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".