London Calling

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.

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).