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!