What should we adopt? How can we adapt?

This post also appears as part of the Arts Marketing Blog Salon hosted by Americans for the Arts.

While reading over the Arts Marketing Blog Salon entries this week, particularly David’s entry on the rise of the citizen critic and Ron Evans’ post on online reviews, I was reminded of an experience I had a few years ago when our local paper cut its classical music and dance critic. I had a meeting with many of the marketing directors in the city, who were understandably upset about the firing and convinced that their success was inextricably linked with newspaper coverage.

Should we adapt to new technology before we adopt it for our own uses?

Many of these people had been in marketing for 30 years. When they first started out in the business, the primary marketing channels were TV, radio, and newspaper (and maybe billboard, telemarketing, or fax.) When a new medium was introduced, it might take a while to master, but that was fine. The learning curve was viewed as an investment because you knew that medium would still be around in five years.

Compare that to now. We have new, “must-have” technology platforms coming out nearly every 6 months to a year. Today, we are being pushed toward mobile apps for phones and iPads, geolocation social media like Foursquare, and more. We are not sure if these technologies will still be popular in three months, let alone five years down the road. Combined with the slow-but-steady demise of many of the “classic” marketing channels, it leaves us constantly wondering: how quickly should we adapt and adopt, when it comes to new technology?

Specifically relating to citizen critics, these two issues come head-to-head. Firstly, we have the citizen critics adopting new media platforms for distributing their reviews. Then, we as arts managers must decide if and how we will adapt to them—ignore them, embrace them, meet them on their own turf with a social media friendly press release, etc.? How do we decide?

When I studied communications technology in undergrad, one of the first things we talked about was Moore’s Law, the principle that the capacity of new technologies doubles every 18 months to two years. It applies not only to the memory size on a new laptop or the number of pixels in digital cameras, but it also describes the exponential rate of change we are experiencing as a society. I find myself thinking about this principle every time I hear that arts organizations “should be using” this new platform or that new tool.

Even though the capacity of the technology may have increased or the new platform may have reached critical mass in usage, my workload capacity typically has not increased nor has my motivation to take on one more task reached critical mass! Chloe Veltman’s post does a wonderful job in relating this back to arts managers, speaking to both a difficulty in adapting to the demands of social media (particularly Twitter) as well as a resistance towards adopting it as part of audience engagement.

So, typical of this age in which we are often left with more questions than answers, I leave you with two questions to mull over when planning your marketing strategy: What are the signifiers that it is time for your organization to adapt to a new technology? Which signifiers indicate that your organization should adopt the use of a new technology?

Online Video: We All Want The Same Thing

This post also appears as part of the Arts Marketing Blog Salon hosted by Americans for the Arts.

The world of arts management is changing, as all industries are changing, with the proliferation of technology. Especially with the increasing popularity of online media, we as arts managers have had to reconsider the way we see our performances. Is online video footage merely a vessel for our product? Or is it, in fact, our product? Or, can it also be a means to an end?

Many see social media and its democratization of internet content as the tool that will restore relevance to the arts, which critics claim is no longer present.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen changes in the social media landscape that make the issues surrounding performance footage all the more relevant. Twitter is adding video embedding capability. YouTube will soon be able to handle streaming video for content partners. These are signals of a trend that is already in progress—a movement of online video footage becoming not only accepted, but commonplace. Like it or not, online video is here to stay.

It was for this reason that I assembled a panel of experts on the rise of streaming video, and its interaction with our union relationships to speak at the NAMP Conference this November. It will be an opportunity to talk about the challenges that we face, as an industry, when it comes to video footage.

As an employee of an arts service organization and an arts management student at Carnegie Mellon, I’m in a unique position to examine performance footage in social media. Instead of having a vested interest in what would be best financially for a given organization, I can look at what is best for the arts industry as a whole and where the industry stands on these issues.

Over the past year, I’ve been looking at intellectual property issues as they pertain to performance footage. This research will culminate in an upcoming white paper for the Center for Arts Management and Technology. I’ve talked to unions, I’ve talked to organizations, and I’ve talked to artists. It’s fascinating to listen to their positions and how they perceive “the other side.”

Artists sometimes view online distribution of performance footage as a sort of Pandora’s Box: releasing their performance footage means relinquishing control of it and monetization of the content. They see organizations as trying to take advantage of their skills, or reducing the value of their work. Although they understand that organizations are struggling, they are struggling, too.

Organizations, on the other hand, are struggling with the realities of the economic downturn, as well as a decrease in newspaper circulation and in the general effectiveness of advertising in traditional media. They see new media as a lifeline, and take it on in order to secure their organization’s future. Some perceive that artists don’t equate saving the organization with saving the artform and the artist’s own career. This assumption leaves them puzzled and unsure how to proceed.

Although these positions seem diametrically opposed, both artists and organizations have common interests. In choosing and chatting with my panelists, who come from all different disciplines and affiliations, it seemed like there might be some fundamental conflicts between them. However, during our first conference call, I was amazed at how willing we were to listen and how much we genuinely wanted to understand each other’s viewpoints.

More often than not, I’ve found that we are all striving for the same thing—increased attendance, our own ensured success, and in turn, a bright future for the arts in America—we sometimes just have different ways of going about it.

Where we are different, we are the same

This post also appears as part of the Arts Marketing Blog Salon hosted by Americans for the Arts.

Silos belong on farms, not in arts organizations.

As a writer for the Technology in the Arts blog, I am constantly thinking about which topics will appeal to which artistic disciplines, which specialty, which skill level… and on and on. But the more I have to think about the segmentation of the arts management audience, the more I realize how broad many of the issues we discuss are.

A few months ago, I interviewed Alan Cooke of the e-fundraising company Convio, and we talked at length about the problem of organizational silos. In arts organizations, as in any company, conflicts often arise between different departments and may develop into an “us against them” mentality. As arts organizations become more prevalent in the social media space, it becomes easier to see which organizations have truly good internal communication between marketing, communications, box office and development departments.

We also tend to think that orchestra problems are unique to orchestras, theatre problems unique to theatres, and so on. For example, a few months ago I was at an opera conference listening to a presenter from another artistic discipline, when a colleague leaned over and whispered, “Ok, but what does this have to do with opera?” Unsure how to respond, I sort of nodded in agreement, but later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. True, it didn’t have much to do with opera, but, I would argue, the point of the conference was to learn new things, not to be told about things we already know.

Working in the non-profit world, we usually don’t pay attention to discussions and proposed solutions going on in the corporate world.  We don’t think that their solutions will work for us. I’m in a class right now entitled Social Media Analytics, where the students are split up into teams and assigned a major corporation as a client. At first, I expected that the corporations would have a pretty good handle on their social media presence, in terms of who they were reaching, who they were converting and how they were making money from their social media sites. What I found, however, was that the for-profit companies involved in the project are asking a lot of the same questions that I see posted by non-profit arts companies all the time. How do we track audience engagement? How do we convert brand awareness to sales?

Technology, especially social media, is an industry in high flux. It’s easy to think that there’s someone out there with all of the answers, but the truth is we’ve only begun to understand, let alone master the seismic shift in online behavior and the potential of these new tools. We still struggle to find tools that will accurately “read” sentiment from user comments and accurately extract what people are really saying about our brand. We question whether our tracking of sales due to social media is accurate. We wonder how much effort, which platforms, and which campaigns are really worth our time.

One of the things I am looking forward to most at the NAMP Conference is getting this broad perspective across artistic disciplines. Learning from each other is one of the most important things we can do, and I’m looking forward to seeing how arts marketing, as a specialty, has developed in the past year.

YAP Tracker: Organizing the Uncertain World of Auditions

For most people in the Northern Hemisphere, summer ended last week. But for those who run artist training programs in the summer months, next summer has already begun. In case you are not in the artistic department of your org, newsflash: It’s audition season, folks!

Today I have an interview with Julie Baron, General Manager and one of the founders of YAP Tracker. For those readers not familiar with the field of opera, a "YAP" (Young Artist Program) is a training program for young singers, usually with a large opera company which hires the singers for the season and provides them with small roles in the opera, coachings with staff pianists, and the opportunity to perform in educational outreach programs. The singers have usually graduated fairly recently from a Masters or Artist Diploma program and are trying to launch their singing career.

Having left a career in technology solutions consulting and training to pursue her passion for the arts, Julie Baron earned her Master of Music degree in Vocal Performance from the Manhattan School of Music in 2004. She enjoyed a career as a mezzo-soprano singing with many companies throughout the United States and abroad, but her unusual affinity for both technology and the arts ultimately guided her to create the popular website YAP Tracker.

YAP Tracker was created in 2005 and has quickly garnered tremendous acclaim for its comprehensive, worldwide list of opportunities and online application service. We've talked about online application and review tools in the past on the Technology in the Arts blog, but YAP Tracker is truly unique in its industry specificity and the fact that it provides organizational features for singers, teachers and company administrators alike.

"We’re so grateful for the support that we’ve gotten from both companies and singers alike and we hope to be around for many years to come to help people find auditions," Julie said. Julie is also a frequent guest speaker at schools, programs and conferences on the use of technology in the arts, including the 2010 Opera America Conference.

How did you come up with the idea for YAP Tracker?

The site began in 2005; I was singing with the Opera Colorado Outreach ensemble and I competed in a competition there locally, the Denver Lyric Opera Guild competition, and placed well. I was really excited about it and I wanted to find other opportunities to compete. I started looking and I couldn't believe how much was out there—so much that it was difficult to keep track. So, the site was designed with this in mind. It was originally designed for me actually to use and my friends were incredulous that such a thing existed and so I became willing to sell it to them. So, now we have about 8,000 members worldwide and we list 2,500 auditions a year. They come from everywhere—I think we even have some singers in Guam and Congo—places that I wouldn’t have even realized that there was a need for the service, but apparently there is.

What experiences that you’ve had personally as a singer informed how you created the interface and how you do business as a company? That’s an interesting question. My background is sort of unusual because I have both a technology and a musical background. Before I went back to school for singing, I actually worked as a technology solutions consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. It was important to me that the site be very user-friendly because generally the use of technology is frightening for everyone, so it was important for the site to be able to cater to every level of singer no matter what their technology background. I think that having a higher level of technology background was a good place to start from—to go from the ground up.

So, say I’m a singer and I’m looking for an audition. I find one that’s perfect for me, on YAP Tracker. Where do I go from there? Generally you start a few steps before that. When you subscribe to YAP Tracker, you receive alerts to let you know about new and interesting opportunities that are coming up. They’re interesting because the site is designed in such a way that you filter before you ever receive opportunities that you know will not be of interest to you. So, anything with a particular age limit, if you know that you’re not interested in doing competitions or auditioning in Europe, those opportunities are filtered out for you automatically. If you see something in the alerts that you do like, you go to the site, you click an icon to say "put this in my queue and remind me of all the important details about this opportunity." As the deadline approaches for that opportunity, you’ll receive additional alerts through the site and through our email alert system to let you know that things are coming up. Once you’ve actually sent your application, you click another icon to say “I’ve sent it; stop bothering me” and it goes into another queue. At that point, once you receive notification that you have an opportunity for an audition or that you don’t have an opportunity for an audition, you enter that information and that enters your audition queue. It sort of helps you through every step of the process to make sure that it’s on your mind, that you’re remembering the information that you sent in, and that you’re not surprised when the next date approaches.

You said that you had over 2500 listings. Do you cull the listings yourself or do organizations and competitions enter them or send them to you? Both—there are a lot of opportunities that I find and I contact the organization to let them know that we’ll post it or there are plenty of opportunities where the organization will write to us to say, "could you post this for me?" and they’ll send us the information. Then there are also organizations that have accounts with us and list the information themselves.

Auditioning can be an intimidating and exhausting process. How does YAP Tracker streamline that and take the mystery out of the audition process? Well, we can’t. It’s the one thing that we can’t do. We cannot make auditions themselves any easier for singers. It’s a difficult process, the preparation for auditioning. I will never regret that I’m not doing that anymore because that is the hardest thing that we, as singers, do. And singers do it forever, unless they’ve attained a certain level--which God love them, those who do. The one thing that we can do is make the rest of the process easier. One of the things that we say is “you sing well and we’ll take care of the rest.” We try to take the incredible ordeal out of keeping track of applications, which for many singers is a tremendous organizational feat. I remember when I was doing it myself before the existence of YAP Tracker, I would have this elaborate Excel spreadsheet to make sure that everything was lined up in date order so that I would send things in on time. Now we actually also offer an online application service, which some companies use, which makes the process even easier, so singers can apply to things with the click of a button. I think that if singer have confidence going into an audition knowing that they know what songs they’re going to sing, since they’ve kept that information in the site materials. They can refer to what they sang for that organization last year, because we never remove anything from the site. That’s the best we can do. Singers have to do the rest.

You said that you have artistic staff at opera companies using the program. Tell me a little more about that. Some organizations like to send us their audition information, but others prefer to list the information themselves. Companies can sign up for a free company account, which gives them access to list their opportunities. Other companies use the online application service, which is a fee-based option. Most companies still use a paper-based system; this is frustrating for singers in that it takes a long time to compile and combine and send it off. It can be very expensive to reproduce materials or FedEx, if you’re the type of person who does things at the last minute. They’re also a pain for organizations, when you’re dealing with 800 packets, as companies do, if there’s one headshot missing or if there’s a singer who’s missing a material, etc. A couple of years ago, we developed an online solution to help streamline the process, both for companies and singers alike. And the people who use it have been extremely positive about it, because it helps reduce their workload significantly.

What's one of the most popular features you would like to highlight? There’s so many good features—one of the most popular features that singers like is the section of the site geared towards accompanists, that allows for accompanists to indicate their availability to play for auditions. So, if you’re going to Cincinnati and you don’t happen to know anyone and you’re required to bring your own accompanist, there may actually be a pianist who’s indicated that they’re available to play, so that’s something that a lot of singers and accompanists are happy about. We also offer audition swapping functionality, which is great if you happen to not be available during the time that you’ve been given or if you’re a not a morning person and you’ve been given a 9:05 audition timeslot, there’s a place that you can go to change that. We also have a lot of new features that we’re looking forward to releasing soon, so I’m not going to talk about them until they’re ready, but we’re hopeful to have a new release on the site for 2011.

Streaming, streaming everywhere

Last week YouTube did a two-day test to preview streaming capability, a move that would place them directly in competition with streaming sites such as livestream, ustream, and justin.tv. Streaming capability was available to four select YouTube partners — Next New Networks, Howcast, Young Hollywood, and Rocketboom for two days. Like the existing streaming sites, YouTube will allow for real-time comments and, eventually, embedding in widgets and archiving old streams.

In all of YouTube’s communications , they only address giving this capability to their “content partners” anytime in the near future. YouTube content partners are people and companies that post regularly to the site and apply to YouTube in order to monetize their content with ads and rentals, obtain better quality for their uploads, and use YouTube’s Insight analytics tools. (Note: YouTube has a special program for non-profit partners. Check it out.)

Evan Rosenberg of Anaheim Ballet, a member of YouTube’s nonprofit program, produces the series “Anaheim Ballet: More Than Dance…” (See below for an excerpt.) He described the company’s hopes for its channel.

“YouTube has made it possible to not only showcase ourselves (Anaheim Ballet), but ballet in general to a global audience to the tune of over 24 million views. We look forward to using this additional tool (live streaming) in our continuing effort to spread the art of ballet across cultural, age, and economic boundaries.”

One of the videos on Anaheim Ballet's YouTube channel.

What are the implications for performing and performance arts organizations as streaming video becomes more and more ubiquitous? As a company or an artist, live performance is our product. Thus, we have faced issues with online video platforms since their rise in popularity:

We wonder if capturing that artistic product and distributing it online dilutes the aesthetic appeal.

We wonder if we should side with our artists and unions who deserve credit, payment, and a future in their industry, or with the insistent board member who says we must post video to capture the elusive younger market segment. We wonder if these interests are indeed in conflict.

We wonder if it cannibalizes box office revenues. And we wonder if we should give our audience members more credit; we know the difference between live performance and video, and so do they…right?

Online video is here to stay. This announcement is one more step in a long staircase of live streaming video becoming the norm. Fifteen years ago everyone had to have a website. Four years ago everyone had to have a Facebook page. Last year, everyone was going to mobile apps. With YouTube’s announcement, it’s easy to see performance footage moving from the movie theatre and the ballpark to laptops, phones, and iPads.

Speaking of new platforms for video, is everyone aware of the changes coming up for Twitter?

Building “Real World” Relationships Online: Alan Cooke of Convio

Alan Cooke of Convio

Alan Cooke knows arts donors. This opera-lover also happens to be a master marketer (formerly with Hewlett Packard) and he puts his passion and his skills to good use at fundraising software company Convio, specializing in systems for non-profit organizations across the spectrum.

Convio’s most visible campaign is likely the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure team fundraising efforts. (They have also done a fantastic job with Pittsburgh’s own Carnegie Museum.) However, Convio provides a range of different tools—at the core is Convio online marketing, which is a collection of tools—email marketing, website design, platforms for peer-to-peer fundraising, etc.

I recently interviewed Alan after seeing his presentation on online fundraising at the Opera America Conference in June.

Arts organizations, more often than other non-profits, have two messages that they’re getting out there. They’re asking people to buy tickets and on the other hand, they’re asking for a donations. How do you find that different from your other non-profit clients when you’re working with performing arts organizations?

The ticket-selling organizations are a little bit different from the majority of our organizations which only have contributed income. I think that, in terms of opera companies, many people really don’t understand the economic model of an opera company very well. I certainly did not understand that when I was an occasional single ticket buyer for the opera.

Perhaps one of the things that needs to happen is that organizations need to do a much better job, first of all, of making the case that simply selling tickets is not going to cover the cost of the productions. A lot of that is just education. You can make that case pretty well on your website and also through your communications with people, but you do need to make that case. Secondly, there’s the question of where you want to start. In the case of ticket-selling organizations, it’s logical to optimize your website for ticket purchases. There are things that you can do after someone has actually purchased a ticket where you can start to move them down a path and start to make your case--really simple things, like when they buy a ticket give them the option of making a small donation or trying to get people on a monthly plan where they’re giving a relatively small contributions every month. It’s automatic, you don’t have to worry about it and typically the lifetime value of those donors is very, very high.

One of the things that I have seen with digital communications in arts organizations is that you have the marketing department… And then you have the development department. Sometimes they play together very well, but sometimes, you’ll see accounts that are very obviously controlled by one or the other, and not a lot of overall relationship building. Your thoughts?

This problem of silos is a very common problem throughout the whole non-profit world. I think we have marketing departments that have their own agenda and their own tools and then you have a development department that has their own separate tools and they don’t talk about it to each other very much, which causes all kinds of confusion. Breaking down those organizational silos is easier said than done. Often smaller organizations have an easier time because they have fewer people, but as organizations get large, those walls sometimes can become very, very strong. It’s true that there is a lot of marketing chatter, which often doesn’t have very much to do with relationships. I think we’re starting to figure out how to build relationships the way that the development people have always done—you can do those same things online.

A lot of organizations are getting people’s email addresses after they’ve attended one performance and then they get an email asking for, for example, a $150 donation. Marc Van Bree has made the point that that’s like asking someone to marry you after the first date.

That’s right. It’s all about relationships. The online world is not dramatically different from the real world. You need to ask permission and you need to build a relationship with somebody before you start hitting them up for money. That’s a simple thing to do but there’s a surprising number of people who don’t do that.

Then how do you build that relationship and making the case for support to new pools of donors? In your Opera America session, you mentioned the concept of a welcome series.

So, the idea of a welcome series is that when somebody takes that step of raising their hand and saying, “I am interested in what it is that you have to offer” by giving you their email address, at that point you can’t just ignore them. You can’t just take it for granted and then immediately start asking them for money. Just like you would in a normal face-to-face relationship, you need to welcome that person to your community and you do that by seeking out some spaced email communications thanking the people for getting to know your organization and giving them some background information. Gradually, as you move down what we refer to as the relationship pathway, you give them more and more ways to become involved and to get more deeply embedded in the culture of the organization.

One of the very good things about using a technology platform is that you can automate all that, so you don’t have to write these things every time. It can be completely built out beforehand and automated. And we have found that by doing that, by making sure that as soon as someone joins your list, they get put into that communication stream. Not only are the open rates higher, but the conversion rates are much higher. And once they actually convert and donate, becoming a financial supporter of the organization, you can take them out of that stream and put them in a different stream. All of that can be automated and set up quite easily.

One of the ways that you mentioned non-profit arts organizations could combat the current economic climate is to reposition themselves as a community resource. How can an organization do that via digital means?

This came out of a conversation that I had with the general manager of my local opera company in Austin and I think that what they had said was fascinating. The difficulty that they encounter, especially in a medium-sized market like Austin, Texas, is that it’s not easy to sell opera. There is a relatively small audience for opera in that kind of a city and particularly in times of recession, it’s difficult to make the case. So this was an enormous struggle for the opera company in Austin, as I feel it is for many opera companies.

What they decided to do, which I thought was very clever of them, was they built an excellent music school on the premises right next to the concert hall and they started to garner quite a bit of attention in the city because of the quality of the music education that they offered to children. They had promoted that pretty heavily on their website and they have started to build a whole new pool of supporters for the opera who are people who would have never been on their list before—parents of children who now go to the school at the opera. It’s a completely new donor pool for them and it’s a donor pool that is amenable to different techniques, so they have started to do a fair amount of online fundraising to that audience, and that’s been pretty effective. They are obviously younger people and people who are not perhaps as familiar with the opera as the traditional audience. It’s basically given them a new pool of donors.

I heard that you recently added a database component to your collection of online tools. Tell me about that.

The database component an interesting new development for us. There are obviously a lot of vendors out there that sell databases to non-profit clients, but it became apparent to us that a lot of clients didn’t only want a set of on-line tools. They wanted a set of online tools, but they also wanted an entire CRM [Customer Relationship Management] system, where everything worked together. I think we have done a pretty good job in the past of integrating with programs like Raiser’s Edge. Data flows back into the master database and flows the other way.  But it became apparent that a lot of those database tools were expensive and were relatively complex and that there was an opportunity for us to build a more integrated system together, and that was really the approach that we took.

What we decided to do rather than actually building something from scratch ourselves is we partnered with Sales Force. Sales Force has what they refer to as a non-profit template, which is a kind of a database for non-profits based on their commercial product. We built on top of that core piece and we built a product which is called Common Ground™. It’s a database specifically for non-profits, which talks to our online pieces.

So, if I were a development director, sending out emails and getting fine return on investment, but I really want to take my fundraising to the next level, what’s the first thing I should look into from Convio?

Rather than even looking for a tool, Convio is known for extremely interesting and high-quality research. For someone who is just thinking about how to get to the next level, I think they are thought-provoking. Obviously, they are not going to get you there automatically, but there very interesting. For a technology company, we do a lot more research than many technology companies and I think that’s one of our great assets. It depends on who you are; if you are a small organization, I would hope that you are really at the point where you are strongly thinking about bringing in technology to help you get to the next level, I would hope you’d look at product tours, which are short. They are a pretty good way to see what’s possible.

Social Media Spotlight: Vancouver Opera

Welcome to the first installment of the Social Media Spotlight, our monthly feature focusing on arts organizations’ social media strategies.

Vancouver Opera’s social media presence, headed by photography/fashion buff and technology maven Ling Chan, goes where few opera companies have gone before. In order to achieve their goal of increasing brand awareness and facilitating two way communications with their followers, the $9 million opera company has launched initiatives like manga (a traditionally Japanese style of comic) and an annual animation contest, for instance. Currently on the company’s blog is a serial feature written in the voice of the main character of their world premiere opera, Lillian Alling.

Vancouver Opera takes ideas that many non-profit arts companies might deem risky or unsustainable and, through a combination of sheer creativity, thorough execution and diligent tracking, have made the Vancouver Opera social media sites vibrant, interesting, and unique.

Social Media Manager Ling presented her work this summer at the Opera America Conference. I caught up with her to chat:

Everything in the Vancouver Opera social media presence looks so vibrant. When you first set out, what were your goals for your organization and your audience?

Thanks! Vancouver Opera is a vibrant and innovative company that loves to engage with our community. When we first started out with social media, our goal was to put a face on the organization as well as increase awareness of the art-form of opera through educating and entertaining our tech savvy, minimally to moderately engaged supporters. Vancouver Opera was one of the first arts organizations to really use social media tools. From the start, we were committed to reaching the next generation of opera lovers using the media of the times and integrating it into our marketing/PR mix.

Your summer blog features keep your readers captivated during Vancouver Opera's off-season. Tell me about Opera Mania 101 and the other summer blog features.

During the summer months, we needed to come up with ways to keep our followers engaged, so we came up with some regular features for the blog. • Operamania 101 is a feature I came up with and thought would be helpful for the opera-curious. It’s opera education from a pop culture perspective. Everyone’s heard snippets of opera in movies, TV shows, cartoons and commercials and yet people might think they don’t know opera. They are more familiar with opera than they think. Some other blog features have included: • Bizarre Opera Videos where we post odd, unusual, or notable performances of opera found on YouTube. • Tuesday Trivia where we come up with opera themed quizzes. • Top Ten Lists where we invite readers to vote for their #1 choice. For example: Top 10 Villains, Top 10 Opera Tearjerkers, Top 10 Fantasy Operas • Other features: 20 Questions with an Artist, Everyone’s a Critic, Lunchtime Poll, Opera Props

Lego Carmen, one of the "Bizarre Opera Videos" posted by Vancouver Opera to keep interest in opera during the summer months

You have a background in photography. Was this the impetus for Flickr Fashion at the Opera? What are the goals of the program and what inspired you to create it?

I love taking pictures and I have always had a passion for fashion. I went to fashion design school years ago and worked as an assistant stylist on a couple of magazine and music video shoots. While working down at the theatre during Eugene Onegin in November 2008, I couldn’t help but notice how many young people went all out, dressing themselves “to the nines” for our operas. It wasn’t all just formal wear either. Our audiences mixed dressing up with elements of street, punk and preppy fashion, bringing a whole new flava to the world of opera. The people who dressed up for our operas inspired me to come up with Fashion at the Opera, which you can find on our Flickr.

Describe Blogger Night at the Opera. How did it engage new audiences? Did it show an increase in sales?

Our very first Blogger Night at the Opera was in January 2009 for our Carmen opera. A prominent local blogger named Rebecca Bollwitt, aka Miss 604, came to our Eugene Onegin that previous fall and she ended up blogging about the experience on her own personal blog. We got to talking and she suggested we coordinate a blogger night, which we did and it has since became so wildly successful that other opera companies started calling us to find out how to set it up for themselves.

We invited bloggers who were opera newbies to join us, blogging pre-show and during intermission their thoughts on the opera and the whole experience of being at the opera. We gave them backstage tours and also invited them to mingle with cast, staff and guests at the post-show party on opening night.

We live streamed their web links on our VO blog, so that our readers can follow along in real time. This was great exposure for us and a way of getting the next generation interested in opera. Most of their readers have never been to the opera. But after reading about Blogger Night at the Opera, they became excited about our operas and what we’re doing with social media and bought tickets to the next performances. I had a few of them seek me out on the theatre floor to tell me they were here because of Blogger Night at the Opera.

What's Opera Ninja and how did you come up with the idea? How do other people in the organization feel about giving control of their communications over to (basically) a volunteer?

Opera Ninja evolved from Blogger Night at the Opera. We had blogger night on Opening Night. What should we do for dress rehearsal? We came up with Opera Ninja March 2009 for our Rigoletto dress rehearsal.

It was inspired by Welsh National Opera when they tweeted 12 hours in the life of the Welsh National Opera's The Marriage of Figaro, including a live relaying of the performance (also translated into Welsh).

On our dress rehearsal nights, the Opera Ninja would live tweet. Followers were engaged with seeing an event unfold and have an insider view of what was going on behind-the-scenes. The tone of Opera Ninja is cheeky, fun, irreverent. We didn’t necessarily want it to be a play-by-play of what was happening on the stage. Instead it could be the Opera Ninja’s reactions to what was going on. Our followers have found this entertaining and fun. They would add comments and also re-tweet our tweets to their own followers.

I was the original Opera Ninja but have since invited our bloggers to take on the character in their own voices. I give a lot of freedom to our Opera Ninjas in what they tweet because I trust them. They are high-profile and active Twitter users. They know the etiquette, the advantages and the drawbacks of Twitter. They understand that they can have fun as the Opera Ninja but as they’re also representing VO for the night, they have to be professional too.

Vancouver Opera has started publishing manga, a comic book based on the opera. Manga is sort of an unusual foray for an opera company to take. What inspired you to take the stories of operas to this new medium?

It may sound like a strange combination but the partnering of opera and manga has worked extremely well for us. We were approached by Vancouver artist & editor Roy Husada of Rival Schools four seasons ago with the idea of “manga-nizing” our operas. It started out in black & white and written in Japanese, but has evolved into colorful mangas in English. The mangas are eye-catching and it helps give readers an idea of what the opera is about, thus sparking their interest in coming to the opera. Our mangas have proven to be very popular with our followers.

By my count you have at least four Twitter accounts for Vancouver Opera. Why? What are the advantages to have many accounts? And how do you track and get a good picture of your audience?

We have 4 Twitter accounts: 1. Vancouver Opera which is our main Twitter account where I tweet daily. It's the one with the most followers and the most activity, so it’s this account where I keep track and measure all our questions, responses and re-tweets.

2. Operabot which was started for our Operabot contest, an animation contest for our Golden Anniversary season. Professional and student animators were challenged to create animated shorts of one of the four productions last year. The tweets posted to Operabot related to updates on the contest, the submissions received and any fun or wacky robots related links.

3. Opera Ninja – We wanted a dedicated Twitter account just for our exclusive “behind the scenes” tweeting during dress rehearsals.

4. Where’s Lillian – For our upcoming world premiere, we wanted to introduce our Twitter followers to Lillian Alling as she makes her epic North American journey from Ellis Island to the wilds of British Columbia. She travels on foot in search of a man named Josef. We have someone taking on the persona of Lillian Alling and tweeting in their own voice the adventures and hardships that the real Lillian Alling might have encountered. From these tweets, we hope that followers will become intrigued with Lillian Alling and want to come to the opera.

Each Twitter account serves a different purpose and we wanted to have a dedicated account for the audience who wanted just Operabot updates or just Opera Ninja updates. Also it frees up our main VO Twitter stream by not bombarding our followers with too many tweets or random-sounding trains of thoughts.

What have been the results of all of these programs for Vancouver Opera? Many times it is difficult to track the effects of social media programs. How have you been tracking your initiatives at Vancouver Opera?

Our social media initiatives have garnered a lot of positive attention from newcomers to opera, opera lovers, our peers in the industry and the media.

I track and report data to measure the impact of our social media efforts in various ways: • Blogger – Google analytics, Like This / Tweet This buttons • Facebook – analytics • I use the Bit.ly shortener for our tweets to see how many people click on our links • Through promo codes in our Tessitura software, I can find out how many tickets were purchased whenever a sales offer was put forth on our social media channels.

Any initiatives for the 2010-2011 season that you'd like to preview for us?

I have some exciting things planned but it’s a surprise. Everyone will just have to stay tuned to Vancouver Opera.

The arts industry, beyond genres

June is conference month for arts managers. We all know the drill: sit through sessions, hobnob, and think about trying to new things that you may or may have the guts to try when you get back to your desk. I attended one of these conferences and have been listening to everyone’s feedback on the conferences they’ve attended and have come to the non-earth-shattering realization: we’re all having the same conversations.

The conversations that I had and heard about social media at Opera America were nearly identical to conversations that I've had with my friends in the non-profit theatre and orchestra industry. Yet when we try to have cross-disciplinary conversations, people start putting up walls—“Well, he works in with an orchestra. Tell me how that research relates to MY patrons.” Many of our problems are shared, we just don't get together to talk about them. Although we have the technology to collaborate, find conversations and have discussions—many of us simply don’t.

In the same sense, conferences bring us together, but they also isolate us. They affirm labels and barriers in some cases, and in others, break them. When we stand strong as orchestra managers, are we still standing strong as arts advocates? When we are united as arts marketing professionals, are we still loyal to our own organizations?

One of the sessions from the Opera America stuck with me. The session, New and Unusual Opera (a play on words with “cruel and unusual”?) was about new ways to think about opera as an art form--thinking outside the boundaries of our industry. Opera industry vet John Conklin started the session by playing "Nessun Dorma" sung by none other than Aretha Franklin. (See below.) Of course, that got the expected chuckle from the audience. But Conklin went on to make the point that, for the majority of the American public, that’s opera. If people can embrace this music on their own terms, what are we doing putting up a barrier against their entry point? Why are we so against the crossover of pop music and opera, or opera market research and orchestra market research, or the marketing and development departments within our own organizations?

Challenge for this week: Have an experience in an industry outside your own. Subscribe to a development blog if you're a marketer. Follow an opera company if you work at a museum. New ideas spring from new experiences. Start having new conversations and start breaking down those barriers for yourself and for the arts industry.

Four free online tools you should know about

Roving arts management reporter, reporting for duty! I’m taking a brief break from my summer gig at Wolf Trap Opera Company to resume my TitA duties and re-cap the delights of the Opera America Conference this week in Los Angeles. Conferences are great places to exchange ideas. I always come away with a list of things to check out. Here are a few great free tools on my list:

• Box.net—Simple online file sharing. Can be used instead of a share drive, OR as a way to upload your season brochure for easy patron download.

• Pitchengine.com-the social PR platform—Make fuss-free digital press releases with easy links to multimedia. No coding, no WYSIWYG editor screwing up what would otherwise be a reasonable task.

• Twitalyzer.com- Does a slogan like “serious analytics for social relationships” take the fun out of Twitter? No way! Track your impact through hard data, not just anecdotal evidence.

• Polleverywhere.com-create polls that audience members can answer via SMS text messages, Twitter, or the web. Some great advanced features for a little extra money, too!

[And I won’t assume you don’t know about Foursquare.com. If you’re not offering people who check in (or your “mayors”) something cool, look into it.]

And I must mention one that is not free (but cheap): Wildfireapp.com is ideal for setting up campaigns, coupons, and sweepstakes. Great way to capture data on your patrons.

Also, this is pretty sexy: operabyyou.com

Look for conference interviews by yours truly coming up on future Technology in the Arts podcasts!

Thanks to Ceci Dadisman and Palm Beach Opera for many of these sites!

Technology as competition for the arts

I recently watched Ben Cameron speak at the Emerging Leaders Conference at American University. He addressed the role of technology in the arts--that the internet was seen as the panacea for marketing but now it brings 6,000 competitors to our patrons' attention every day. (see below for similar address by him at the TEDx Conference) Ben Cameron at TEDx

In the Tech in the Arts blog, Corwin and I often talk about the ways technology can enhance and promote the arts. But we don't talk as much about the competition that arises from technology. As a field, arts professionals tout technology as the future of the business, and some of us embrace it. But as much as it is our friend, it is also our competitor.

I’m not suggesting that database software, mail-merge, and online information-capturing haven’t saved hundreds of hours of work and made life generally less tedious. But it has also made entertainment more accessible and available than ever before.

I've spent my first year in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon researching how arts professionals view and use video footage. There's much concern about video of performances competing the performances themselves, especially amongst the artists themselves. And I suppose there's a way to protect your organization against that--just don't produce video. And that's the route many smaller organizations take, when faced with musician's union fees or the reticence of an artistic director, or even just not being able to get a straight answer from the legal department. But then there’s competition from other arts companies, and entertainment industry. In many ways you can't protect your organization against the wider world.

People are getting used to consuming their entertainment in the comfort of their homes, or accessing it on the fly from mobile devices. They get it on demand. They get it personalized.

I still think the live arts add so much value to society—I wouldn’t be in the Master of Arts Management program or writing for this blog if I didn’t. I feel strongly that live arts have a lot on technology: the uniqueness of audience interaction, connection with large groups of people simultaneously, the shared experience of a story, and so much more.

I know I’m not the only one that feels that way in my generation. But I also feel like I’m in the minority. For every person like me who can recognize a Bach fugue or would much rather go see Il Trittico than Letters to Juliet, I know that there are probably 10, 25, maybe 100 other 26-year-olds out there who are happier consuming their entertainment solely via Glee on Hulu or playing Rock Band.

Technology in Arts Advocacy

Fellow TITA bloggers Corwin, David, and I attended Arts Advocacy Day yesterday in Washington, D.C. Americans for the Arts hosts this event every year. Over 500 arts professionals attended this year to learn about the issues and then lobby their Congresspeople. I thought I was a pretty good arts advocate. I always took the time to explain to people about the arts and how they change people's lives and enrich communities. But what struck me is how much I could have been doing this whole time that I hadn't been doing.

I assumed that you had to know ALL the facts, ALL the budget numbers, ALL the studies on the arts to be an effective advocate--or an advocate at all. But you don't. Facts help. Personal stories are even better. Simply taking action at all is the most important part, though.

Just because today is the day after Arts Advocacy Day doesn't mean it's too late to make an impact. (This is an excuse I'm ashamed to say I've used before.) There are going to be 364 more days after Arts Advocacy. While a designated day helps us focus everyone's efforts, our organizations, our funders, our artists and the cultural welfare of our nation need our voices continuously.

At its heart, this blog is about the ways that arts professionals and artists can use technology to create the future of art and culture. This may be as complex as building robots that make music. But it could also be as simple as one of the three ideas below.

Three simple ways you can speak for the arts today:

1. EASY: Write one paragraph about why the arts matter to you. Add a sentence encouraging an increase in NEA funding to $180 million this year. (more info here) Send it to your Congresspeople. (email form)

2. EASIER: Tweet a condensed version and tag with #arts. This was a trending topic yesterday and the tag is still pretty hot.

3. EASIEST: Join the Arts Action Fund (sponsored by Americans for the Arts). Click here, enter some info. It's free.

Wasn't that easier than building a music-making robot?

Eric Whitacre dreams of his Virtual Choir Machine

This morning I had the pleasure of watching Eric Whitacre's latest virtual choir release (see video below). This effort, the composer's second, combined 185 individual singers from 12 countries recorded independently.  Whitacre conducted the choir through a YouTube video. The videos were then combined together by producer Scottie Haines in a very familiar formation--the videos look like they are on risers, with Whitacre in the traditional conductor's position.

Whitacre has always been looked on as a sort of "rock star" composer in my peer group (I define them as "20-something music nerds"). My college choir was ecstatic to sing his pieces--they sounded new, modern, but with elements we could connect to both as musicians and listeners. They had cool titles, like Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine. (I mean, who writes choral pieces about Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbook?) And, of course, they contained those famous "shimmer" chords that we loved to sing. His "rock star" positioning is evident in his YouTube page. (check out the promotional photo that proclaims Marvel Comic/Criss Angel style "I. AM. ERIC!") Projects like this cement his reputation, and you have to admire him for it. Good music, marketed well.

Why is this project so fascinating? It's new, sure, but seeing the singers' heads, framed by their "natural surroundings" was especially compelling to me--more so than a simple video of a performance, like the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Digitally created music presented in a digital medium rings true, more so than traditionally created music presented in a digital medium. It's the same reason why I've only been to one Met HD broadcast--I crave that feeling of "genuine-ness".

I've been doing a lot of research lately on video footage of the performing arts and have heard many different views on how video footage (especially streaming of entire performances) will either preserve or destroy the live performing arts industry. This debate exemplifies the inherent friction we sometimes find between the arts and new technologies. (There was a great speech given on this topic by Ben Cameron at the TEDx conference, if you haven't seen it yet.)

But I can't help coming back to my simple love of live performance. Nothing replaces it, in my mind. Maybe I'm atypical of my generation in that respect. Or maybe the fact that I get equally excited about Whitacre's 'Lux Aurumque' YouTube video and the Bach Sinfonia performing Bach's complete motets live in a concert hall shows that I am fundamentally and irrevocably a part of it.

Whitacre has always been looked on as a sort of "rock star" composer in my peer group (I define them as "20-something music nerds"). My college choir was ecstatic to sing his pieces--they sounded new, modern, but with elements we could connect to, and those famous "shimmer" chords that we loved to sing. His "rock star" positioning is evident in his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/EricWhitacresVrtlChr">YouTube page</a>. (check out the promotional photo that proclaims Marvel Comic/Criss Angel style "I. AM. ERIC!") Projects like this cement his reputation.

Building Audience Diversity Through Social Media, Part Three

Watercolor style theater renovation by Gordon Tarpley (from flickr)

In part 2 of this 3-part entry, I interviewed social media managers from different regions, artistic disciplines, and mission focuses about how diversity drives their social media strategy. I found that, for most, online community-building came first and diversity factored in minimally, except in terms of age. When I first came up with the idea for this blog series, my first instinct was to do a quick search of the niche social networking site BlackPlanet.com. It showed groups for black actors, a very large poet group, a few artist groups, etc. Lots of jazz fans. Lots of fans of activities that researchers are constantly associating with arts attendance. But not one LORT theatre is on the site. Not many theatres period, except the stray comedy club.

In analyzing the responses of the social media managers and the notable absence of non-profit arts organizations on these niche social networks, I was puzzled. Then I thought, “Am I asking the wrong question here?”

Would most American theatres (most of which produce, on average, about one play by a black playwright a year) have a place on these networks that exist to connect black people to one another and to black culture? Maintaining a profile on one of these sites while you’re promoting Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit could be a bit of a stretch.

But even maintaining a tenuous connection to this community, such as an ad, could get a whole new community of people looking at your org, right? I decided to talk to an expert. Gerry Eadens is a media buyer who has worked in advertising for nearly 20 years and now works at Kansas City Repertory Theatre. She specializes in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and other online media. She did a cursory search and found at least 100 sites through the Google ad network that are meant to serve a specific cultural or ethnic group.

Research shows, however, that advertising is not a replacement for a social networking presence and vice-versa. Eadens cautioned me, “Typical display ads are not recommended for the best response from social network users since they are often ignored. Research has shown that advertisers garner greater results from more engaging activity with their audience such as posts that appear within news feeds.” Add to that the difficulties that online marketers often have in knowing how to focus an ad toward their intended audience. There’s no ethnicity category on the Facebook ad set-up interface, and I’m guessing that the company probably won’t add one in the near future.

So what can we do and more importantly, what’s worth our time to do?

At long last, the diversity question has come around to the classic “old vs. new” debate: When faced with declining arts attendance, is it better to “pick the low-hanging fruit” and focus on maintaining and growing our existing audience demographics ("the more return on investment for less energy" approach) or make a long-term investment in trying to attract new groups of people to our performances?

In a recent cultural policy article I read, I came across the question, “In our art, we place great value on experimentation and innovation—why not in our management practices?” I thought this was a great question, and I also bought into it, at first. Innovation seems to be the hot buzzword these days, and I think that generally, it’s a great value to have. However, from listening to the reasoning of the social media managers in the previous entry, I would argue it may not always be the most important one, especially from a user’s perspective (as opposed to a developer’s). They have tailored their social media presence to be purpose driven, tailored to their mission statement and aimed toward staying connected with their current audience while gaining new audiences, although not specifically diverse ones. Timothy Platt of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society writes about purpose-driven marketing on his blog Platt Perspective:

Good online social networking means sharing value and even paying it forward and taking the initiative in starting that process. But true online communities always carry this greater, synergistic value and are bound together by the cohesion and momentum that it brings. It is in the communities of members and supporters that good nonprofits gain their strength…

When I interviewed Thomas Cott of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, he spoke about his org’s purpose-driven strategy. “Since social media works best when you don’t try and push sales too directly, we’ve been using Facebook as an outlet to expand our ‘brand awareness’ and we’ve succeeded in attracting fans from many countries.”  For an organization with an international presence, the brand awareness angle is especially valuable.

More local or regional orgs, on the other hand, value building community locally. Brian Hinrichs of Madison Opera commented, “Our Facebook page very much feels like a community–fans comment and interact, they want more blog posts and photos, etc. Twitter doesn’t yet feel so cohesive: I’m interacting mostly with local media and other opera companies and nurturing those relationships. If our local paper re-tweets a ticket link or production photos, that is extremely valuable, but this is not where most of our fans are…yet.”

No matter your geographic focus, social networks are fundamentally about forming a community and having conversations. Therefore, having a clear purpose in mind when you choose your networks is essential. We’ve all heard the adage “the medium is the message.” It means that the method by which your audience receives your message becomes an inextricable part of the message itself. The phrase was coined in the 1960’s before the advent of the social media frenzy. But think about what it says to us today. Your show is its logo. Your season is the email blast that announces it. Your theatre is your Facebook fan page. But there’s more to it than that. With social media, the audience becomes both medium and message. Your audience is your identity. Who your fans are says something about who your organization is. If someone chooses to invest themselves in your product or purpose by becoming a fan or making a comment, then they become part of your organization in a way that’s visible. They become a message that your organization is worth following.

Think about the last think you received a postcard from an arts org. Chances are, they wanted a private, one-way, and perhaps institutionalized response from you (like buying a ticket, perhaps?).  Outside of social media your level of engagement with the organization is determined by those ticket purchases and other statistics available exclusively to the organization. Not so in the world of social media.  Think about how different the message is between a postcard (Buy a ticket!) and a Facebook page (Interact with us!). There are many ways to interact, and many messages a fan can send you. By creating a presence on a specific social networking site, you are signaling that you are open to communication with the people on that network. So what does it say if your organization is not present?

Arts and Technology Round-up

Oh the joys of Google Reader! I love reading through the blogs and news articles of my fellow arts managers. They remind me of the larger world out there beyond the Masters of Arts Management program, especially after the drudgery of mid-term week! (If you're unfamiliar with Google Reader, it's a handy way to access all the blogs and newsfeeds you want to read on a regular basis in one place. C/NET has a great guide.) I sifted through a few of my 1000+ accumulated new articles last night and found the following articles: Music education meets technology: Michael Bradley of Pima High School in Arizona uses Apple's Garage Band software to teach kids how to integrate music and technology. "There's a ton of different career opportunities in the technology side of music and being able to work in a recording studio or to manage and operate an auditorium," Bradley said. "You have to have the technology knowledge to be able to do any of that." Full article here.

After July 12, you might not be able to use wireless mics in the 700 MHz range. Joe Patti has the breakdown over at Butts in the Seats.

When a Carnegie Mellon grad makes robots for a living, it usually isn't a big news story. But this CMU grad makes musical robots. Eric Singer was featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for his creations (video below), which include computer-driven guitars (see video below), marimba, vibraphone, orchestra bells and other percussion instruments. He has worked with artists like They Might be Giants and Pat Metheny. Full article here.

Drew McManus covers how to create value outside of the performance itself --"what else of value, besides the actual music, do orchestras have that is interesting enough to potential ticket buyers and donors that it can be given away as a free gift" in two blog entries: The Three Keys To Social Media Marketing For Orchestras and Uncovering Hidden Value.

And speaking of creating value, is giving music samples away theft or promotion? Composer Alex Shapiro weighs in on newMusicBox in an article entitled "The Economy of Exposure: Publicity as Payment?".

Building Audience Diversity Through Social Networking – Part Two

In part 1 of this 3-part entry, I left you with the burning question: What are arts groups doing to build audience diversity through social networking? I decided to ask arts organizations around the country two questions that are relevant to any arts organization with a social networking strategy (and not just during Black History Month):

1. How is your org are selecting which social networking sites are worthwhile?
2. Are you taking diversity into account when forming these strategies?

"St Petersburg - Alexandrinsky Theater" by thisisbossi / CC BY-SA 2.0

This can be a very sensitive issue and I am very grateful to the orgs that chose to take on this question. I contacted organizations of different sizes and different artistic disciplines. The answers I got were very in line with conventional wisdom of creating and streamlining a social media presence. Brian Hinrichs of Madison Opera says that he tries to focus on the two websites with both the most users and the most relevant users to his organization, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook has the most users. We do have a MySpace page, which I understand has a more diverse user base, but that was not intentional. MySpace proved to have a large singer community, but I was not finding Madison Opera fans… Most of our MySpace friends, which is very few, also have Facebook accounts. Anecdotally, I find that to be the case in Madison and so for convenience of updating I am focusing most of my efforts to Facebook.

Thomas Cott of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (and the daily arts newsletter You’ve Cott Mail) also advocates focusing on a few sites rather than less coverage on more networks. Ailey boasts the largest Facebook Fan base of any nonprofit arts organization, at over 32,000, and is planning on rolling out pages for other programs like Ailey II and the Ailey School.

Ailey has focused its attention primarily on Facebook and YouTube (we’re phasing out our MySpace presence), because we feel it’s too hard to be everywhere at once… Of course, maintaining a robust presence on a social media site like Facebook requires a lot of staff time, and even for a big company like Ailey, we don’t have an endless reservoir of staff time to devote to this.  That’s the main reason why we haven’t pursued Twitter or some of the newer outlets like Foursquare.  It’s also why we haven’t put our attention to more ‘niche’ websites like blackplanet.com.  We feel we are reaching a diverse audience on Facebook and YouTube, and since they are the biggest sites out there right now, we felt that was the best place for us to devote our attention.

Paul Montenegro maintains the social networking sites of GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington D.C. He chooses to focus on Facebook and Twitter said that he focuses on the website’s functionality in his choice of networks.

I personally find the sites to be more user friendly when it comes to making events or sharing information. If there are sites out there are can do a better job or similar one, I would be looking into it to ensure that we can contact patrons via the web.

I contacted several other arts organizations who, like GALA, had mission statements which specifically focused on sharing the artist achievements or preserving the heritage of one ethnic or cultural group. I had hoped that they might be able to tell me how they decided which social networks to create a presence on, but they declined to comment. However, groups who did not have a mission statement that focused on one culture or missions to serve the community-at-large, were willing to talk about their choice of social media sites in the context of diversity.

Like many of these social media managers, Courtney Perez of Two River Theater Company in New Jersey cited universality of the social networks in her choices.

In regards to diversity, I must say that was not a direct factor in choosing these sites. I guess you can say these sites were appealing because they seem to be used by all ages & races therefore allowing us to reach a very broad audience. The formats of these sites are also quite uniform so the information we put up isn’t too targeted.

None of the respondents directly cited diversity as a factor for choosing to advertise or have a social network presence, except in terms of age diversity. Catherine Guarino, Director of Communications & Ticket Sales with Lansing Symphony Orchestra cited ease of use as a reason for her choice of Facebook and, recently, Twitter. But the purpose of social networking, for the symphony, was to find a younger audience.

I chose the two most popular social networking sites in hopes of reaching a younger, hipper audience. We didn't factor race into the mix at all, and I'm not sure we really ever do. Our goal with social marketing is just to stay in people's brains - to show up on their screen and remind them that we're here… What I found is that more and more older (for Facebook - say, the 50-60's) people were finding us and becoming Fans. We do have a decent college following, but the Fans that interact most with the page (comment, RSVP to events, write on our wall) are older.

More to come in part 3 of 3 of this article! We'll talk more about how arts orgs choose social media site, I'll chat with a media buyer, and more. Stay tuned...

St Petersburg - Alexandrinsky Theater

Shouting it from the grassroots rooftops: Wolf Trap Opera and the digital season launch

Midnight Launch by Temari 09 (from flickr)

For arts organizations, February brings with it the final throes of determining next year’s season. Some have renewals out already; others are still mired in scuffles with artistic, production or finance offices over which productions and dates will make next season the best it can be. Regardless of where you are in the process, if you are in marketing or PR, your thoughts have probably turned to how you will get the word out about the new season.  You may have perfected publicizing your season through renewal mailings and paper season brochures, but how do you “shout your season from the rooftops” online? Kim Witman, director Wolf Trap Opera Company (WTOC), has embarked upon an innovative new campaign to launch the company’s season this year. Located just outside of Washington, D.C., Wolf Trap bills itself as the "future of opera", a slogan that the organization seems to have taken to heart both in its programming and in its marketing efforts. As a researcher of how non-profit arts orgs use technology, I have been continually impressed by Wolf Trap’s leadership in online social media, particularly in their creation of a ning (a customized social networking site)—one of the first performing arts orgs to do so.

This season, Kim aims to get the word out to existing fans and potential audience members with a "digital season launch", combining elements of technology, grassroots campaigns, and social networking. She will celebrate today’s announcement of the WTOC 2010 season by doing guest blog posts and interviews in a few places across the blogosphere (see a complete listing at the WTOC blog).

I caught up with Kim about a week ago--a busy week for her, as she was returning from the classical Grammys. Wolf Trap was nominated for Best Opera Recording for their 2009 recording of John Musto’s Volpone. As she prepared to launch the season today, February 9, she took the time to answer some questions about launching a season digitally.

Q. In previous blog entries on Technology in the Arts, we’ve talked about digital season brochures (such as the London Symphony Orchestra) and other ways to publicize your season using technology platforms. What exactly is Wolf Trap’s concept of a digital season launch?

Kim: Wolf Trap Opera’s season announcement is only a small part of a large kick-off for the entire 2010 season of the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, and within that context we don’t have the chance to provide a whole lot of detail and texture for the opera performances. My guest posts and interviews on colleagues’ blog sites give me a chance to tell many sides of our story while creating a bit of a buzz on our little corner of the web.

Q. So today is the big day of your season launch online. What is rolling out today and what are you doing today to “shout your season from the rooftops”?

Kim: The WTOC blog is a spot from which readers and fans can fan out to dig deeper into the parts of our season and the aspects of our company that are of particular interest to them.  In addition to linking to posts on the other blogs participating in today’s effort, we’ve cranked out the news via our Facebook fan page (become a fan!), our Twitter feeds (www.twitter.com/WolfTrapOpera and www.twitter.com/kimpwitman) and the WTOC Hotspot.  Phew.

Q. You drew inspiration for this campaign from marketing guru Seth Godin, who is publicizing his latest book not through newspapers, TV or any so-called “traditional” means, but instead through blogs and other online outlets. How did you modify this idea to fit Wolf Trap Opera Company’s specific needs for the digital season launch concept?

Kim: I kept the guts of Seth’s approach intact. (I wrote him before embarking on this project, in the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.  He wished me luck.)  I contacted the writers of a few blogs that I read regularly, and I offered to write guest posts or engage in interviews that target the area(s) of interest between my readership and theirs.  My effort isn’t nearly as massive as Seth’s was, but the goal is to focus a critical mass of attention on WTOC for a day!

Q. I have heard of surprisingly few arts organizations engaging in a digital season launch. Which aspects of your organization and its marketing channels made a digital season launch a good idea? Do you think this sort of effort will become commonplace in the future?

Kim: Our small company doesn’t typically have a lot of traction with traditional media anyway, so this isn’t a huge shift.    For the last 10 years, our main vehicle has been the website, along with the two direct mail pieces that go out later in the spring (calendar with entire Wolf Trap season, and WTOC brochure mailed to a smaller target audience).  We will continue with those traditional efforts.

The nerve center of this season announcement is the WTOC blog and its readership. The daily interchange between bloggers and their readers is vital, interactive, dynamic, messy and wonderful – and that’s the kind of energy we need to tap into.  Clearly, I could’ve compiled all of the guest posts and Q&A’s and put them on a web page, but there would be something too clinical and linear about that.

These types of initiatives are becoming more common, and the trend will undoubtedly continue.  Digital media make it possible to tell your story, no matter your budget.  The challenge is to do it wisely and in a targeted fashion.  All of the social networking initiatives are tremendously time-intensive, and they can rob a small organization of its precious human resources.  We’ve chosen to ride this wave, but we’re constantly weighing its assets and liabilities.

Q. You mentioned the time-intensive nature of investing in social media and also touched on how different platforms serve your followers differently. WTOC currently has a blog, ning site, and Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. How do you manage which content goes on which site?

Kim: It’s an ever-moving target, but this is how we’ve been focusing our various initiatives:

• Facebook: By becoming a fan, you can get our updates (including my blog posts) through your Facebook feed.  We look at this site as a way to deliver WTOC highlights to FB users without them having to go to a separate site.
• Hotspot (ning platform): The content is pretty much a clone of Facebook, with the added attraction of a comprehensive calendar.  It exists primarily to inform fans and patrons of our non-ticketed events (artist panel discussions, free concerts, etc) and to provide one-click clearinghouse for non-Facebook-users.
• The WTOC Blog gives us a distinctive and informal voice.  It allows me to speak in detail (and when appropriate, in industry jargon) to aspiring singers and other opera geeks.  And it allows me to speak more frankly and conversationally than a traditional web page.  (I love that the words “traditional” and “web page” can now exist next to one another!)
• Twitter still serves a niche audience.  Although (when we’re not in season), both of our Twitter accounts often run the same updates, they are differentiated in the summer.  I view mine as a conversation between me and my arts industry colleagues.  And the WTOC twitter feed is intended to allow us to communicate with fans and patrons.
• The YouTube account isn’t terribly active because we are still struggling with artist rights and releases in order to be able to post content, and because we don’t have media staff in house to spend the time needed to do the pre-production work on video clips.

Q. How are you spotlighting the Season Launch through these networks?

Kim: We’ll simply be putting the WTOC blog link front and center, encouraging folks to link through and start exploring!

Q. Anything else you would like to tell us in closing?

Kim: My son is a software programmer, and I get most of my geek fix through him.  He is quick to remind me that all of our technological tools are not effective until they disappear into the fabric of the task at hand.  It takes some energy to ride the wave of the technological flavor of the day, but our goal is to conquer the learning curve and allow the technology not to be an end in itself, but a tool through which our real message is conveyed.

Kim Witman of the Wolf Trap Opera Company is celebrating today’s announcement of the WTOC 2010 season by doing guest blog posts and interviews in a few places across the blogosphere.

Link back to Kim’s blog entry at www.wolftrapopera.blogspot.com for a complete list – all of the links should be active by midday on Tuesday, February 9.

Kim Witman assumed directorship of the Wolf Trap Opera Company in 1997 after having served the Company since 1985 in a variety of roles:  principal coach, assistant conductor, music administrator and chief of music staff.  A graduate of The Catholic University of America (M.M.) and Elizabethtown College (B.S. Music Therapy), she has also been a visiting faculty member in the opera departments of the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the University of Maryland.  In addition, she has been music administrator, chorusmaster and assistant conductor for The Washington Opera, adjudicator for the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and assistant conductor for Washington Concert Opera. Ms. Witman has been active as an opera coach and recitalist in the Washington, D.C. area since 1981.  She has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Philips Collection, the White House, and at New York’s Merkin Hall.  Committed to de-mystifying the opera business for fans and aspiring professional singers, she writes at www.wolftrapopera.blogspot.com.

Building Audience Diversity Through Social Networking - Part One

When I was working in the trenches of a theatre company in the Midwest about a year and a half ago, the arts orgs in town got together to have a round-table discussion about social networking. At the time, I had grown my theatre’s social networking from mere presence to full-blown strategy and was seeing our friend numbers grow exponentially. I was proud of my Facebook page and our (at that time) fledgling Twitter site, but the MySpace page was the real shining star of the bunch, with almost twice as many friends as the Facebook page and three times as many as Twitter. Most intriguingly the people on MySpace didn’t feel like the people on the other networks at the time. They were much more diverse in terms of race and age. They didn’t have a professional feel like Linked-In or Twitter (in some cases). It was a network open to everyone, one that didn’t start as a “gated community” catering exclusively to historically white colleges and universities like Facebook. Best of all, they were asking questions through private messages that indicated that they hadn’t heard of the theatre or weren’t sure how to get information on shows.

At the meeting we went over the popular social networking sites and discussed how MySpace was losing its market share and how some of the orgs had abandoned it. I raised the question "But is MySpace really and truly dead?" to which about five people in unison responded "YES!" and someone said "let's move on". Ok, then...

Now around the same time, I read that MySpace was still growing, just at a slower pace than Facebook and Twitter, but that it was the social network of choice for African-Americans and other ethnic minorities. (This is referenced in Hispanic Trending and in the below video.) Interesting, huh? But I didn’t speak up again. I figured, the people have spoken. I became disenchanted with the MySpace page, still checking it, but not putting in much effort. Since that time, the very thing that made MySpace a great social network—its openness to all users—also led to its demise in popularity. (Although a study from FSU from July 2009 showed that the ill-favored network was still quite popular with English-preferring Hispanics, preferred more than 2:1 to Facebook.) However, the fact still remains that I gave up on something that at the time, for our org, had brought us close to those elusive “interested, but unaware” prospects that could be tomorrow’s patrons.

Video from Black Web 2.0

I didn’t put the two incidents together until Martin Luther King Day last week when I was thinking about diversity in the theatre. We shouldn’t just be thinking about audience diversity on MLK Day, or Hispanic Heritage Month, or when our grant proposal is coming due, but some organizations do. For most orgs, audience diversity is something we might value, but it often isn’t a part of our social media strategy or even a part of the marketing strategy. It’s easy to write off, because it is very difficult to track based on race or ethnicity. Maybe we don’t have the time or staff. Maybe we’re not completely sure how to do it effectively. But, the fact is, the world in which arts orgs operate is changing and not just because of the technology that has revolutionized that way we entertain ourselves or engage with the world.

The make-up of U.S. culture is changing. The census bureau projects that, by 2050, the Asian and Hispanic populations in the U.S. will have tripled. The percentage of African-Americans in the U.S. population will also continue to rise, at the same time they grow more affluent. Perhaps because of this, the for-profit business community has begun to recognize African-Americans as the hot emerging niche market, even profiling behaviors to help advertisers reach this audience. And, as Dr. Eszter Hargittai prophesied in the video above, the playing field for minorities in social networking is getting more level.

The past few years have seen the rise of niche social networking sites for African-Americans as well as Hispanic Americans. Additionally, the 2009 study at Florida State University referenced above found that equal percentages of English-preferring Hispanics, Asians, and non-Hispanic whites under the age of 35 now access social media sites 2-3 times a month. The study concludes with the following paragraph:

"Few marketers are proactively targeting ethnic minorities online and even fewer are leveraging social media to do so. A first mover advantage is available for those that devote the time and resources to engage these critical audiences in ways that they find meaningful. The fact is that we now have an unprecedented ability to reach and interact with ethnic minorities; and companies that deliver value to this segment today will be rewarded with the long term loyalty of this market."

So what are arts groups doing to build audience diversity in this market? In Part Two, I’ll "take to the streets" and chat with marketing directors (including Thomas Cott of Cott Mail), a media buyer, and more. Stay tuned!

---

There's been a vibrant debate going on in the arts blogosphere about diversity, how to best reach new audiences and the relevance of American theatre. Here are a few of the posts:

'Outrageous Fortune': Playwright book full of whine and din, Chris Jones of  Theatre Loop (Chicago Trib)

What if we are all wrong?, J. Holtham of 99 Seats

More on diversity, Greg Sandow (Arts Journal)

Lyn Gardner: "We Need to Act Now to Save Theatre", Scott Walters of Theatre Ideas

No history?, Rob Weinert-Kendt of The Wicked Stage (American Theatre)

Mobile apps and the arts: where we are and where we're going

Expressway at night by The Pug Father (from flickr.)

2009 saw many new technologies first start up (like Google Wave), slowly emerge (mobile apps), or explode with popularity (Twitter). In the past year, we at Technology in the Arts have been writing a lot about the emergence of mobile technologies in the performing arts, particularly the emergence of mobile apps. We’ve highlighted disagreements between artistic and administration staff about the role of phones in the audience, as well as the new and unique ways orgs are promoting the arts through apps. We featured a short video of mobile marketing guru Ron Evans of Groupofminds demonstrating new apps as part of a webinar hosted by the Center for Arts Management and Technology on “Mobile Applications for the Arts: Where Are We” (more on webinars at the freshly made-over CAMT site.) I caught up with Ron again around New Year's to discuss where mobile technology is now and how we might expect it to develop in 2010 and beyond. Amelia: What do you think arts patrons want in a cell phone app? What are the most successful examples that you’ve seen at giving the intended audience what they want?

Ron Evans: In a study I recently completed for the Artsopolis Network (who is considering building a mobile application to allow patrons to access their arts calendaring portal), of patrons aged 48-64, surprisingly one of the top results to your question is "Parking." People really want to know what parking options are available to them before the event, how much the parking costs, etc. This is a perfect example of some of the answers one might overlook when focusing on the arts organization's presentation of "the art" and is really very practical and useful information to know. Other responses that score high include restaurant information for pre/post show activities, availability of events near the users location (and the event start times), getting directions to the event, and being able to purchase tickets through the app (hopefully with discounts). These are all practical responses, and that's ok right now -- we're in a phase of early adoption, and outside of these functions that they are already familiar with (using Yelp to find restaurants, or using the iPhone's maps to get directions to a location) people don't really know what they want yet. They will be attracted to new phone technologies/capabilities that are cool as they develop.

iPhone Transparent Screen by edans (from flickr.)

A: In the current marketplace, what are these apps useful for? Is it simply audience engagement and a connection with the organization? Is it selling tickets? Or do you think that at this point they serve more as publicity devices—the organization that comes up with a cool app gets written up in papers, and gets a reputation for being forward-thinking?

RE: I feel that it is all of the above. If your arts organization creates a mobile app, it still feels like magic. Since many groups are local or regional and not national in scope, it doesn't really matter if an arts group in Boston creates an app similar to the one you just created in San Diego -- to your local community, you're cool. You're looked at as a forward-thinking organization with resources to spend on research and development, and I've seen several funders interested in funding new technology like this. Now, there aren't many examples of financial return on investment for the creation of an app. But similar to social networking, there are many examples of a visibility return on investment, and that's of course quite useful in many cases. But some people have to be the pioneers, who build things because they are fun and cool and give a new spin on the experience -- those people are the ones that eventually find the ROI. But to finish your question, apps can be designed to serve a variety of purposes, from deepening audience engagement to simply helping people find events to attend in the first place.

A: Back in the 90’s, there was a big “everyone needs a website” push for all commercial and non-profit orgs. Now everyone wants their website to be mobile-accessible. Is the next step that everyone needs a mobile app for their organization? In short, are apps right for everyone?

RE: Let's draw a quick distinction between mobile accessibility and mobile apps. The former is simply having a website that looks good when viewed in a mobile browser, and this is an absolute must-have. The latter is the creation of a new software program that people can download from places like the Apple AppStore, and is not a requirement, but is certainly cool. For a mobile-accessible site, your web designer should create a mobile-friendly version of your site, and you should try it out on various phones. If you use a content management system such as Wordpress or Drupal, there are free plugins that will do this for you automatically -- it's quite easy, and has the advantage of working for any phone with web-browsing capability. Mobile applications however, only work on the phone they were designed for, so you need different applications for the iPhone, the Droid, Blackberrys, Nokia's, etc. New tools are looking to make this a bit easier: for example, there are software coding environments that allow you to code your app in a general way, and then spit out "flavors" of apps that work on different phones. New technologies like this should bring down the cost of creating apps significantly.

iPhone sunset in the Andes by Gonzalo Baeza Hernández (from flickr.)

A: What type of organization could benefit the most from creating a mobile app? How do you suggest an organization research and decide if a mobile app is right for them?

RE: I don't think the use of an app would be better or worse for a specific arts genre. If you're doing interesting things, an app would offer a new medium to communicate that information. Before deciding to move forward on any development, I'd do two things. 1. Research what's out there already -- do some searches in the app store of your smartphone for organizations like yours, and see if apps exist already, what they do, and how you might use them if you were to contact the org that made them. 2. Ask your patrons -- send them a survey and tell them you're considering creating mobile access to the arts experience, and ask them what they would like to see, with an open-ended comment option. I've taken arts organizations through this process and answer analysis, and the information received is fantastic in focusing your development, saving you money, and ultimately increasing your chance of "success" in however you define it for your creation.

A: I’ve been researching streaming video in arts organizations and I have been finding there are many performing arts organizations that are having trouble obtaining the rights to stream video. Similarly, there are many modern museums and galleries that cannot obtain permission from artists to put a photograph of their art on their website, much less a mobile app. Do you see this as a significant barrier to arts organizations developing apps?

RE: Yes, it is a huge barrier. People that own the rights need to lighten up and realize that capturing the likeness of a piece or an event to share the act of participation isn't the same as being there in person and participating. But this is really only a barrier to apps that are designed to display this sort of content. There millions of other ways an app could augment my arts-attending experience, and many organizations are focusing on those ideas right now.

Samsung mobile phone by Milica Sekulic (from flickr.)

A: Do you foresee a huge demand for on-demand video on smartphones? How do you think the market reconciles the hi-def video craze with viewing performances on a low-def platform (i.e. tiny screen, tinny sound quality)? What sort of apps do you see emerging in the future, based on current trends?

RE: Actually, on-demand video, no. You can do it already and that will just become easier. The next big thing is going to be live streaming video -- sharing the experience you're at right now, with yo friends who aren't there with you. The iphone already has this capability (although you can't use it unless you break your contract with Apple and "jailbreak" your phone). AT&T also doesn't want you to have this capability right now, as it will be a huge drain on their mobile network resources. But as 4G speed and more becomes standard in the next couple of years, you're going to see this capability emerge, and instead of asking people not to take pictures, many arts groups will be asking people to not stream capture the entire event on their phones. This is going to be a big battle. But again, I point out that watching a show through a cell phone camera is not the same thing as attending the show in person in all its glory. One should be a "taste" of the other, intended to drive interest and participation. But many rights holders and arts organizations aren't going to see it like that for a long time.

I also think there will be more and more location-based apps, that know where you are in relation to everybody else, and your friends. For example, it is going to be easy and precise for you to be able to find your friends in a crowded 1800 seat concert hall -- you'll be able to point your phone like a compass to find them, as well as see them represented on a map that includes the walls etc. of the physical space you're in. There are already apps being worked on that help you find friends to attend with, identifying people of similar interests and tastes. And apps will start asking you for permission to do the things you do most -- do you usually go out to dinner before shows? Your phone will know that, and ask you "should I make a reservation at X restaurant for you?" You just give the ok -- the default will be that the phone asks for your approval, not the other way around with you hunting for a restaurant and trying to tell the phone you want to make a reservation. Sound like the stuff from science fiction movies? It's closer than you think, and it will all be based on the continued constant recording of your preferences and actions, in order to try to predict your future behavior. Getting your DNA examined to know your physical traits is pretty commonplace today -- getting your behavioral preferences mapped will be the goal of tomorrow. Sounds potentially Orwellian, I know. But if you can get beyond that, it's pretty exciting stuff, and we are just starting to play around with ways to enhance the arts experience itself using these technologies -- interesting stuff to come!

Ron Evans is the founder of Groupofminds.com Arts Consultants, and is a leading developer and researcher of arts marketing and audience development using technology. His firm assists arts groups to explore emerging technologies and measure their impact on patron behavior in expanding arts audiences. He can be reached at http://groupofminds.com/contact-us

We ask that you now turn ON your phones! Enjoy the show!

Fail Phone by Rammikins!

Today on the Technology in the Arts blog, a further investigation of the burning question--mobile phones: good or evil? Last week, we investigated the evils of mobile phone technology in the context of arts audiences. This week, it’s time to turn on your cell phones and explore how mobile phones can help the audience engage with arts organizations on a personal level.

There are quite a few examples of mobile phones being used quite creatively for marketing and audience development initiatives. I’ve heard of a few different arts orgs twittering backstage during performances.  Most notable is the Broadway show Next to Normal, which tweeted an entire performance in short little 140-character spurts. You can still read the archived tweets here. And by this point, many orgs have mobilized fans through social media via their smartphones or even with texting services offering discounts. The artistic and production staff are harnessing the power of a mobile social network, too. In July, the Old Vic’s invited audiences into the creative process of its 24-Hour Play Marathon, with tweets from followers shaping the direction of some of the plays. During the national staging of The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, audience members used Twitter from their phones at many theatres to ask questions at post-show forums. In addition to coordinating the Q & A sessions, theatres across America that participated in the project used Twitter to sync their production with the “lead” show at Lincoln Center. For a unique national project like The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, an application like Twitter that is easily accessible from a cell phone is perfect to coordinate artists, production staff, and audiences.

If we drift away for a minute from the concept of cell phone use during the show, we see people starting to discover with their inner arts-lover with all kinds of cool apps being developed for smart-phones:

• There’s the Gustavo Dudamel iPhone app, where you can conduct "March to the Scaffold" or "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath" from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.
• There’s the bizarre, yet popular ocarina app, which turns the phone itself into a musical instrument. (video footage below)
• Most of us have now heard of Pandora Internet Radio, which recommends songs based on songs you like.  Pandora apps are available on the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre and a variety of other phones.
• Zoozbeat, which allows users to compose their own songs with a variety of instruments by simply shaking and moving their iPhone, was recently featured on CNN.com.  
• If you are more the theatrical type, the complete works of Shakespeare are now available on an iPhone app.
• In the visual arts arena, your phone can become your canvas with the Brushes app, an iPhone finger-painting tool. (Gallery of Brush app art at the end of the post.)

Will apps like the ones listed above increase the audience's desire to flock to the theatre? Hard to say. But one thing is certain--show time is still a boundary that none of these apps and few of the organizations using smartphone technology seem willing to cross.

In pondering last week’s entry on the evils of cell phones in the audience, I began to wonder if proper cell phone etiquette is merely a question of our expectations for the specific venue. For example, I doubt anyone would be bothered by people texting at a broadcast of an opera in a baseball stadium, or perhaps even an outdoor lawn concert. This summer, the National Symphony Orchestra started twittering program notes to audience members in lawn seating. Sure, some people might still be bothered by the LCD lights and the “text-offender”’s inattention to the performance at hand, but outdoor concerts have a different aura about them. It’s like people expect to be distracted by the sights and sounds of nature, especially if they are sitting on picnic blankets with a cooler of beer next to them. But, then again, it’s a sliding scale. When I think of the last two outdoor venues I attended in Kansas City, my reaction to texted program notes would have been quite different. The first is Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, a rollicking good time with a temporary stage and lawn seating. Audiences are encouraged to bring their own picnics and drinks to the show. On the other hand, there’s Starlight Theatre, which brings in touring Broadway productions every year. The performances take place in a large (permanent) amphitheatre with a stage and seating approximating a large indoor performing arts center.  Texted program notes at the Shakespeare Festival? Great. Starlight, I’m not as enthusiastic. It’s too close to an indoor venue and part of me feels like the same rules should apply.

So maybe it’s a question of societal expectations. As we are often told, social etiquette at the theatre was quite different “back in the day” when, watching the performance was optional and (sometimes they’d seen it multiple times), talking was almost expected. The overture was initially conceived as a signal for all to get to their boxes. In some of the more low-rent houses, audiences would jeer the performers or even throw vegetables. (sometimes they still do…) But today’s cultural values center around respecting the artists on stage. It’s sewn into the experience of going to a live arts performance in America. We’ve experienced a cultural shift in expectations in the opera house since the old days. Perhaps we will again with the advent of these new technologies.

Bottom line: with great smartphone power comes great responsibility. A responsibility to our audience to engage them on their level, balanced with a responsibility to respect the experience of art for both the audience and artist. These two duties will come into conflict more and more in the coming decades, and it's also our responsibility to wonder--and determine for our own organizations--at what point the two can meet.

Free Museum Computer Network Webinars

The Museum Computer Network, an org that specializes in sharing information about new museum technology and its most effective uses, is holding its annual conference next week in Portland, Oregon. This year’s theme: “Museum Information, Museum Efficiency: Doing More with Less!” The org is webcasting several of its sessions for free on Thursday, Nov. 12 and Friday, Nov. 13: (All times Pacific) Museum Data Exchange Thursday 12 November, 1:30-3:00 PST

Tweets to Sweeten Collaborations for Archives, Libraries, and Museums Thursday 12 November, 3:30-5:00 PST

Libraries, Archives, and Museums: From Collaboration to Convergence Friday 13 November, 11:15-12:45 PST

Ramping Up while Scaling Down: Strategic Innovation in Challenging Times Friday 13 November, 2:00-3:30 PST

2009 Conference Roundup Roundtable Friday 13 November, 4:00-5:30 PST

Instructions for accessing the webinars will appear at the MCN site on Wednesday, Nov. 11. MCN is encouraging Twittering during the session with hashtag #mcn09oL. You will be able to submit questions during the Q & A sessions via Twitter as well. More details at MCN.