The Theatre Communications Group 2010 National Conference wrapped up last night. I heard word it was the largest in the conference’s history, clocking in at just under 1,000 attendees. A sizable chunk of those folks live tweeted several breakout sessions, mostly [...]]]>

The Theatre Communications Group 2010 National Conference wrapped up last night. I heard word it was the largest in the conference’s history, clocking in at just under 1,000 attendees. A sizable chunk of those folks live tweeted several breakout sessions, mostly under the #TCG2010 moniker.  My presentation, Social Media Strategy: Why ROI Isn’t Enough went quite well. I’ve received so much great input from folks over the past four months about what I should talk about, and was overwhelmed with gratitude from the many good luck emails in the days leading up to my presentation. So without further ado, for those of you who couldn’t be with us in person, and may not have caught the original tweeted link, here goes nothing:

You can also check out the live tweeting commentary. A few folks requested my notes, since I rattled off a bunch more stats.

Shortly after my presentation, my interview podcast with Technology in the Arts also went live! It in, I discuss the most significant findings of my social media research for theatres.

Speaking of, now I’m off to gather my thoughts on speaking at Americans for the Arts next weekend in Baltimore about Branding Yourself Through Social Media with the estimable Ian David Moss.

Possibly related posts:

1. Theatre & Social Media in 2009
2. A Social Media Measurement Plan
3. Social Media Strategy Recommendations for 2010
4. What do YOU want to know about Theatre and Social Media?

Ok, not Facebook per se, but a rant about theatres using social media inauthentically. I get it, you’re busy, there are a lot of social media platforms, and you’re not exactly sure which one(s) are worth your time. So, [...]]]>

Ok, not Facebook per se, but a rant about theatres using social media inauthentically. I get it, you’re busy, there are a lot of social media platforms, and you’re not exactly sure which one(s) are worth your time. So, you decide to link your Facebook account to your Twitter feed and not bother checking in on your Twitter community. A full 25% of TCG theatres on Twitter have committed this tragedy (see autosync below).

I’ll be going more in depth about each of these segments at the TCG conference next week, but for now, let’s focus in on this Facebook issue (MailChimp, TwitterTools, and TwitterFeed are also culprits, but far less popular than the Facebook method). If you’re a theatre on Twitter, you probably care a lot about the volume of buzz: the number of tweets mentioning your brand. I call this @mentions. The graph below shows the difference in this metric between “Real” tweeters (any theatres that posted specifically to Twitter, via any method they want, anytime in the last month) and “AutoSync” tweeters (those theatres who blindly and shamelessly fill their tweet stream with solely Facebook posts.

On average, if you’re tweeting daily for real, you’re seeing 5x the volume of buzz each week about your brand. Now of course, there are also those special theatres that get nearly 100 @mentions each week. I’ll be talking about them too next week. Next, check out the weekly blue line compared to the daily red line (still on the above graph). Even if you have time to update Twitter just once a week, you’ll get higher buzz on average than simply autosyncing your Facebook profile.

And what about the fan base?

Say you can only update Twitter once a month (!); you’re still likely to have a higher fan base than those theatres who “tweet” daily Facebook updates. And just who are these culprits? n00b’s who don’t know any better?

It turns out, sort of. It looks like once theatres hit their one year anniversary on Twitter, they tend to start really paying attention to How to Tweet. And the longer they’ve been around, they more frequently they’re tweeting. That’s real good news.

So maybe I’m being a little too harsh? Let’s see what the fans have to say. But first, let me say, the theatres I’m calling out here are by no means the only bad guys–I just happened to notice these tweets while finishing up my research. I also have no way of knowing if the theatres may have reached out to these tweeps in some non-public way (via DMs or on another platform). But let’s get real here folks.

So you offer a give away, an eager fan reaches out, but nobody ever responds. A disenchanted fan? Oops.

You’re promoting a show, an eager fan wants to ask a question about said show, but nobody ever responds. A potential lost sale? Oops.

Don’t forget it’s not only your audience members who are tweeting about you. Also your sponsors. Those folks that give you free stuff. Bet they would have appreciated a thank you & a you’re welcome. Oops.

Here’s another fan, a subscriber it seems. For now at least. No response to her. I wonder if she would have invited friends along the next time she attended a show. Oops.

You’re always wondering if social media sells tickets. Here’s a potential sale. But no response. Oops.

What a great compliment from an awesome colleague. Too bad there was no response. Oops.

A student, excited about a play, willing & able to recommend it to all her friends. What a missed opportunity for audience engagement. Oops.

Other times, it’s potential artistic collaborators you’re missing out on. What a bummer. She could have been a great playwright to bring on board. Or at least, chat with for a moment online. Oops.

The sad thing is, most of these theatres will never know I was calling them out. I’m not their Facebook fan, I haven’t liked their page, I won’t be commenting on their blog, and I won’t be bothered to call their box office. But I will be talking about them on Twitter. Do you want to guide the conversation about your brand online, or do you want to leave it in my very capable hands?

Possibly related posts:

1. The Epic Facebook Experiment

The final presentation of our social media strategy for Vocalo.org happened on Thursday. It went really well, barring the fact that we went wayyyy over our allotted time. In the four days between the

The final presentation of our social media strategy for Vocalo.org happened on Thursday. It went really well, barring the fact that we went wayyyy over our allotted time. In the four days between the first draft of this that I posted online and our final presentation, we made a lot of tactical changes based on feedback from readers, our friends, and the awesome new Managing Director at Vocalo, Silvia Rivera who was incredibly generous with her time and insights. And there’s still a final white paper to finish editing that goes into greater detail about the process and strategy (I’ll be posting that too!).

We had 3 interesting questions during the Q&A post presentation:

1. Why no YouTube?
2. Is Foursquare worth the effort?
3. In addition to teaching users to create, why not find creators would will also be users?

Thought provoking all.

After MANY long debates, we landed on not pursuing a YouTube campaign because we couldn’t imagine a possibility (in the near future) where someone would search for content (on say, hand gun control) on YouTube, come across Vocalo’s channel, find their way to Vocalo.org, and become a regular listener, much less content creator. We believe that in the short term at least, Vocalo should be focusing on a Chicago audience, interested in Chicago’s issues, and willing to engage in Chicago’s community. YouTube seemed too anonymous, too disperse, and too resource intensive. But, we could be wrong.

We presented a few Foursquare campaigns that Vocalo could test pilot, but  our implementation plan calls for them to essentially just keep an eye on Foursquare for the next six months. We think Foursquare would be amazing tool to use for community engagement. So far, we’ve mostly seen big consumer brands and media companies rolling out campaigns, but the potential for political and social campaigns seems enormous. But, we could be wrong.

The last question was really more of a comment, and it struck us as pretty genius (hat tip to James Warner). Vocalo could reach out to street artists, political activists, and other local content creators, and partner with them using Vocalo’s platform. This would increase quality of the content on Vocalo’s site, and reach a wider community of users. Of course there’s a danger that these folks could abuse Vocalo’s platform, but that’s the case with any new user/contributor.

As we were wrapping up this project, both Meredith and I have been marveling at the amount of information we were able to collect about Vocalo, just via social media channels, and how closely our recommendations line up with the changes they’re already in the process of implementing over the next few months. I was also thrilled to realize that all of the research I did on theatres & social media turned out to be really applicable in the social media strategy for an entirely different industry.

Ironically, at the exact moment we were giving this presentation in class, Beth Kanter was giving a conference call with TCG member theatres on “Using Social Media Strategically for Theatres.” I was really bummed I had to miss it, but via the magic of hashtags, Beth’s great wiki, and the notes of a few colleagues, I got quickly up to speed.

But now I’ve really got to get back to wrapping up my thesis so I can actually graduate in 23 days…

Possibly related posts:

1. Vocalo.org: A Social Media Strategy for Public Media
2. Social Media Strategy Presentation
3. Social Media Strategy Recommendations for 2010

My social media class is finally wrapping up, and our final presentation is on Wednesday. As you might remember, I’ve been working to develop a social media strategy for public media streaming radio station Vocalo. Along [...]]]>

My social media class is finally wrapping up, and our final presentation is on Wednesday. As you might remember, I’ve been working to develop a social media strategy for public media streaming radio station Vocalo. Along the way, I hoped to be able to apply what I know about how social media works in the theatre, and learn a bit more about the public media system. We’ve already written a paper about the current social media footprint of Vocalo, now our goal is to develop a strategy for moving forward.

Here’s where I need your help. What am I missing? What seems unrealistic or just plain wrong? Other than Slideshare’s (slightly annoying) habbit of reformatting font sizes, colors, and inability to maintain animating features…

UPDATE: very cool of both Andrew Gill (Producer, Chicago Public Radio) and Sylvia Rivera (Managing Director, Vocalo.org) to reach out to us with support and suggestions on the presentation. As a consumer, I really appreciate when companies notice and applaud the folks talking about their brand. As a student, it’s awesome to hear that the analysis is in line with what the company’s planning for the future.

Possibly related posts:

1. Revisiting Vocalo’s Social Media Strategy
2. Social Media Strategy Presentation
3. Social Media Strategy Recommendations for 2010
4. Theatre & Social Media: TCG 2010

What drives profitability in the theatre?

First, let me be clear: the reasons to make profit are many fold: with this year’s extras, we can make better art next year, provide more for artists (and administrators), lower access barriers [...]]]>

What drives profitability in the theatre?

First, let me be clear: the reasons to make profit are many fold: with this year’s extras, we can make better art next year, provide more for artists (and administrators), lower access barriers for audiences, ask less of our donors, and have greater economic and cultural impact in our communities. So we’re not making profits just for their own sake, but instead for sake of the art(ist).

One of the first issues to solve is data collection. Without clear and consistent variables across time and place, it’s hard to form any hypotheses about predictive drivers.

But let’s break down the competitive pressures in the theatre and see what we find.There’s a lot of juggling going on, and some of those balls are on fire (see how hard I’m stretching to make the picture fit?), so forgive my simplification. It should be the case that:

Buyer have very little power because there’s many more of them than there are us. But it turns out they don’t need much power because we’ve overbuilt seating capacity and there are an increasingly infinite* array of leisure time activities. We’ve tried to increase switching costs via annual subscriptions and membership programs, but those are clearly on the decline as well.

• From the perspective of an outsider, I’d like to find some predictive variables that drive ticket prices.
• From the perspective of an audience member, just how elastic are ticket prices?

Suppliers have very little power (again) because there’s many more of them than there are us. Even though on average 60% of a theatre’s budget is spent on personnel, the ratio of qualified people (artists and administrators) to available positions is very very high, and though execution is difficult to measure, rents tend to fall to the firm. Here’s what I’d like to know:

• What impacts salaries in the theatre? How do we identify the driving forces? Does the presence of other theatres in town drive the market price of talent up? Does the education level of applicants? Do annual ticket sales? If so, by how much? How does tenure have an impact?
• What objective impact does a change in Artistic Director (and Managing Director?) have on programming, ticket sales, and/or business strategy?

Barriers to entry are laughable. Anyone can start a theatre company; there’s no license involved (as in hospitals), it requires relatively little capital (compared to say manufacturing), and distribution channels are wide open (online ticket retailers are aplenty). Rarely do founders think of serving a target market with a niche product (though Single Carrot is off to a good start), thus many of us have drifted towards the center in our quest to capture market share. Here’s what I’d like to know:

• In theory, a mission serves 3 masters: donors, clients, and staff, for the purposes of evaluation, boundary setting and motivation. Everyone complains that mission statements “aren’t good” and/or “shouldn’t be changed (often).” But with these (at least somewhat) objective measures, I’d like to see an actual comparative study of missions across location and time indexing their impact for motivation, boundary setting, and potential for evaluation.
• Once a theatre enters a market, there is a fairly well documented organizational life cycle. We know that it exists, and we know what features characterizes each of the stages on a macro level, but we don’t know how organizations leap from one stage to the next, how long they can stay there, or what minimum efficent levels of scale are at each stage.
• There’s a clear selection bias of only looking at successful theatres (or even those still in existence) and interpreting cause based on effect (because it could be the case that theatres that have closed had the same cause with a different effect). But I’d like to know a little bit more about the path to extinction. Looking backwards, what were some of the key decision points where things could have gone either way?

Substitutes abound. Sort of. It all depends in how we define ourselves. Which we’ve always had trouble doing. Do folks buy tickets because they’ve learned to value the cultural opportunity via arts education at a young age? Or do they just want to take a few hours off in search of a good laugh/tear jerker? Does the reputation of donors increase in their community in line with the size/consistency/transparency of their gifts? Or are they just looking for a tax break? Clearly this is more of a spectrum, less of a dichotomy. But strictly speaking, a product or service is a(n economic) substitute only if a change in your price impacts a substitute firm’s demand (or vice versa). Simply: when you raise ticket prices $10, do more people start attending the local movie theatre? When donations increase at the symphony, are you left with fewer donors? If so, you’ve just found your substitutes.

Competitive rivalry is fierce. As one of my classmates proclaimed this morning, “a curtain is not a sustainable competitive advantage.” It is difficult if not impossible to achieve productivity gains in the theatre: in other words, we can’t replace actors with robots (yet?). With the constant turn over in Artistic Directors, our programming trends are in constant flux, and our mission statements are wide enough to drive a truck through. However, theatres also share resources via co-productions, a common artistic & admin pool, companies in residence, and the dispersion of ideas propogated through foundation grants. Here’s what I’d like to know:

• In theory, rivalry should drive innovation (for an industry seeking high returns on resources). Many believe that innovation can be systematized–that a focus on the process yields better results than restricting your eyes to the prize. One force shaping how much innovation an industry undergoes is the net entry rate of that industry. In short, if you have many firms entering and exiting the field, ideas flow more easily between the remaining firms. I’d like to see within particular regions the inflow and outflow rates of theatres, and how that impacts both programming and managerial decisions.
• More generally, what are the revolutionary ideas that have changed the theatre industry? Technical advances are a little easier to identify: the advent of electricity fundamentally changed our ability to manipulate light and sound; building an indoor stage expanded the length of time during the day and during the year that we could perform. Then there are the business model advances like repertory companies, subscription tickets, education departments, and co-productions. But I’ve yet to find a relatively comprehensive study of the economic (rather than simply artistic) shifts in modern theatre history. It’s a little overwhelming to think of, so in discrete chunks, on an industry-wide level, I’d like to know things like:
  • The change in ratio of artists to administrators over time
  • The change in ratio of earned to contributed income over time
  • The change in total seating capacity over time (relative to the change in the nation’s population?)
  • The change in the number of theatres per capita over time
  • The change in average length of run (and actor weeks!) over time
  • The ratio of rural:suburban:urban theatres over time
  • The proportion of theatres at each TCG budget level over time
  • The professionalization (proxied by graduate degree holders?) of artists, administrators, and boards
• We don’t often think of market share within the theatre, when it would seem to be fairly easy to do so. Within your city, do you know what share of arts-based revenue your theatre captures? Do you know when the entire pie expands (or shrinks)?

A little idea I’ve been kicking around for awhile is how to create a merger and acquisition market for the theatre, simply for the sake of data collection. Or maybe it’s a franchise market. In short, I want to know which theatres out there are figuring out ways of doing it better than the rest. Much like in my social media research, I want industry benchmarks that are simpler than the annual fiscal surveys. I want metrics driven by theory rather than history. I want case studies that highlight success stories. I want clearer bounds to capacity for growth in a particular area. I want to spot regions or customer segments that are under-served. I want theatres with R&D budgets attached to specific objectives. I want a web site that contains these resources and a community of art makers that embrace and critique it.

I’m not interested in data for the sake of collecting reams of paper terabytes. But I think that by looking at industry structure we can begin to seek out pockets of innovation that could make the field stronger (and maybe a few lucky theatres more profitable). No doubt some of this already exists on the interwebs, and I just haven’t happened upon it. And someday, someone will finally start paying me to do some of this research. Until then, I settle for work study grants and graduate research fellowships.

*not strictly mathematically possible

This guy asks “What would VIP service in Economy Class Look Like?” His premise was interesting:

Foursquare is taking off like gangbusters, and it’s got me excited about combining social media with actual social interactions. Last week, Rafael Gallegos of New York Theatre Workshop asked me, “We have foursquare checkins, but I’d really like to run a [...]]]>

Foursquare is taking off like gangbusters, and it’s got me excited about combining social media with actual social interactions. Last week, Rafael Gallegos of New York Theatre Workshop asked me, “We have foursquare checkins, but I’d really like to run a deal for the mayors but don’t know how to begin. any thoughts?” So here’s what I would do.

The BACKGROUND:

NYTW “provokes, produces and cultivates the work of artists whose visions inspire and challenge all of us.” They’re about 30 years old, located in the East Village, and have roughly a $5 million annual budget. They’ve got 2,756 fans on Facebook (posting about twice a day), 992 followers on Twitter (also tweeting about twice a day), just under 5,000 views total from their 6 YouTube uploads, and have thus far had 29 check-ins on Foursquare from 15 users.

Top Secret is their next production; tickets go on sale to general public Jan 29, and first preview is Feb 24, closing March 28. A shortened description of the play: It’s 1971 and the nation is at war. A federal court blocks The New York Times from publishing the top-secret history of US invovlement in Vietnam. Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham has a single day to decide whether to print these Pentagon Papers.  More here.

Foursquare is just under a year old location-based mobile social networking game. Last known user count was ~ 200,000 but the press loves them, and they’ve got wicked cool ideas on how businesses (and users) can use them. Most importantly, they’re open to suggestions.

The MISSION:

• Introduce new people to New York Theatre Workshop
• Have some fun with current NYTW audience members
• Establish connections with other interesting local businesses (and their employees/customers!)
• Test a new model for marketing

The SET UP:

Think secret scavenger hunt + free ticket give-away + social media. Users unlock “Top Secret” badges by checking in at businesses far and wide all over NYC (maybe elsewhere too?). Unlock enough badges, and users win free tickets to the show. Easy to adjust this one: start the game with 5 pairs of free tix to the first 5 folks who get to the final badge. If there’s tons of interest, enter everyone else into a contest and give away 5 more pairs. So…badges. What do they look like? Maybe something like

• Muckracker: for checking in at the new york times and the village voice
• Presidential Pardon: for checking into a police station after 8pm
• Watergate Watch: for checking in to 3 hotels in NYC
• Theatre Nerd: for checking in to 3 places tagged theatre in NYC
• Spook Alert: for checking into the UN and a kinkos in the same week
• Pulitzer Prize: for acquiring all 5 badges above

The GAMEPLAN:

• Contact Foursquare to help with the ‘badge across businesses’ idea. They’ve already done similar in Chicago and Las Vegas.
• Refine the Gameplan ideas above. I’m not a dramaturg (ok, sometimes I am, but not now) and I haven’t read the play. There are most definitely better clues and names that involve users with the contents of the play. Anyways: these are all preserved for prosterity online, and thus not very “secret” anymore.
• Put a foursquare widget on the front page of NYTW.org.
• Establish a dedicated twitter hashtag (#topsecret is already being used. #topsecretnytw is too long/confusing. maybe #topsecret79?)
• Tweet clues to users once a day. Make it fun. When folks start unlocking badges, congratulate them via twitter. Host a Twitter widget on the Top Secret page of NYTW.org that consolidates all of the hashtags so users can see what’s going on in real time.
• Post (google image) photo clues to your Facebook fans. Encourage them to plot together collectively.
• Encourage users to upload YouTube video about their search for the Pulitzer. Grab a flip cam yourself and make some clues video-based rather than just text based.
• Inspire some inter-city competition by inviting American Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage to copy the model and use it for Paradise Lost and 39 Steps (both conveniently opening the same weekend).

The tools to MEASURE:

• Every day count @nytw79, #topsecret79, FB engagements, YouTube videos. The every day part is important because you’re constantly testing out which promotion strategies are working best (text v. video v. photo, and on which platform)
• At the end of the game, compare the total ticket sales of Top Secret, the “new ticket buyers” for Top Secret, and the number of press articles generated by the game.
• Post game, survey (you remembered to collect email addresses, right?) users about their experience with the game. Is there increased awareness of NYTW? Are they more likely to consider going to NYTW in the future, even if they didn’t attend Top Secret itself? etc. More questions will arise as the game is played out.

Why I think this will work:

• NYTW has a staff member who is passionate about and interested in Foursquare
• NYTW is located in an urban environment with a relatively high penetration of FS users
• NYTW has some degree of experience using other social media platforms
• Foursquare is in search of interesting business/non-profit uses of the game

Want to learn more about Foursquare? Check out my survey of theatre’s use of it.

Any thoughts?

Teddy Goff, of Blue State Digital, came to speak to my Social Media Marketing class last week. I’ve got to admit: even after reading his bio, I was a little jealous of Beth Kanter guest [...]]]>

Teddy Goff, of Blue State Digital, came to speak to my Social Media Marketing class last week. I’ve got to admit: even after reading his bio, I was a little jealous of Beth Kanter guest speaking at the Stanford GSB Power of Social Technology class. But ten minutes into his lecture, I was hooked.

First, the video.

Then, the words:

The 3 Principles Guiding Obama’s Digital Strategy:

1. Transparency. This meant giving complex issues their full day on stage instead of shaving them down to 10 word answers.
2. Authenticity. This meant going “off message” to show the candidate as a person instead of a brand.
3. Engagement. This meant asking users what they wanted, and showing that you’re listening.

The campaign’s mission:

1. Communicating. Users want to see other users like themselves online. Through testing (more on this below), they found users preferred “real” videos over “highly-produced” ads. This much communication required hiring lots of folks to produce content.
2. Organizing. The more they talked about what people were doing, the more they did it. Along the way, they realized they had to base the digital strategy in existing relationships. This much organizing required a lot of volunteers.
3. Fundraising. Making it about the # of people donating instead of the $ increased traffic and total donations. They found donors, no matter how little they had donated, were far more engaged with the campaign after they donated. They had great success with a contest that tied small-amount donors to big-donor rewards. Gimmicks work. Sometimes merchandise made more profit than fundraising; that’s ok.

And then came the answers to our many questions.

• Email lists were the most important asset they had. Far more so than Facebook fans.
• Test everything. Say you’re sending an email. Take 1% of the list, and split them into 2 groups. Send one group one version of an email, and send the other group a different version. Wait an hour. Use whichever email has the highest click through rates to the entire group. You can test to, from, subject lines, and body text. You can test the color of the donate button you’ve embedded in your email. You can test your website too: from the titles of page tabs, to whether your “donate” button should instead read Contribute, Please Donate, or Donate Now. Apparently, it mattered.
• Counter messaging only helped when everybody was already aware of the smear.
• Facebook wasn’t (as) important then, but it is now. Twitter legitimizes Facebook by making social media an industry rather than just a single website. When Facebook made status updates the center of the FB experience (instead of the wall, or personal info), it revolutionized social media. Facebook photos and videos drove more engagement than text-based wall posts.

And just a few general ideas that he threw out:

• They didn’t have to sell a product people didn’t like, just one they didn’t know. This made their job considerably easier.
• Almost everything everyone does is targeted towards current users. No one’s figured out how to engage undecideds or non-supporters. But in non-political spheres, consumers are generally brand agnostic.
• Consider the kind of relationship that your customer wants to have with you.

It’s that last one that hit me like a ton of bricks. What kind of relationship do ticket buyers (or more generally, members of your community) want to have with their theatre? You’re never going to be a part of their daily lives. You might be a part of their monthly lives. When your paths do cross, what could you probably be doing better?

Here’s a few things that came to mind:

Be more transparent. I (as a consumer) want to know what’s going on behind the scenes, literally, and figuratively. More quarterly reports, and less 3 year old innacurate 990s. When a play on your stage isn’t up to snuff, tell me what’s working and what’s still being worked on. Stop treating Artistic and Managing Directors as the (wo)men behind the curtain and let me see them as real people. That extends all the way to actors too–I like seeing them out of costume just as much as I do onstage.

Understanding the importance of me seeing people “like me.” For a long time we’ve talked about the importance of seeing like-minded folks in the audience, but when I’m checking out a theatre’s online presence, I’m also looking for folks like me. That means on your website, on your Facebook fan page, even checking to see who else is tweeting about you. What if one of your marketing interns stood in the lobby with their flip cam to capture what your audience looked like?  You can edit selectively. Or get first time audience members to post a comment to your Facebook page, make a contribution to your blog, or tweet about their experience. This applies for 50 year olds the same as 20 year olds. Know the demographics of your (social media) audience.

We need more content (creators). I know everybody’s in a hiring freeze, but over the past few years I’ve been seeing more and more of these folks as permanent staff. Still appalling to me that most of my classmates (at both schools) don’t know squat about video editing, photo-shopping, or blog writing. I’ve got an inkling that designers who’ve been working in the theatre for awhile might not be the best people for this job, but that’s more anecdotal than data-driven. In light of the “real” versus “produced” note above, I think designers would be driven crazy by the low-(production)-quality bar that this kind of job requires. If I had a staffing survey to do over again, I’d ask more questions about that.

In fundraising: people > dollars. I’ve rarely seen capital campaigns that focused on the number of folks participating over the dollars raised. Although, I’m wondering if anyone’s yet undertaken a capital campaign that has really embraced social media. Maybe it’s too early for it, but to me it’s an exciting prospect. Especially with ideas like this. I want to see theatres experimenting more with gimmicks. With contests. With merchandising. When’s the last time you actually wanted to wear that t-shirt you saw in the gift shop?

Test everything. Again with the problematic hiring freezes. But this is what I get the most passionate about. In a recent discussion about which should be the image on the front of our marketing brochure for next season, my suggestion was to poll our subscribers. Or our single ticket buyers who we want to start subscribing. Every time someone lands on our webpage, or clicks onto our Facebook fan page, or opens an email from us, it’s an opportunity to stop TELLING them something, and instead start ASKING them something. Every week we’re looking at our Google Analytics, but when’s the last time we actually made a change based on the stats? How often do we forget to use a control group so that we know how well the “test” worked?

But do it quick and dirty. There’s a lot to do, and never enough bodies in the office. So (especially when you’re not printing it out), form a hypothesis, make a decision, release it to the wild, and see what works. Throw everything at the wall and watch what sticks. Lather, rinse, repeat. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes (but don’t forget that transparency thing when you do). One of the sort of magical things about social media is that it is time intensive, but incredibly cheap.

My latest experiment is this new blog. What’s the last experiment you tried? How’d it work out?

I updated the social media strategy presentation for my Artistic Director/Managing Director/senior staff, incorporating more of the research findings, and corrected a few formatting issues. The meeting date’s been set: Jan 25! Of course, the marketing office has already [...]]]>

I updated the social media strategy presentation for my Artistic Director/Managing Director/senior staff, incorporating more of the research findings, and corrected a few formatting issues. The meeting date’s been set: Jan 25! Of course, the marketing office has already been moving forward: finally launched the Yale Rep Facebook page.

Possibly related posts:

1. Social Media Strategy Recommendations for 2010
2. Vocalo.org: A Social Media Strategy for Public Media
3. Revisiting Vocalo’s Social Media Strategy

Organizational goals, Industry bench marks, Success Metrics, Future growth opportunities for Yale Rep’s social media strategy in 2010. Help me make sure this presentation to my Artistic Director, Managing Director, Director of Marketing, and Associate Dean make them leap from their [...]]]>

Organizational goals, Industry bench marks, Success Metrics, Future growth opportunities for Yale Rep’s social media strategy in 2010. Help me make sure this presentation to my Artistic Director, Managing Director, Director of Marketing, and Associate Dean make them leap from their chairs in excitement. What am I missing? What sounds impossible? How could I make it stronger? On slideshare.

Possibly related posts:

1. Social Media Strategy Presentation
2. Vocalo.org: A Social Media Strategy for Public Media
3. Theatre & Social Media: TCG 2010
4. Revisiting Vocalo’s Social Media Strategy