community in social media networks, we need to add valuable content. "Add value" is often an imperative used by social media experts. Our social media messages should be transferable, clickable and sharable and give an urge to answer, discuss and participate within the community. How can we add value in the performing arts?

As representatives of performing arts organizations, we can add value (1) in our own community networks, (2) when visiting other sites, blogs and communities and (3) by creating longer, qualitative information in blogs. Here are some thoughts of how we can create value in our own community networks. 

How to Create a Community in Social Networks

Let's take a look at our Facebook fan pages. Do we see lively discussions, pictures, links and community participation? Or do we see our own publications, and publications, and publications … followed by silence and thousands of friends in the left corner? If we see the later we need to reconsider our social networking efforts!

We have to think community, when approaching social media in a marketing perspective:

• Social media sites are built on collaborative activities
  
• The users of social networking sites must feel that they take part in an active community
  
• The sense of belonging will make them participate further in the development of the community.
  

If we fail in building an active community, we fail social media marketing. If our Facebook sites lack interaction, nobody will take the content further, and we fail to reach new audiences. We can post message after message about interesting events, but the effect will be an "email-effect": some of our "fans" will read our message, some might come to our event, but most people will not pay any attention. We need people to click, to tag, to share, to like and to tweet, and to bring the discussion further to reach the full potential of social media marketing.

So, how do we create an active social network community for our theater?

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!!". 

Social Media Policy for the Performing Arts sector II

Yesterday I started to examine Social Media Policy by listing some thoughts for the Performing Arts sector to consider. Today, I have been doing some screening and looking at different companies' social media policies. Here are some policy points that can be useful for the performing arts sector:

Before writing our Social Media Policy we should consider that:

• There is a big circulation of people in the performing arts sector. The policy has to take that into account.
  
• Many performing arts professionals are depending on their personal brands. Don't make a policy that prevents them from developing their own brands in their own network activities; they are depending on them for future engagements.
  
• When we decide to implement a social media strategy in our organization we strive for a viral effect and want our information to travel beyond our websites. We have to accept that we will not be able to control everything that is said about us. A policy is not about restrictions, but guidelines!
  

Social Media Policy for the Performing Arts sector I

Today I will take a look at Social Media Policies. A policy is a guideline instituted to avoid negative behavior, or to guide positive behavior towards a desired outcome. A social media policy is intended to give employees guidelines of how to act on social networking sites, both as an employee for the company and as a private person at home.

Mark van Bree, a Dutch public relation practitioner working in Chicago, made a survey in December last year about the social media use in orchestras. There were only 15 orchestras participating in the survey so the sample is not very big, but the survey shows that a majority of the orchestras do not have an internal social media policy and that 40% do not consider that they need one. Van Bree upholds the importance of implementing a policy and how that easily can be done when renewing the freelancers’ contracts.

There are however discussions both for and against Social Media policies on the internet , so we really have to ask ourselves if our performing art organizations should implement an internal Social Media Policy or not, and what we can gain from it.

Creating Social Media Content II

Social Media provide effective tools to create a dialogue with people. The impact of our Social Media Marketing will be determined by our content. Many sites where I have been reading about content creation, recommend me to be interesting, engaging and entertaining. That might feel a bit intimidating… However, don't fear. There are methods for everything and so for content creation. I have done some screening and here are some tips of how we can create interesting, engaging and entertaining content in the performing arts sector. 

Creating Social Media Content I

 In social media marketing content is gold. Or rather: No content, no social media marketing. When having listened and decided on how we want to interact with our present or potential customers, the time has come to create content.

In the book "The new rules of marketing and PR" the author David Meerman Scott states that content is everything. Today it does not really matter what source that brings information to the costumers, as long as the information is relevant to him/her. When searching the web for information most costumers will never separate website content, a blog post about our organisation (or event), an article in a magazine etc; if the information reflect what he/she is looking for right now.

The key to creating relevant content is to really know the target group. Social media content always has to target different groups; for example, existing audiences, potential audiences, teachers with their classes, donors, sponsors etc... Meerman Scott talks in his book about different "buyer personas". By mapping out different buyer personas you can easier outline your different target groups and the relevant characteristic of the content for each of those groups.

On the publishing and reading site Scribd I find some other good advises on social media content. After having created "the right" content Scribd recommend publishing "Home and Away". This means that if the content is going to reach your buyer personas you have to publish, not only on your own site, but on other sites where the buyer personas are. The idea of extending the value of your content is the main idea of social media.  

Who owns Social Media in the Performing Arts?

The article "Which Department Owns Social Media?"  was published yesterday at Mashable by Christina Warren. I touched this question two days ago when I proposed that marketing and audience development professionals may have to merge their paths when working with social media. The "Social media ownership" is a tricky question because social media can have so many different goals and give different results. The ownership is important since many organizations tend to run into social media without a real strategy (because it feels so yesterday not to have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account). It is not very smart to do things without thinking, so we'd better go for a strategy. But then, who should develop the social media strategy in a performing arts organization? 

Make your Audience a Community in Social Media

I found something interesting on Chris Brogan's blog. Chris Brogan has been blogging for years, written books and is the president of a new media marketing agency. He is a rock star of social media. I was checking his "best-of blog posts", and found one called "What to do with influencers" which was good for my research. It is about how companies now are trying to get to know how to build relationships with communities through bloggers. He writes about how companies are trying to build relations with bloggers who have big audiences, like "publishers sought to build relationships with magazine readers and TV viewers". This is a problem because the bloggers do not have the same relationship with their readers as the magazines. Brogan means that bloggers have communities around them that they have built up during a long time, and not audiences that they can influence to sell just anything to:  "..audiences are not the same thing as communities".

Think “long term” in social media marketing

I am now reading the book "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" by David Meerman Scott. I want to mention one little line that I read in the beginning of the book that is really important to think about. The author lists the "old rules of marketing" which he means are ineffective and have to be transformed. I don't completely agree since he claims that marketing before only meant advertising and branding, which is far from true in my sector. The performing arts sector has for many years been working with audience development and relation building programs to reach new audiences, young audiences, socially and geographically disadvantaged groups etc. 

But now let's get to the thing that really caught my eyes in a positive sense. Meerman Scott writes that in the old rules "advertisement was based on campaigns that had a limited life." This means that in the "new rules", in the world of social media, you should think the opposite:

Social media marketing shouldn't be based on campaigns with a limited life. I understand "don't think short term and don't expect short term results in social media" from that. 

How to engage bloggers in Performing Arts Marketing

Public relations and third party ink have always been, and still are, very important for the performing arts industry. The art sector is short of money for advertising and there is almost a silent agreement that performances and other artistic events have the right to media cover and critics. This agreement is supported by the close relations between the performing arts and journalists, and also by the fact that many theater critics are also theater professionals, and vice verse. The journalists have a specialized knowledge; they see theater several times every week and are far from always representative to your audience. And yet, they are the only persons that press and PR agents exclusively target to reach out to their audience through media. But now there are also social media…

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the importance of targeting the influencers when applying a social media strategy. Influencers can be found amongst the people who produce social content, like bloggers. The span of blogs varies from personal diaries to big specialized blogs which can be as important as newspapers. It is impossible to neglect the role that bloggers have and will have for us to gain third party ink in the future, so we'd better get started engaging them in our cause straight away! 

What is the Open Graph and how can it be used in Performing Arts marketing?

Two weeks ago Facebook launched the Open Graph Initiative. I am pretty sure that there are still some organizations out there that haven't yet added the Open Graph plug-ins to their sites nor understood why and how they should. So, I have been doing some thinking about the Open Graph for Performing Arts organizations, here it comes:
 
The Open Graph Initiative is based on the idea of making the web experience "instantly social". The Facebook crew means that a person is defined by his or her connections. On Facebook you are connected to people through your "friends", and to things, causes and organizations through pages and fan groups. Everybody in the" Facebook world" is connected in a global social graph. The idea is now to open up this graph and share your likes, interests and recommendations beyond Facebook. 

Any organization that wants to be connected to the open graph can install a plug-in, a little "Like" (or "recommend") button, in connection to features on their website and let people share their likes to their networks. Sharing is nothing new and is already done by sites as digg and reddit, but the difference is that your organization now can be connected to a network that have over 400 million users all around the world. This is of course important for big global companies, but it can also have an important impact on small local organizations. Like your theater! 

Where do we find the influencers?

Finding the right influencers, or "leaders", is one of the most essential things for any organisation that wants to approach social media. It is important to always aim for the viral effect to optimize the potential of social media, and by finding the right influencers your message can ramify in all directions and deliver a qualitative message to both present and potential audiences/clients/buyers.

At Forrester I found a classification of how people use social media:

Creators: People who add social content: in blogs, on websites, upload photos and music etc.
Critics: People who comment on other people's content. This group participates in discussions in forums, post ratings of other people's content, comment on blog posts etc.
Collectors: People who organize content by themselves and others by using RSS feeds, tags, voting systems etc.
Joiners, People who maintain a social profile at social network sites like facebook and myspace.
Sectators, People who take part of the content publish by others: blogs, pictures, music. They read comments and voting.
Inactive, don't do anything of the activities described above.

Influencers can be found in the three top groups. They produce content, they comment on other people's content and organizes and spread content from themselves and others. The people we want to target in our communication are however present in all the groups of this spectrum!

So, who are the influencers in your local area?