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!  


    

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.

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. 

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?

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? 

Deveny as an influencer

This morning it was announced that the Australian newspaper The Age has sacked a columnist, the comedian Catherine Deveny, because of her Tweets during the Logies awards (Australian TV awards). I don't know this comedian; I don't read her column and don't follow her on Twitter; so I am definitely not in the position of judging anybody here. The tweets were quite tasteless, but judging by the nature of the tweets, it can't possibly be the first provocative words by Deveny. In fact, she must quite certainly have been chosen to write columns in The Age because of her humor (appreciated or not).

Another reason to believe that The Age wanted to be connected to Deveny is that she was named one of the 100 most influential people in Melbourne by The Age Melbourne Magazine in 2007. So they have decided to use Deveny to reach out to people that they are interested in. They bought in on Deveny as an influencer. For business reasons, of course. So, when the "business deal" turns out to their disadvantage Deveny stands alone. 

How to engage by using Social Media

Today's word is ENGAGE. The word caught my attention in a slide show from a seminar about social media for art organizations given by Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth's blog, which is specialized in social media for non-profit organizations. Now when I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, going from page to page, checking things that I read somewhere just to find something more interesting that I start to read instead, it is obvious how difficult it is to engage people for your cause. To make them stay and get really engaged

In Beth's seminar slides I read that listening leads to engagement and that we have to work with influencers. The influencers are people who create "the buzz". We do not want "one to a few" communication; we want "one to lots and lots". So finding the right influencers is important. In the olden days, when I started to work… those influencers where the "theater representatives", (primarily) women (mostly teachers), who made group bookings and got discounts and a free ticket for themselves. This is still an effective way of selling tickets for many theaters, because even if we now are cooler, more efficient in our communication and heavily brand oriented, it finally comes down to how many butts there are in the seats. And the (primarily) women (mostly teachers) as a group do sell a lot of tickets. There were always discussions on how to renew this engagement. That was before anyone knew that there would be a Facebook, and a Twitter, and a Myspace… So now the door is open for the new generation to get engaged!

Just like in offline marketing it is important to engage the right people. The people who can engage are the people who create social content. Content that people take part of, and listen to. Stefano Maggi writes in his blog Digital Ingredients that you are looking for people who create buzz, but since the engagement demands a lead (a purchase of tickets for example) it is not just the quantity we're after, but also the quality. We are looking for people with strong interpersonal ties that can speak for our cause. To find them, Stefano Maggi writes, we have to integrate their world, take part of the audience for a while.

Beth's "method is a five step rocket: listen, engagement, social content, general buzz and community building/social networking. Those steps correspond to different social media sites, where Ning, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc… turns up in the end of the rocket. When we are already flying.

When I think about all the time that was given to the theater representatives; the special events, the staff working just for them (their own personal contact), all the extra treats… it seems fair to at least have a couple of persons working on social media strategies in a performing arts organization. It takes time to really engage people; get to know them, to make them seen and to find out what compensation that will make them engage. It is not impossible that a lot of organizations start with last step, by building up a network and then stays by that, and that's what makes it feels like "a sophisticated email system". So to engage you have to have time, and to get to know people.

Interact and react

Today I was interested in learning more about ning.com. Ning is a social network site. It can be compared with sites like Myspace and Facebook, but it works in a very different way. Instead of building a profile and create a social network around yourself, you create your network around a specific interest or passion. Each interest network has its own characteristics, rules and site design. I find the idea of ning rally appealing. Instead of getting meaningless information about people that you barely know, you get to exchange meaningful ideas and thoughts with people that you don't necessarily know but who have the same passion as yourself. I created a profile and dived in.

In a social media group I found an interesting video from a seminar with Eric Qualman the author of the blog and the book, Socialnomics. In his seminar he is talking about how companies can use social media to succeed in their business, or rather, simply how to use social media in a wise way. After having seen the video I was inspired. The four steps that Eric is talking about must be described as a basic approach to social media, for any business or organisation.

The first is to listen. (The importance for companies to listen to the present and potential customers is once again underlined!)

Secondly, the company has to decide how they want to interact in the dialog with the community. They have to create a social media strategy

The third step is to react, or at least decide how to react or not react. This must be one of the most important steps for a company! Any company with a social media strategy, or the wish to have one, has to ask itself how they will act, what they will do with the information and feedback they will receive. If you're in the game you have to play. I will come back to this because it is especially important for the performing arts sector.

The fourth step will come naturally, Eric Qualman means. If a company acts according to the prior steps, the costumer will either sell or not sell for the company. 

How to react on peoples' feedback is an important question in the performing art sector. I have a gained my work experience in Sweden and France and have been working with big theaters from many Europe countries; I am well familiar with a performing art sector which is subsidized by public funding and where the theaters have been "privileged" to work without worrying about fundraising and private sponsors. These theaters do not necessarily have to maintain an active dialogue with the audience to survive. In simple words: the only dialogue that you really have to reinforce after a bad season is the dialogue with the politicians. However, in the countries where I have been working, audience development and outreach programs have advanced enormously the last ten years, and many theaters are excellent (German theaters...wow!). But there is still an ambiguity in the idea of letting the "market" in to the "artistic sphere", so the question is if the theaters (not just the marketing department, but the theater as a whole) are willing to really listen to their audience and react to what they are saying. Maybe it could be the way of creating theater for future audiences... Before entering social media marketing they have to be really clear on how they want to interact and react. If social media are used as one way communication, the networks risk to fade. I will be excited to see how theaters that are really using social media to interact with their audience are working! Is the whole theater engaged or just the marketing department? 

Today's thought is definitely interact and react.

United Breaks Guitars... and social media spread the word

My plan was to write about ning.com today and new social media knowledge that I have found there. I will do that later because I run in to a video on YouTube that I have to show NOW. As I wrote yesterday social media sites depends on the user community's input and activities. This gives a strong voice to costumers, buyers, audience etc. We can hear people talk about companies and products like never before. The challenge for companies and organizations today is to listen to what the costumers and potential costumers think about their brand. If they don't listen, social media can be used against them… The following video is excellent and has over 8.000.000 hits.

Social media stand for community and collaboration

The past weekend and I've been doing some more sophisticated reading about social media. A friend handed me a research report in the subject. It includes all the basics, and since the ultimate way of gaining new knowledge is to start from "go", I'm thrilled.

I found a very simple thing interesting: What social media are not.

Social media are not newsletters that people can subscribe to. Social media are not comment systems, where people can post comments but not go further in their exchange. Social media are therefore not one way communication systems where one person, company or association stands as the remitter. Social media are signified by community and collaboration. This might seem very basic, but considering the use of existing social media sites (and I am then in particular thinking about Facebook that is so widely spread) it is obvious that social media are not by far reaching its potential when it comes to marketing arts and small non-profit organizations. What I have seen so far, with only a few exceptions, is by definition not considered as social media. The positive aspect: there is a lot of potential, and according to the report advertisers are in the process of exploring campaign possibilities right now. So there is still time.

There is a built-in problem when it come social media and marketing for commercial purposes. A social media site is depending on the user community to create content and spread the site. This participation in a site generates a sense of ownership within the community. So, if the members of a community suddenly get the feeling that they are being used for commercial purposes, they can easily experience this as a betrayal and lose their engagement for the site. It is therefore important for the social media site's actual owner to be very careful when it comes to exploiting the community for commercial purposes. However, the marketing ads or campaigns on the sites are of course not only coming from the actual owners (google ads etc) but within the community itself. And that's where it is specifically interesting for local arts and small non-profit organizations, because here the marketing is free and the success is based on creativity, and the report also says that many users are willing to participate in and drive viral marketing campaigns if they are designed in an appropriate way and that the users feel that they can gain something themselves. So the door is open.

One very successful campaign from last year, which used the gain for the community as an important diffusion factor, was the IKEA facebook showroom campaign. Facebook members tagged happily their names on photos of IKEA products, created within a facebook account, with the intention of winning them. By tagging their name they also spread the IKEA campaign (and the IKEA products) to all their facebook friends. This is certainly a great way of using an existing social media function to spread a commercial product and still get goodwill for it. A big part of the success was however the worldwide buzz about the brilliance of the campaign itself. Smart social media marketing can of course be effectively used for arts or non-profit organisations working an a local market, but the worldwide wow-factor of the IKEA campaign is not necessary to get local audience in the seats of a theatre. It is enough with a local buzz. You just have to find the way to get it. 

The thought for today: Respect the community and think collaboration.

Social media for small organizations on local markets

Today I haven't had much time to do Social Media research, but there is one thing that I can't get out of my system. Thanks to yesterday's post, about listening instead of talking when using social media as marketing tools, I was recommended to check out Nielsen's website. Nielsen Buzzmetrics helps companies find information about what people say about their brand on blogs, social networks, discussion groups and other CGM platforms (Costumer-Generated Media). It is a company that asks its clients the question: "Millions of customers are talking, are you listening?" So again, listen!

Nielsen's activities are not new to me. I've known for years that there are companies using technology to search the web to sell information to other companies about what people say about them on the web. The question is however, how I as a marketing manager working in a sector that can't pay for this kind of information, can build my own strong social media strategy and listen to and learn something about my customers, in an intelligent way? I can't stop asking myself how effective social media as marketing tools actually is for a small or medium sized orgnisation working on a local market. Social Media have to be a great tool for arts and non profit orgnisations since it basically only building on a creative mind, but I can't think of any successful campaigns that have been used on local, limited markets, promoting for example one specific theater or event. Considering all the newsletters and communities I belong to in the arts sector, I am surprised that I can't think of one. I have to go digging!

Use social media to listen

I just found something interesting. I follow a blog called The Mission Paradox, with the modest under title "The Best Arts Marketing Resource in the World". But it is really very good… and the following just makes it better: The blogger, and head of the Mission Paradox Adam Thurman, is commenting on an article where the company Starbucks talks about how they view social media. The online magazine AdWeek has made an analysis of the hypothetical money value of Facebook fanbases (that is their group of "fan" or friends). Another site Mediabistro spoke to Starbucks about how they respond to that according to their big fanbase.

The answer:

"We don't view social media as a marketing play," said a company spokeswoman, "but rather as a customer engagement channel where we can have real connections with our customers, engage them in the brand and answer their questions. We are in constant dialogue with customers, participating in the communities of MyStarbucksIdea.com, Twitter and Facebook. Our engagement allows us to understand their needs, stay top-of-mind in an increasingly competitive retail environment and share interesting news about the company with a captive audience."

Thurman underlines "social media are tools for conversation, NOT SELLING…. If you're clogging up the airways with constant sales pitches then you're wasting the power of the medium."

That's really good. This is what I mean when I say that I think Facebook is just used as a sophisticated email system, all those mass emails asking you to take part in this and that event.

Social Media as in LISTENING, not TALKING. That's today's thought.