London Calling

The big story post conference season was definitely the proliferation of the social media back channel. London Calling’s Digital Account Manager, Katie Moritz explains why much of her working day now involves finding out what people on the internet had for lunch…

I love Twitter. I signed up when I was job searching. My friend told me to use the ‘#whaticando’ hashtag before key successes so employers who are recruiting can find you. She runs a small web design company short of the Guardian budget so she has used Twitter to find and employ over five excellent members of staff.

I discovered other ways to utilise Twitter, such as following tweet streams at events and gain new followers, who I actually met at my first ‘Tweet up‘. This was a new and different social interaction,  I like following my favourite TV show as I watch it live, or at an event or a gig to connect with others.

I went to the Arts Marketing Association conference in July. I followed the stream during key speeches, breakout sessions, at lunch and late night socials (no Twit-pics posted from them)! I became utterly absorbed following Twitter, in particular the backchannel stream during talks. It would have been fascinating (and a little like car-crash TV) to have had the live tweet feed on view.

Re-tweets around the #AMA10 hashtag sent wise words from key speakers to marketers around the world. Tweeters critiqued the speakers and sparked debates. Events and programmes were promoted. All this Twitter activity created the very thing we were being taught about – marketing where the consumers create the buzz themselves.

AMA speaker Christian Payne lives and breathes Twitter. He demonstrated, through a dramatic story about a ropey car accident in the wilderness, how your Twitter network can literally be life saving. He showed us loads of applications that work with Twitter –  Audioboo, Foursquare, Posterous, Flickr and many more. He also celebrated the ‘What I had for lunch’ tweets; we will have these conversations with the our actual colleagues, so why not on Twitter? They add personality to your organisation.

Key learning points?

• Be an organisation with stories to tell that people connect with.
• Have something interesting to say, don’t just ’sell stuff’.
• Create interesting network lists that other can access.
• Think of creative ways to use Twitter and share them.
• Help followers and re-tweet.
• Use your Twitter friends to find an answer instead of Googling.

So, don’t just say it, tweet it!

Following up on our sponsorship of the AMA’s digital marketing day last week, Georgina Turner shares her personal highlights from this year’s social media sell out event.

The day opened with keynote presenter DK, founder of MediaSnackers, starting the day by challenging delegates to reposition the way they use these highly conversational tools as part of their communications mix.

Social Media is “not a mountain to climb but a wave to catch” he claimed, and how right he is. The whole point of catching a wave is if you miss one, there’ll be another along in just a minute, so it’s not like Social Media is an all or nothing effort, and if you’re not ready for the big surf you can always dip a toe in the shallows. Come on in folks, the water’s fine.

Still, multitasking your way through a digital landscape can leave anyone with a brand new raft of questions to answer. For instance we all know the main sites now, but now venues and brand are increasingly getting on board what are their relative pros and cons, and how do you know which is the one your audience will respond most positively to? Perhaps the most important question for people on the day was how do you use these tools to portray your brand or organisation correctly?

The key point to remember is, Social Media is all about people.

Some might consider it corny, or even dangerous, to talk about putting individuals in front of  brands, but as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously noted, “A brand is what people say about you when you are out of the room.

Individuals are at the heart of these communication tools, and when they give our organisations permission to enter their world and interact in their personal space, we have to remember we’re in the room by invitation only.

However, once you’re there you have a great opportunity to tell your networks what is happening with you right now. Given the emphasis on real-time interaction and organic growth (just think of the way the retweet standard on Twitter grew entirely from users) it’s worth remembering that everyone else is experimenting with these tools as much as you are and strategies such as Do, don’t plan and Direct your message, don’t spread it, can often yield quick results which you can then keep modifying and learning from as you go.

So it was very much in this spirit that Rebecca from Pilot Theatre introduced me to AudioBoo, a sound sharing application on my iPhone that can be linked to your Twitter and Facebook sites. There, over our mushroom stroganoff, we recorded a conversation and posted this to the Pilot Theatres Facebook page and there I was having a conversation about SM, posting this to a SM host, and sharing our personal conversation about this latest emergent SM trend as part of the wider discussion.

An appealing factor about the wider Social Media discussion is that it’s measurable. Keynote Jim Richardson, Managing Director of SUMO and author of the excellent Museum Marketing blog introduced me to my new favourite measurement tool which focuses on the level of involvement of audiences and categorises the different types of Social Media users.

From this, if I could offer you any advice it’s catch the wave with your audiences, take the journey to find out what they are doing with your brand and then it’s up to you how far out you go and how long each wave lasts.

The best news is you’re already halfway there. We work in a creative and inspiring sector whose audiences are already actively talking about our shows, events and exhibitions. At heart Social Media tools simply expose the word of mouth that is already going on all around us and give us a new way to meaningfully join in with and learn from the conversation.

With London Calling being headline sponsor for yesterday’s Changing Mix, Changing Strategy digital marketing conference, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to introduce London Calling’s own Internet Marketing Specialist, Damon Segal.

Damon Segal

Damon’s first role for us was a presentation on the Three Stages of Social Media Optimisation (SMO) – create, implement, manage – and an introduction to this latest part of London Calling’s digital offer.

If the sold-out digital marketing day is any indication, social media looks set to remain a hot-button topic for arts marketers for some time to come, and we’d encourage everyone still trying to get their heads around the technology to remember two things:

Go where the conversation is. In exactly the same way you wouldn’t rely solely on displaying brochures in your own front of house, it makes sense to to go out and engage with people where they’re already socialising, where it’s their local bar or their favorite online sites.

The conversation was happening all along. Conversation and sharing are hardly new inventions, and social media sites have simply amplified and linked up conversations that were happening anyway. While the proliferation of new channels and deluge of talk can seem daunting at first, what social sites like Facebook and Twitter give us as arts marketers are tools for being able to see the conversations that were happening around us for the first time – and once you know there’s a conversation happening it’s much easier to join in and be a part of it.

Following someone on Twitter or keeping up with the Facebook posts is all well and good. But it’s still not the same as making reaching out and making a real connection. The virtual equivalent of a quick call or stopping by for a cup of coffee.

With your patrons, there are well-established regular touch points – when they come in to see a show they interact with staff and feel welcome; when they receive an email offering them preview tickets at a discount they feel special and wanted. But how else can your social networking help to solidify that communication? With so many followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook it can feel impossible to make your contact personal. But here are some ideas on how you can move from a transactional to a constant relationship with your patrons.

Make it easy: Most of us are using many different types of social engagement, but not all will have the same technical abilities. Make it easy for people to find you, get started and keep interacting.

Make it engaging: President Obama widened the spread of his message from live speeches, debates and interviews into the social sphere, providing supporters multiple ways to spread the message for him. Rather than just passively consuming content, people became engaged and active participants in his campaign.

Keep it interesting: the more often you add content, post new blogs or reply to comments, the more engaged your patrons will be.

Look at the individuals: Understand your audience and tailor the experience to them. Take advantage of log-in info and user preferences, modify content for younger audiences.

Measure your metrics: Facebook has shown how much people like to follow their own stats. Create measurements for user polls, competitions etc.

Share: Let people share content, see what everyone else is doing and spread the message far and wide.

User-generated content: Take the burden off yourself sometimes. Let your users add their own images as well as posts.

Be consistent: Create reasons to stay in touch. Follow-up on survey results, reply to messages and show that you’re listening to what people have to say.

Create a long-term strategy: Social networking is about more than just setting up a Facebook page and hoping people become fans.  True engagement means full engagement in the channels where you choose to invest. If you’re resource-constrained, it’s better to be consistent and participate in fewer outlets than to spread yourself too thin.

Get your team on board: Any successful social media strategy requires all of your organization’s staff to be on board, from the Finance Director who ok’s the budget to the summer intern. Make it part of everyone’s job to get involved – a few minutes spent regularly every week, enriches your social networking point of view and adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.

Appreciate Your Friends: People who lend you their time, by following your posts, passing on your emails or blogging about a play, they all deserve a thank you. Everyone likes to feel noticed and appreciated.

This post is by London Calling’s guest blogger Sarah O’Hanlon

In anticipation of the AMA’s Digital Marketing Day next week, I’ve been getting to grips with the practicalities of internet marketing and its associated acronyms: SEM, SEO and SMO to name a few of my personal favourites, i.e. Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Optimisation respectively.

This got me thinking about something a lot of us marketers take for granted – the basics of print design.

Sure, there may be best practise guidelines and plenty of examples to hand (just check our racks if you need some new ideas) but what interests me here is how we can use these new digital lessons to revisit our other communications mediums and, for instance, re-imagine our approach to print within this broadening context.

Here then are some of my own thoughts on new approaches to print and how to optimise it’s affect as a vibrant part of a 21st century audience engagement strategy that includes digital, mobile and the whole marketing mix.

Include more than just your URL

It used to be enough to include a simple www.myvenuename.com URL on your print, but now  I’d argue that simply listing your URL is almost counterproductive. Audiences expect you to have a decent website, after all they all have one via facebook, twitter or even personally branded sites, so how much value does simply listing this really add?

Print display is an ideal way to reach new audiences, so we should be thinking of how best to add calls to action that will encourage people to jump online to where all the added value content is,whether it’s curatorial blogs, video trailers for forthcoming productions or even just foregrounding the 3 clicks & You’re Booked benefits of a new online box office system.

Sell the experience

If online is trackable down to the last pay-per-click, then is modern print shifting to a more experiential model? Now that people are as likely to find you via search, land where they like on your site then navigate around by themselves, there can be real value in reconsidering how you want people to engage differently with your printed material.

Returning to the idea of Prestige Format print, what are the added advantages of being able to directly influence the journey people take as they browse your brochure? Are there ways you can look to make your content more immersive? What can we learn from the ways people browse magazines, newspaper or even books. Does your print have a throughline, something that foregrounds the wider experience of your venue or production? What stories can you tell that go beyond the usual mix of production copy, pull-quotes and how to find us information.

Offer multiple ways to engage

Our research shows that offering new ways for people to engage with you can help foster a more modern & up to date impression in the eyes of both new and existing audiences. For instance including SMS short codes on posters and print has been popular for a number of years and is increasingly catching on in our sector. However there’s still a need to tailor the offer to your audience.

Downloadable mobile wallpaper and similar content might be great for fans of blockbuster movies, and I’d count myself in that demographic, but I’m still looking for more from my friendly neighbourhood arts venue. Instead, are there vouchers I can text in for and use at the bar, can I sign up to controlled text message alerts that update me on the added programme around a main exhibition or even for the price of my original text message (perhaps tailored to a one-off premium charge) can I sign up to a new cheaper but more flexible mobile membership scheme with your venue?

Think about sustainability

Audiences are demanding, and we’re seeing mounting evidence that arts audiences are also highly likely to be engaged with broader cultural concerns like climate change. If you’ve not greened your print yet, then the costs of doing so are now highly competitive as more printers are appreciating the added business benefits of using vegetable inks and sustainable paper stocks. If your print is as sustainable as you can make it, is there more you could do to highlight this to audiences and communicate other green initiatives your organisation is working on?

Could you include especially selected pre-show dinner offers with sustainable restaurants, highlight the new selection of organic drinks and snacks in your bar or restaurant or, given that one of the largest parts of our sector’s carbon footprint comes from travel to and from a venue, partner with a friendly carbon-neutral taxi company?

Today is the three week countdown to the Arts Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Day, for which London Calling is the proud headline sponsor.

Following on from the theme of sponsorship in my last post, and given the fact some may note a slight incongruity in a digital marketing event being sponsored by a company best known as a provider of print display, it seemed highly timely to offer some insight into exactly why we think there’s such a big connection between our work taking print out on the road and the new opportunities to be found on the good old information superhighway.

The first time I really started thinking about the effect of digital media on the modern marketing mix was back in the last millennium – 1999 BB (Before Broadband) to be precise – and I was working  box office and communications at The Junction in Cambridge.

I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the basic tide of popular opinion back then went something like this:

“In a couple of years time we won’t need to print any more season brochures because people will simply go online and print them off themselves at home.”

Now, I’ll add a big caveat here and say this wasn’t necessarily the opinion from the marketing team, but it was certainly a trending topic of the day and the first time I encountered the so-called Death-Of-Print concept. And, as something that I’ve been encountering on and off ever since, it seemed a suitable topic for discussion here.

London Calling is  a company built with print marketing at its heart, so you can see how we might think it a good idea to take this kind of talk seriously. The thing is though the predicted trends aren’t bearing out. In fact with the internet breaking, mutating and re-paradigming established business models all over the place, any kind of long distance prognostication is proving a tad hard for people.

Instead let’s focus on what we do know. Change is definitely happening. Conversation has toppled content as online king, and the way we consume and share information is radically shifting our traditional marketing models; or, as some prefer, giving us a more insightful understanding into how those same models actually worked all along.

The question for us is where does a company like London Calling fit within this realignment of priorities? Do we want to stay at the centre of the mix, or are there new perspectives to be gained from experimenting on the edges?

The answer is most likely a combination of the two, but it’s the details of that potential mix that most fascinate us and have led us to trialling new digital products of our own and, ultimately, investing in conference events like this in support of both our own development and that of our clients.

The prediction about everyone home-printing their own brochures may have failed to materialise – hardly surprising given the cost of printer ink compared to pretty much everything else – and in fact London Calling has seen volumes increase year on year, which can be a different kind of concern, and one of the reasons that’s lead to all of our recent sustainability initiatives. However the shared world of marketing, communications and advertising can be a highly sensitive ecosystem, and we’ve all heard that story about what happens when even a single butterfly flaps its wings.

In anticipation of the Digital Marketing Day it seemed fitting to use this blog space in the coming weeks to explore the recent work we have done under the banner of London Calling Digital. Sharing our own learning experiences – the good, the bad, and the error 404s – and offer our own two-cents on the ways print, digital and now locative media may begin to interact in the future.

In my humble opinion it’s a fascinating time to be a marketer, and the levels of expertise, initiative and enthusiasm we’re seeing across the arts to engage meaningfully with their audiences suggests the need to experiment and share our knowledge has never been so timely.

*I was originally going to put ‘Before Google,’ but they first launched in 1998 (to no fanfare whatsoever, which just goes to show how people fail to pay attention to the really important things).

A good conference should resonate long after you’ve handed out your final business card, drained your last networking drink and returned home to tame the wilds of your inbox – And so it is with Communicating The Museum 2009.

Last week we caught up with Rosalind Bherer from the organising team at Agenda, who kindly traveled all the way over from Paris to hand deliver our copies of the final analysis after the vagaries of British fail mail lost the originals in the post (thanks Rosalind).

This got me thinking back over everything we’d heard and all those scrawled notes I’d saved for later, and a stock check of what we’d learned and what we’d done since seemed entirely timely.

If the 2008 conference in Venice was about the tools of online social media, then this year was primarily about the talent and how far and fast things have moved on.

As the analysis clearly states “Social Media is not about Marketing, it’s about Conversation” and this year was all about practical examples from marketing agencies like 1000heads and SUMO and internationally recognised venues like the Brooklyn Museum, Bozar and the Barbican – all of whom are putting their social media money where their word of mouth is. Although I think it’s equally fair to say there were plenty more experts in the audience as well.

If you missed it there’s now a full synthesis available for purchase here. In the meantime, and in time-honoured blawg tradition, here’s a list of some of my favourite learnings:

Who is your social media presence really for?

Markets are conversations, so it’s great to be an active adopter of these conversational tools (early or not) but it’s equally important to consider who you want to be speaking with.

Are you looking to talk with new audiences, existing visitors, specialists in the field or all of the above and more? Sometimes it can pay dividends to listen and find out what people are already keen to talk about. And if they’re talking about you already all the better – good news and bad, you can learn from both.

The tools may be free, but time ain’t cheap

If there was one theme I heard repeated more than any other it was the issue of time as a barrier to adoption. With mounting pressure but no clear direction often coming from your powers-that-be to get on the band wagon and get it done cheap – take a pic, do a blog – it’s important to take a step back and think about what practical measurement criteria best suits you for gauging success.

Is your aim to promote shows and sell tickets, allow audiences a peek behind the curtain or maybe give them exclusive access to special offers and exclusive events? A clear set of performance indicators, no matter how simple and changeable, can make all the difference between being hailed as your venue’s social media evangelist or pilloried as that staffer who just hangs about online following Stephen Fry and looking at lolcat blogs all day.

Evolve. Let the chips fall where they may.

In some ways the binary opposite to my second point, this one can best be summed up as try things out, make mistakes, learn from them (quickly), try again and, perhaps most important of all, remember to enjoy yourself along the way.

It’s this ethos that most directly informed our own decision to jump in and switch our old company website over to a more dynamic, evolving and semi-permanent beta format using freely available Wordpress software. There’s a whole other blog post on what we’ve already learned in the weeks since version one of this site went live but in the meantime here’s one final thought on making the most of the connected world.

And finally

Look beyond the tech.

Seriously.

At heart, and whatever your current platform of choice, social media and Web 2.0 tools are simply another means of taking your message out to those places where your audience already are and finding ways to initiate conversations with them.

I’m reminded of this every time I step into a gallery, theatre or bar and see people picking out print from one of our display racks to share with friends. Brochures and flyers are communications tools too after all, just ones we already understand intuitively.

It wasn’t so long ago that companies were seriously debating banning email in the office as a potential timesink, but now it’s just another accepted part of the communications mix and pretty impossible to imagine working without. In ten years or so real-time services like Twitter, or whichever new start-up ultimately accelerates past them, will almost certainly be as acceptable and intuitive to us as an email broadcast, direct mail or well-placed poster is today.

And so the marketing mix marches on. Here’s looking forward to conference time 2010.

Whatever happened to the good old text message, huh?

That’s the question Sarah O’Hanlon and I were challenged to answer in the latest issue of JAM, the quarterly Journal of Arts Marketing from the Arts Marketing Association.

We were especially drawn to the reasons why mobile has yet to reach a critical tipping point in the arts marketing mix – an unwillingness to risk an accidental tarring with the scuzzball brush? – and suggested that perhaps one of the main barriers to adoption was a tendency to think in terms of large and relatively consistent mailing lists rather than embracing the niche opportunities that can exist in a faster opt in / opt out conversation.

You can download the whole issue here.

To save you looking we’re near the back on pages 21 & 22.