London Calling

So, July is conference season (did we say that already?) and the London Calling team will be out, about and generally plugged in to the best of the best of the arts & cultural keynote and conversational scene over the coming weeks.

Hopefully we’ll see you there, and here’s just a few of the spaces where we’re be hanging out over the next few weeks…

Communicating the Museum: Tomorrow we’ll be boarding flights for Vienna and Agenda’s #CTM10 international Museums and Galleries marketing conference (note the hashtag by the way).

Previous years have seen the conference making its home in Madrid, Venice and Malaga, and while the locales may sound glam all on their own, we have to say its the quality of the content that keeps us heading back for more. On a personal note, some of the best friends I’ve made have been within the coffee breaks of this conference, which just goes to show how friendly everyone is in this sector I think – lucky us, eh?

Change does happen though, and so, apparently, does Shift, so this year we’re also venturing out to the highly regarded Shift Happens conference in York.

This is a first time visit for us, so we’re really looking forward to this one. The emphasis here seems to be much more on technological applications within the arts rather than a focus on marketing, and perhaps the most exciting angle here is the way our sector has a way of  finding its own uses for the dominant technologies of the time. Exciting stuff basically.

Last, but by no means least, the Summer conference season wouldn’t be complete without the sector’s main cultural gathering that is the annual Arts Marketing Association conference.

This year the theme is Pulling Power (something you’re trying to tell us AMA?) and I have to say, looking at the line up of speakers this year, I’m definitely pulled.

I’m especially looking forward to the keynote speeches from Mark Earls and Emanuel Rosen who respectively wrote the books on the new theory of marketing to our crowd / group mentality and the increasing prevalence of word of mouth influence across every channel of the marketing mix.

I’ve read them both more than once, would recommend them both as great speakers to everyone, and even have signed copies of both books on show in the office.

Suffice to day then that July is shaping up to be a very interesting month indeed.

See you there…

While the week may be coming to a close, the office is still very much a-buzz as we look ahead to July and start thinking about our favourite kinds of Pulling Power

That’s the headline theme for this year’s Arts Marketing Association conference, by the way, which aims to explore the ongoing revolution in social marketing and promises to be all kinds of awesome.

In fact we’re looking forward to it so much we decided not to wait and this week went to see Mark Earls, author of Herd (one of my favourite reads of the year) and keynote presenter at the conference talking about social learning and the latest trends in understanding human nature.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re going to the conference this keynote is likely to unpick many of your closest held assumptions about the value we often place on influencers, early adopters and the individual when planning our marketing strategies and tactics.

On the plus side you’ll also likely walk away with some new ideas on how our jobs as marketers are changing towards a model that helps audiences to grow themselves, if that makes sense. And if it doesn’t make sense, then I guarantee you’ll still have lots to talk about. After all,  conversation is one of the key ingredients of any social campaign, right?

In other news, we’ve been very busy indeed on the home front too, with new Account Manager Nina joining the team in the last few weeks, and even newer Account Manager Jason and Digital Account Manager Katie poised to join us shortly.

So, lots of new faces, lots to learn and lots and lots of Social with a capital ‘S’ to look forward to in the weeks to come.

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.

My latest article for the Journal of Arts Marketing talks about the thorny issue of carbon-offsetting and its potential for the (unwitting or otherwise) greenwashing of your company’s marketing mix.

I’d dearly love for London Calling to be a genuinely carbon neutral company, but the simple fact for us is that offsetting our carbon emissions is being viewed as the last resort rather than first or only step on the road to becoming a truly sustainable company. Our prime aim right now is to work to actively reduce the levels of our actual carbon emissions, especially out on the road, and you can find out more about our progress on this and other sustainable initiatives here.

Meanwhile here’s the full article from July’s issue of JAM.

Ready – Steady – Greenwash

So, I originally had a whole series of these articles planned out, but fortunately for me, and my impending copy-deadline, I’ve just lucked out and found the ultimate easy option for greening up your image in an instant.

It basically works like this: Hop online, run some easy numbers through one of the many handy carbon calculator websites you’ll find there, then simply hold aloft your magic credit card, loudly exclaim By The Power of Greenwash then just sit back and wait.

Sooner or later the same nice website will award you a badge or something. Just pop this on to your website, brochure, headed paper etc etc and you’re off. Hey presto, instant official Carbon Neutrality. Well done you.

In a nutshell this and various similar tactics are what people mean when they talk about Greenwashing.

I need to be clear here and say I’ve got nothing against the majority of carbon calculator websites, just the companies who look to them for a cheap and easy out. We recently stumbled across one website that suggested we could offset a whole year of our carbon output for around a thousand pounds. Cheap sure, but on this occasion perhaps reassuringly expensive really is worth more.

On the plus side these sites are a great awareness resource and I’ve frequently used them myself to contribute some kind of meaningful charitable compensation for all the glamorous business travel I seem to do these days – and since it’s my own cash I tend to select my own favoured charities as well, which is why I’m now the proud adopter of some snow leopards and a great white shark amongst other things. Lucky me.

My real problem is with the illusion of sustainability this type of activity can create, both inside a company and for your customers or audiences.

A company doesn’t necessarily have to be actively unscrupulous to fall into this trap, but it can be all too easy to punch in your pin number and simply offset the issue into that mental territory known as someone else’s problem.

To quote from John Grant’s excellent book The Green Marketing Manifesto, “The biggest misconception about green marketing is that it is about making companies look green (my italics).”

In other words, it’s broadly okay to offset your carbon output. It’s even okay to wear the badge and tell people about it. The real trick is in acknowledging that isn’t the end of the journey and you also need to go that extra mile to reduce your actual carbon emissions. Only when you’ve ticked all those boxes of what’s meaningfully achievable should you go looking to offset the shortfall.

My advice is don’t focus on this almost inevitable shortfall as an embarrassing company problem you’d rather wash and spin away, but rather use this as a spur to think about all the creative ways you might start bridging the gap.

Full disclosure: This article was written as a paid for advertorial as part of our ongoing sponsorship of JAM. As sponsor London Calling is responsible for the print production of the journal, and ensures that it is printed to the highest possible standards of sustainability by our print partners Greenhouse Print. This mutually beneficial arrangement allows us the opportunity to regularly raise and discuss green issues within the wider arts marketing community and to highlight examples of best practise that can benefit everyone.