Welcome to the 21st Century

Anyone up for some irony today?  Good, because here it is.  A one Mr. Greg Sandow recently posted an entry on his blog entitled, “Don’t Do It Online”.  Catchy title.  What does “it” mean?  For Mr. Sandow “it” has the Liz Lemon connotation of business.  More specifically he is of the belief that one should not promote one’s art organization online.  Really, Mr. Sandow?  You could not be more wrong.

First, I’d like to point out that this blog happens to be on the internet.  I received a link to the blog post via an e-mail from the Arts Journal.  If I am not mistaken, that is promotion via the internet.  I would be able to take this post more seriously, if it had been a newspaper article or a story on the radio.  Don’t bash the medium of promotion you’re using to promote yourself.  That’s just silly.

Mr. Sandow mentions how a performing arts center created a blog to promote a concert, complete with videos from the musicians.  He says and I quote “But none of the varied stuff got any comments, which surely means that hardly anyone was reading it.” What? Think again, Mr. Sandow.  Just because people aren’t commenting on a video doesn’t mean they’re not seeing it.  I view at least 20 youtube videos each week and have never commented on a single one.  I have read hundreds of articles online without commenting.  Not everything is worth a comment.  By Mr. Sandow’s logic, only 5 different people have viewed his post since there are only 6 comments written by 5 people.  That is obviously wrong as I read the blog, but did not comment on the actual page.  I also sent it to my professor and a couple of my friends, who in turn read the blog without posting a comment.  If it’s views you’re worried about, try using Google Analytics.  It can help you track unique views and define your audience and a bunch of other swell things.  Also facebook sends the administrators of fan pages statistics about the activity on their pages.  It’s not like these things aren’t being tracked.

“…putting things online is probably a waste of time…”  All I can do is shake my head in disgust.  If this was the early 90s, I would agree with this sentiment.  But seeing as it the year 2010, and we have such inventions as internet-capable phones, putting things online IS a great use of time. Using the internet is the best way to reach audiences, especially newer and younger audiences.  Our society is incredibly connected and informed—we crave information.  Not having a website is organizational suicide.  It takes a person 3 seconds to type the name of an arts organization into Google.  It’s so much easier and faster than calling the organization and asking them to send a brochure.  Spend 20 minutes reading a website and checking out reviews, or wait 48 hours for a brochure with limited information to arrive in your mailbox?

It’s also pretty obvious Mr. Sandow hasn’t heard of viral marketing. Sally sees a video posted by Arts Organization A and sends it to 5 friends and puts it on her facebook page and twitter.  Then, her five friends each send the video to five friends and post the video on their social network sites.  Those 25 friends do the same, and all of a sudden you’ve reached hundreds of people in a matter of seconds. Maybe Arts Organization A doesn’t sell 100 new subscriptions because of this video, but they’ve put their name in people’s minds.  You don’t need to understand Pascal’s triangle to know that viral marketing is a great method of communicating with the public.

I am by no means suggesting using the internet as your only vehicle for marketing. However, it should be a player in your annual marketing campaign.  In order to be effective, you must know how to reach your markets.  Don’t discount the internet and the power of social media.

-C

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

While I stayed home and watched television on my computer Thursday night, I viewed several commercials promoting my activities of choice for the evening.  PNC Bank was advertising its new “Virtual Wallet.”  In the commercial is poses the question:  Go see a movie and spend $12 or stay home and watch hulu.com and save $12.  The other commercial was advertising Direct TV.  The ad featured a pretty girl and a good looking dude who spends the whole ad trying to get this girl to go on a date with him.  He suggests the idea of going to the movies, the ballet, rock climbing, dinner, a gallery, all of which the girl turns down.  His final suggestion is watching television.  She smiles all big like and then agrees to watch television with the poor kid.  Golly gee willikers, arts world!  This is bad!

Dear Arts Marketers, you certainly have your work cut out for you.  What’s going to happen to live performing arts if everyone stays home to watch television on a Friday night?  I think there are two options.  We can either fight it or work the trend to our advantage.  If we fight it, we’re going to have to do something drastic to get people off their couches and into the theatres.  I know art executives around the world will die a little on the inside when I suggest this, but what if we make tickets cheaper?  Perhaps we can bundle with local restaurants so both the local economy benefits.  I know ticket sales on average cover a mere 30% of the total operating budget, but we have to do something.  Arts organizations have to be the ones to change because we certainly aren’t going to be able to convince Americans to come to a show when the cheapest ticket isn’t even under $50.  We have to make the experience easier and better for the consumer or we won’t have an audience base any longer.

Our other option is work the trend to our advantage.  So people want to stay at home on Friday night, so what?  Why not stream live for a fee?  Indiana University streams their operas live.  You can even watch them after the show has stopped running.  The best part is that it’s free!  Now, I realize that it isn’t fiscally responsible or commercially practical to provide this service for free.  However, with the dawning of the internet capable television, such as this one from Sony , we can stream right into the consumers living room!  I know companies like the Metropolitan Opera have their own channel, but it’s only available on the computer and you have to pay for a subscription.  What if we created some sort of arts channel that was like Pay per View and the consumer could watch live and archived concerts, operas, and plays at their leisure? 

If we want to continue to exist, arts organizations must be relevant.  I know this is difficult because relevancy often requires more money than arts organizations have to spend.  Remember small progress is still progress.  Long live the arts!

--C