London Calling

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.

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.

An away day from the office isn’t what it used to be.

So, for instance, not so long ago a day’s training at the Ecademy learning about Social Media for Business with self-described Silicon Valley tech geek, blogger and early adopter Louis Gray would have been just that. A day away from the office and all the associated desk-bound projects left there under the watchful eye of an out-of-office message, and maybe a quick and conscientious check-up call over lunch.

Not so now. In a room of perhaps 80 people the vast majority were skilled smartphone ninjas, even the ones still finding themselves baffled over the difference between feedburner and friendfeed (friendburner?), and I was far from the only one checking a few incoming work emails, facebook statuses and bookmarking names of other sources to go check out. On the back row others were enthusiastically tweeting quotes and questions live to Louis and wider the world – Gone are the days when they ask you to switch off your phone before booting up the powerpoint. I’m still trying to decide between the echofon and tweetdeck apps at the moment, having previously preferred easier former option but now being swayed back to the more all-in tweetdeck on recommendation from Louis, one of its first adopters and early evangelists, and having now seen the scale of new tweets I can expect from following him I suspect I’ll be glad of an app that can handle some heavy social media lifting.

All of this certainly helped highlight one of Louis’ central points about how we handle information and overload in the modern working day. That this has fundamentally shifted seemed readily apparent to everyone in the room, and Louis summarised this neatly as a conceptual shift from jobs where people worked full time to jobs that now happened in real time. If the place where you work won’t let you engage with these tools, says Louis, you need to find a new company.

A few days later, and I’m still processing some of the deeper implications of this pattern shift in my working topography and doing a little social media stock-taking. I wouldn’t even pretend to be as fully immersed as Louis so clearly is, but it seems the first signs of a residency in cyberspace are there for all to see. Quickly totaling my own main social media sites and information channels, it seems I’m regularly plugged in to three distinct email accounts and seven social media ecosystems (with multiple accounts in more than one), while connection with this online life shuttles back and forward across a couple of different laptops and a smartphone with its own discreet contact list of phone numbers and text messages. This doesn’t include all of those sites like Amazon where I simply maintain an account rather than participate or post content, or those blogs and bulletin boards (remember those?) I might visit and comment on as part of my broader online browsing and grazing.

Louis likened the buzz we see surrounding services like Twitter today to ten or so years ago when email as a marketing channel for business was really starting to ramp up. To summarize quickly, you likely wouldn’t attend a day’s presentation on Email for Business today, it’s just part of the landscape, and likewise ten years from now Real Time will simply be Time once again.

In the meantime, and again courtesy of Louis, here’s a link to the Online Marketing Blog with some handy hints for those who’ve optimized their social media presence and are now seeking to optimize the way the amount of time they stay immersed.

Tom