Six months ago I got a call from one of my former classmates, Frances Black, asking me to be the project manager for “a social networking site for off Broadway theatre companies in collaboration with [...]]]>

Six months ago I got a call from one of my former classmates, Frances Black, asking me to be the project manager for “a social networking site for off Broadway theatre companies in collaboration with A.R.T./New York and TheaterMania.” That sounded pretty interesting, but I was in the middle of this, so I reluctantly turned the opportunity down. Two months later she called back, “Pretty please?” Ok, ok, who am I to turn a chance like that to actually practice what I preach–social media for the theatre.

And thus began my contract with the New York Theatre Network:

The New York Theatre Network is your hub for what’s happening on New York City stages. From the hot new company you’ve never heard of, to the theatre you’ve been subscribing to for years, NYTN is the place to find out what’s coming up, who’s tweeting ticket discounts, and which theatre company makes the best YouTube videos. Sign in with Facebook to see what recent shows your friends liked. Be in the know.

In the first few months, I had an awesome partner, Meghan Pressman–together we created a marketing strategy plan and an education strategy plan. She did 95% of the heavy lifting for these plans. Which, of course, as soon as the project began, we had to promptly throw out the window.

MARKETING

In the end, we chose 3 print publications, 7 websites, Facebook, and Google, to run an ad campaign over the course of 4 weeks. Each ad has its own tagline, and (we hope!) the graphics tie together the whole campaign. Look out for all the ads on your local newsstands, website browsings, and theatre-lobby-wanderings.

I’m pretty stoked that we have a few weeks to experiment with different Facebook & Google ads. I just wish it were that easy to tailor all those other digital ads. We’ve even tried to space out our print ads to get a better sense of CPA, because the CPM‘s are maddeningly different between publications. And you know what else is maddeningly different? How to submit the dang ads. Digital portals, generic email addresses, account rep’s, messenger service. Somebody should really consolidate that.

We also hired a great PR firm, AMP3 PR who have a background in launching new websites, and an awesome graphic designer, Maggie Elliot, who has a background in coming through FTW on tight deadlines, vague instruction, and no budget (she also does all the creative for Yale Rep). There’s been much debate about whether PRNewswire or PRWeb would be the best venue of choice for our press release. And I learned a valuable lesson in paying for backlinks: the day before our press release went live, the phrase “New York Theatre Network” yielded just 3 results on Google (ouch). The day after: over 15,000. Talk about SEO. And we’ve already begun to generate some great press:

• Clyde Fitch Report, A.R.T./New York Joins Social Media Swim
• Steve on Broadway, The Social Network
• Independent Media Magazine, Theatre Social Networking Site Launching
• Encore Magazine, Theatre Arts in a New Light

And we continue to run a Twitter profile, though not a Facebook page. Both were quite difficult decisions to make; knowing that my time with A.R.T./New York is limited, and there simply aren’t spare minds & hands around the office to take on more work. Ginny Louloudes has been a trouper learning to tweet though! And if wishing made it so, we would have had a Foursquare badge. Theatre Nerd anyone? (maybe like the little guy with the glasses?)

EDUCATION

Surveys are tricky–especially with a finite population and limited response rates. The first survey we did about A.R.T./New York member theatre’s experience with, and comfort with, social media implied they were rolling along their merry way, practically headed towards Foursquare nirvana. I got all freaked out, demanded impossible features from our tech team at TheaterMania for the nytn.org site, and began planning an ambitiously advanced social media curriculum. Then we did another survey about what in particular member theatres wanted to learn about social media, and heard things like, “How do I start a Facebook page?” and “Where can I list my show online?” Hmm…there seems to be a disconnect here. In the end, we tried to plan a mix of workshops & informal discussions to get the ball rolling. And we were lucky to get:

1. Dave Charest to teach Demystifying Social Media
2. Erica McLaughlin to teach Efficiently Using Social Media
3. Sarah Lasley to teach Creating Videos for YouTube
4. Reva Cooper to teach Listings that Work
5. Dennis Baker to teach Increasing Traffic with SEO
6. Me (less lucky, more like stuck with me) to teach Social Media Strategic Planning

And I facilitated weekly round table discussions Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Blogging. Including some nifty new research on them all, where I tried to answer:

• Who’s using this platform?
• What are best practices?
• What works best, based on the research?
• What else could we do, if we’re an advanced user?
• Where can we go for further resources?

About 1/4 of all A.R.T./New York member theatres attended one of these education events, many of them attending multiple events with multiple staff members.We follow up each of the workshops with an online survey asking attendees about:

• What they expected to learn
• What they actually learned
• What they thought of the instructor’s knowledge & engagement
• If they expect to actually use what they learned at their theatre
• Convenience with the logistics
• If their overall expectations were met

We’re also totally grateful for the Flip Video Spotlight for Good program for sponsoring our purchase of technology to video tape the workshops, and lend out the flip cams to member theatres for their own use.

TECHNOLOGY

TheaterMania are the great folks behind the actual nytn.org site design & architecture. Big shout out to Dave Stanke, John Issendorf, and Ed Highfield for putting up with my endless requests for new features, submitting countless bug reports, and general needling about the 20 things that must be fixed right now. It was a huge learning experience for the A.R.T./New York team about the intricacies of launching a new website. We navigated through internal beta to private beta, to our launch of public beta today. I’ve been amazed at our frequent use of off-the-shelf products: the site itself is built on top of a wordpress platform, a Facebook open graph app powers our recommendation engine, a Google form serves as our bug report tracking, and we’ve got a Gmail support email.

We’ve written what feels like reams of website copy. Easy to forget that every single word on a website has to come from somebody’s mind/fingers, and get through the approval process of 2 organizations.

We’ve also been able to generate *tons* of support documentation: from screencasts to PDF’ed tutorials to FAQ’s. And we’ve brainstormed wishlists like:

• What if every theatre could link to as many of their social media profiles as they wanted on their NYTN page?
• What if the NYTN page promoted upcoming shows just like Hulu?
• What if it was as easy to search for a theatre company as it is to scroll through Google Images?
• What if we had faceted search like MenuPages?
• What if we integrated with Talkbackr?
• What if our Dashboard was the best of Postling and Flowtown?

And a whole list too long to enumerate here.

Every week, we track bugs submitted/fixed, member sign ups, and how many of each type of content members are updating. None of this is automated yet, so it’s a lot of me and Rebecca Phillips counting things by hand.

The last tricky thing we’ve yet to solve is WTF should go in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. We’ve tried compare/contrasting TheaterMania, HuffingtonPost, IMDB, BoingBoing, and TrustE, to no avail. I’m too stubborn to simply copy & paste someone else’s. I don’t like any of the templates out there. On the one hand, we don’t actually have control over much of the content posted on the NYTN site–it mostly belongs to the member theatres. And we want people to share/repurpose that content at will, and make it as easy/free of legal jargon as possible to allow them to do so. Le sigh.

INTERNAL COMMUNICATION

Out of all of my NYTN responsibilities, this one really snuck up on me. There’s been a pretty steady onslaught of emails to write every:

• Monday: Workshop & roundtable surveys (and then synthesizing the findings, and sending final reports on each to my boss)
• Tuesday: Staff updates (more on these in a moment)
• Wednesday: Promotion of upcoming workshop & roundtable
• Thursday: A.R.T./New York member newsletter updates about NYTN
• Friday: Reminder to A.R.T./New York member theatres who haven’t yet completed their NYTN profile

The staff updates, although admittedly a pain, provided a great opportunity to figure out: what are we measuring?? On Twitter, on our website, on our progress towards a whole set of goals & timelines. Check it out for yourself to see where we landed.

We also made a presentation to the board (and I learned keynote!).

LAUNCH

So that’s it. We’re launched. I’m hanging around for another week or so to try to optimize the digital ad campaigns, get the budget in order, write up a final report, and teach that final workshop. For the past three months, I’ve learned how to be a Product Manager, Brand Manager, Copy Writer, Project Manager, Educator, and Social Media Strategist. I’ve got the financial resources of a nonprofit, the growth goals of a social network, and the manpower of a start up. It’s been a wild ride. And the reason postings have been a little light on 24 Usable Hours. As I pack up to leave for Bangkok, expect postings to return to their regular schedule.

So if you haven’t already, won’t you visit the site?

I got a little antsy in social media class today, and decided to revamp the curriculum. IMHO, this is what the class should have covered (none of which it currently does). To give a little context, the class meets [...]]]>

I got a little antsy in social media class today, and decided to revamp the curriculum. IMHO, this is what the class should have covered (none of which it currently does). To give a little context, the class meets twice a week, for 1 hour 20 minutes at a time, has about 40 MBA students, and lasts for 14 weeks. In the below curriculum, each numbered topic (plus intro and wrap up days) would be covered in one class period. The overall goal of the class would be to introduce future managers to the current state of the social media field, and prepare them to create and execute social media strategy successfully.

Social Media Class Curriculum
INTRO: SOCIAL MEDIA OVERVIEW
Discuss current state of the industry, social network theory, and class overview

SECTION 1: PLATFORMS
For each platform, review in class: user demographics, history of dominant platform, value proposition, what success looks like, selected relevant topics. Assignment: Select one platform and build a prototype profile based on a person, product, service, project, or policy (see Section 3 for examples).  Fill that profile with applicable content and post a link to the class wiki. Be prepared to discuss your profile on its relevant class day.

1. Symmetric Social Networks: Facebook
   • Newsfeed
   • Profile
   • Facebook Ads
   • Facebook Causes
   • Facebook Connect
2. Asymmetric Social Networks: Twitter
   • Search
   • Stream
   • 3rd Party Platforms
   • Twitter Lists
   • @anywhere
   • @ad Platform
3. Video: YouTube
   • Commenting system
   • Top viewed videos
   • Flashmobs
4. Location: Foursquare
   • Digital v analog
   • Game mechanics
   • Push notifications
   • Yelp & Groupon
5. Collaboration: Wave & Skype
   • Challenges when working across time and space
6. Blogs: Gawker
   • Cultivating snark
   • Commenting systems
7. Email: Gmail & Xobni
   • Benchmark open & click through rates
   • NYT most forwarded emails
8. Bookmarks: Delicious
   • Bit.ly
   • Packrati.us
9. News Aggregators: Digg
   • Wisdom of crowds
10. Customer Reviews: Amazon
    • Star system
    • Motivations of reviewers
11. Social Gaming: Zynga
    • Virtual currency
12. Mobile: iPhone app store
    • Open source
    • How mobile changes things
13. Website Design
    • Calls to action
    • Search engine optimization
    • AdWords

SECTION 2: STRATEGY
Review the nuts and bolts of creating a social media strategy, specific to what makes social media different from traditional media. Assignment: Using the profile you’ve created, design a social media campaign strategy, touching upon each of the class topics below.

14. Creating a Workplan
    • Competitor benchmarks
    • Goals
    • A/B Testing
15. Copywriting
    • Different voices for different platforms
16. Measuring Success
    • Free and paid services
    • Are metrics predictive?
    • Engagement versus sales
17. Organizational Culture
    • Social Media Policy
    • Training your staff
    • Overcoming fears
18. Legal & Ethical Considerations
    • Privacy

SECTION 3: CASE STUDIES
Focus will be on class discussion about how to use social media in various contexts, and within different industries. You should make yourself familiar with the social media presence of each of the following brands/situations. Assignment: Write a (digital) case study about a social media decision that the person/organization/situation you’ve been working on is currently facing, using all of the material you’ve created/found.

19. Marketing
    • JetBlue
    • TV show Chuck
20. Customer Service
    • H&R Block
    • Zappos
21. Fundraising
    • @drew
    • Charity Water
22. Crowdsourcing
    • Haiti Crisis Camp
    • #2amt
23. Thought Leadership
    • CNN
    • Chris Brogan
24. Politics & Policy
    • Blue State Digital Obama’s 2008 campaign
    • World Wildlife Fund
25. Personal Branding
    • LinkedIn
    • SXSW
26. Collaboration
    • SalesForce’s Chatter
    • Threadless

WRAP UP: FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Discuss portable social graphs, smart ads, and push recommendations.

Reading List (based on class #)
Selected passages will be chosen from each of the following books, relevant to each of the classes.

0. Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (2009)
1. The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich (2009)
2. How to Twitter (www.mashable.com)
3. The Cult of the Amateur: how today’s internet is killing our culture by Andrew Keen (2007)
4. Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (2008)
5. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (2008)
6. Say Everything: How blogging began, why it matters, what it’s becoming by Scott Rosenberg (2009)
7. The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It by Bernard Girard (2009)
8. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman (2009)
9. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People by Dan Gillmor (2006)
10. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004)
11. Smartbomb: the quest for art, entertainment, and big bucks in the video game revolution by heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby (2006)
12. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson (2006)
13. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik (2007)
14. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott (2007)
15. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan (2009)
16. Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik (2009)
17. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2010)
18. Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing by Chris Anderson (2009)
19. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki (2008)
20. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (2006)
21. The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine (2010)
22. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky (2006)
23. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin (2010)
24. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by Heilemann (2010)
25. Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuck (2009)
26. Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam Penenberg (2009)

RSS Subscriptions or Follow on Twitter

• www.altitudebranding.com
• beth.typepad.com
• blog.guykawasaki.com
• www.chrisbrogan.com
• www.copyblogger.com
• www.fastcompany.com
• www.gigom.com
• www.kaushik.net
• www.mashable.com
• www.readwriteweb.com
• www.techcrunch.com
• www.toprankblog.com

Class Expectations

• Actively participate in class discussions
• Come prepared to bring your opinion and professional experience into the conversation
• Provide counter arguments
• Use Google Wave to collaboratively take classroom notes
• Feel free to tweet during class, provided that it is relevant and constructive to the current discussion. Note that tweet stream will be monitored by the TA.
• Post your assignments to the class wiki. Note that you are expected to provide linked content throughout, and constructively comment on each others work.

————

So clearly it’s way more content than one class could actually cover, and the teacher would really have to bust their ass to pull together this much content, but it was an interesting exercise (for me at least). What am I missing? What am I trying to cover that’s not actually relevent? Know of a better book/blog? Totally bored by this post?