London Calling

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

I spend a lot of time thinking about print in one form or another and, whether it’s meetings with clients, planning campaigns, researching different audience segments or just sitting in a bar with friends and watching how people approach our racks, one thought comes through loud and clear.

People love print.

Note, I didn’t necessarily say financial directors, front of house staff or even marketers, just people. Oh, and before this starts to come across as a digital marketing versus trad marketing screed of some kind, let me also say I love my iPhone, am hooked on Twitter and buy a load of stuff online (including tickets) like everyone else.

And none of this means that print, and our relationships to it, isn’t changing.

Because I’m fascinated by evolution, I like to talk a lot about how the marketing mix functions as an ecosystem and how, like everything else, print evolves.

Evolution is slow, difficult to spot in the field and, crucially, not a conscious process, so adaptations that might seem entirely sensible to intelligent designers are often lost in favour of seemingly counter-intuitive but highly efficient solutions that work just fine in the real world.

For example, given the flexibility of modern websites to create new pages and update content in real time versus the predetermined size, page count and word limits of brochures, it would make sense that marketers would shift to a quicker, cheaper and more efficient flyer or postcard format with a simple call to action. The obvious tactic being to nimbly attract people’s interest then encourage them online as swiftly as possible so they land where all the good stuff is.

It makes sense in a tactical kind of way, and there’s likely all kinds of efficiencies involved, however looking at the print display campaigns we manage, and the trends over time, I’m starting to recognise the beginnings of a different pattern.

In simple terms, I’ve started to think of this emergent trend as a shift towards what I’ve called prestige format print.

Prestige print is an approach to design and content that eschews the lowest cost to highest content ratio of many brochures in favour of investing in a deliberately high quality product that enhances the reading experience.

Quick examples of prestige print would include an investment in higher quality print stocks, value-added copy such as Q&A’s with artists, and a design process that favours open white spaces mixed in with text and often devotes whole pages to single unadorned images.

The aim is to deliver an artifact with lasting value. A piece of print that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table, serves as a direct statement of your own interest in innovative arts culture and encourages repeat readings over a simple short-term browse and bin.

Now that the web is the default destination for information on demand, perhaps print is changing to meet a different set of audience expectations and satisfying a need for a more lasting and tangible engagement with modern venues. One that runs in parallel with the way we engage with our audiences online.