Live 2.0 Edition 4: The New Media Edition

We hope you enjoy the New Media Edition of Live 2.0.

This month’s Edition features:

The Only Thing You Ever Need to Know about Every New Medium that Ever Appears by Jim McCarthy

What Should Venues Do with the Creation of Audio/Visual Content? Q&A with Greg Sandow

How Should Venues Use Blogs? or The Importance of Being a Blogger by John Glass

Wolf Trap and Live 2.0: How One Arts Organization is Embracing New Media by Chris Guerre

What Can Twitter Do For You? Three Arts Organizations Have the Answer by Danforth France

The Only Thing You Ever Need to Know about Every New Medium that Ever Appears by Jim McCarthy

If you were born before the ’90s, you remember a world where “media” meant TV, radio, newspapers, and…

That was about it.

Now, not only is the list longer, but additions are being made to it rapidly. A year ago, most people were still coming to grips with the idea of social networking websites and had no idea Twitter existed. Now they can reach people in a whole variety of new ways, like RSS, SMS, podcasting, videos on Youtube or flickr, and whatever else rolls off the assembly line this month.

It’s fair to be confused if this isn’t your area of specialty. If you’re considering trying out one of these forms of new media, allow me, using my more than a decade in the new media biz, to give you a simple way to avoid the sinkholes.

Ask yourself this question: What is the unique strength of the new medium I’m considering and how does it fit with my organization’s goals?

If you can’t provide a good answer to this question, then you should either keep thinking about it until you figure it out, or move on.

Absolutely never start using a form of new media for any of these reasons: Everybody’s using it. Our competitors are all doing it. All the young people are using it, so we’ll look behind the times if we don’t join in. Our IT guy really thinks it’s great so we should let him do a pilot program.

Oh, the list could go on, but I hope the point is made. You should never react your way into the use of a new medium.

To paraphrase your mom, if everyone were jumping off a building, would you?

Of course, that’s a wild example to make a point. Moms are good at that. But here’s a slightly different example: What if everyone were pouring their money into short wave radio? Would you do it? Short wave radio has a unique strength: it can be used to reach low-tech people around the whole world very cheaply. It has some real benefits that are worth considering.

Then, after you consider the benefits, you’ll realize that since you are not trying to foment revolution in the Indonesian backcountry or sell dried apricots and water purification tablets by mail-order, it’s probably not the medium of choice for you. Even though, in this hypothetical scenario, everyone else is doing it.

Now how about a real-life scenario? Today, the World Wide Web and email are broad enough and powerful enough that just about everyone has figured out how they can use them effectively. But think back to the late ’90s. It was Web Boom 1.0 and hundreds of companies were freaking out and “getting on the Internet” without understanding what the Internet was or how they could use its unique strengths to further their organization’s goals.

The result was a world wide graveyard of bad, unused, and ultimately tragic sites. Most of these sites were glitzy brochureware that produced nothing, except a few damaged reputations.

Those people were reacting and using a new medium just because everyone else was using it. They didn’t know how its unique strengths could be used to further their mission. By now, I’m sure you’ve figured that part out, and if not, stop reading this article and get to it.

On the other hand, I hereby absolve you if you’re confused by all of the new media being thrown at you these days. Compared to now, the late ’90s were a “Leave It to Beaver”-esque time of simplicity and innocence. Twitter? Facebook? RSS feeds? MySpace ? Mobile? Podcasting? Youtube? Some of these media may work for you in a powerful way. Others may waste your time and money like a congressman on a “fact-finding junket” to the Bahamas.

So for you, the first step is to identify the unique strength of each medium you’re considering. Get some help from a user of it if you find it tough to crack. Don’t guess. Don’t hire an expert, because ultimately they’re incentivized to get you excited about the medium’s potential. Talk to a user of that thing, and they’ll tell you what they get out of it. That’s the real story.

Once you’ve done that, be creative. How, if at all, does your organization’s goal match what this medium does well? If you try and try, but can’t come up with anything (or anything that you could convince a junior high school student would actually work), the best bet is to sit tight. Sometimes the best strategy for a new medium is to wait and watch.

Lots of dollars went into MySpace two or three years ago, but no one was counting on Facebook taking so much attention and audience away from them. Anyone who waited until now to build their MySpace strategy (or is skipping MySpace and going directly to Facebook) will be much better informed, even if they do have some catching up to do.

So just remember that there’s only one thing you need to know, now and forever, about new media: No matter how popular it is, no medium will be effective unless its unique strength fits with your organization’s goals.

You’ll thank me in 2029 when you’re thinking about using your subscribers’ Brain Mail accounts as a way to sell season tickets.

Back to top

What Should Venues Do with the Creation of Audio/Visual Content? Q&A with Greg Sandow

Greg Sandow is a composer and veteran music critic who works as a consultant on classical music questions and teaches at Juilliard and the Eastman School of Music. His specialty is the future of classical music, and he’s a bit of a rebel in the field.

As a general principle, how should content creators be using audio and video content?

To show people what they do. To make themselves seem lively and interesting. To give their audience a chance to participate. They can do the promotional sides of this online. But they shouldn’t neglect what they might do at their live performances.

Why not show trailers, so to speak, for your upcoming performances? If you think it’s cheesy to show them during a show, then play them on video screens in your lobby, the way the Metropolitan Opera does.

Make videos about the people in your organization, and show them everywhere you can — on your website, obviously, but even during your shows, as the YouTube Symphony did so effectively during their Carnegie Hall performance.

If you’re a musician or a music group, your audio content is, quite literally, what you do. So now you can sell it and/or give it away. I’m a big fan of giving your recordings away, or at the very least, selling them for whatever buyers care to pay (including nothing), on the famous Radiohead model.

Someone once asked me, when I was speaking on a panel, what I thought of pirating recordings. I said, with total sincerity, that if my work was widely pirated, I’d be thrilled. All artists, I think, should feel the same way, especially if they’re not yet well known, or if they’re in classical music, where recordings don’t sell very well.

If you’re a classical artist or a classical group, you’re going to make your money with live performances. But how will people learn about you? How will they decide to book you for a live gig, or to come to the concerts you’re giving on your own? It’s in your interest to get your recordings in as many hands as possible, even if that means giving them away.

All this only touches the surface of what’s possible. Use your imagination. Use it a lot.

What are the most common pitfalls in the use of this content?

Using audio and video to educate your audience. For the people in your audience who do want to be educated, multimedia can be very helpful. But to lead with educational multimedia seems like a mistake to me.

The Boston Symphony tried to generate interest in a concert performance of an opera by putting several long videos on its website. But the videos were geared toward education, which was a mistake. They were too long, and too dull. And they took the place of other, simpler content. You couldn’t even read the plot of the opera on the website! You had to watch a video that told you the plot. That’s actually two mistakes in one. The first mistake is using multimedia too much for education, and the second – a serious pitfall – is to assume that simply because you’ve put a video on your website, you’ve done something interesting. Not so!

Another mistake is to make videos too formal, too produced, too slick. A little informality goes a long way. Still another mistake is to make videos only about the art you produce. You should use them to show us what your organization is like – who’s in it, what they do when they’re not working on your performances, and what their work for you is like.

Is there an organization or performer who’s exemplary in this area, in your opinion?

The YouTube Symphony was spectacular. They did everything right. They made you fall in love with their people and their process. They showed you what their process was. And they put their performance online free, for the whole world to see.

And the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for their ads, featuring photos of ordinary people looking at the museum’s art – [photos] which the museum found by searching on Flickr.

Suppose you were giving advice to the marketing director of a small to medium sized organization that has some really interesting on-stage content, but a small marketing budget and who wants to use audio and video content. Where does that person start and what’s the right strategy?

Make the content yourself. Video, interestingly, is easier to do than audio. To record good audio, you need slightly specialized equipment. But video is more fun than audio, and can be more informal. You can use any video camera. Even if you don’t have one, somebody you know does. Or you can buy a Flip camera for not much more than $100. Your videos will look homemade, but for some uses, that’s a plus.

Is there a college or university in your town? Find a student studying film or communications who might want to work for you free, or for very little cost. Or maybe the professor will do it! And don’t just go to the communications department. Ask around. At a visit to a music school at a big state university this fall, I met a musicology student who’d worked professionally as a producer of big-time commercials.

Ask your audience to make the content. Invite members of your audience – and also members of your staff and board, or even anyone in the community – to come to a specially designated rehearsal or performance where they’ll be free to make video or audio recordings, or take photos. Then tell them they’re free to use the content they create in any way they like. They can put it on their blogs, upload it to YouTube, whatever. Now you’re everywhere. Tell them, though, that you want them to give you a copy of what they make, so you can make use of it, too.

Or you could have contests. Who can make the best video showing part of one of your performances? Who can make the best commercial for your show? Who can make the best video featuring people from your organization? Put the winners on your website, and also put them, along with other good entries, on a CD you’ll give away to everyone who comes to your shows.

Greg Sandow’s Blog: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow

Back to top

How Should Venues Use Blogs? or The Importance of Being a Blogger By John Glass

John Francis Glass is a Theater and Arts Critic.

The next time your press department swings into action for opening night, give careful thought to how those tickets are allocated. If you have marginalized or eliminated bloggers from your comp list, you may want to reconsider.

Across the land, empty seats are yawning back at theater management. As good as your show is, people won’t see it if they don’t know about it. There is so much competition for the entertainment dollar, particularly today, that every means at your disposal, including, and especially the blogger, is important to getting the word out.

The world’s changed: people are interested in getting better information faster and from different sources. They want a sense that their information is straight-up – not diluted or massaged – and not tied to the corporate mission statement.

Many people don’t read the newspaper. Even if they do consult a newspaper’s website, it is so loaded with content you’d need a roadmap to locate a show review. Newspaper posts by critics generate, if they’re lucky, a couple of comments.

Try finding arts reviews in the paper. If and when you find one, it’s skimpy. In the pecking order it’s way down there: politics, sports, style (read: celebrities), even the obituaries are consulted before the arts.

A different perspective is presented by bloggers. Newspaper critics are cut from the same cloth, while bloggers vary widely, generating more and better threads!

Blogs are interactive. People feel connected to them as they might a social networking site. The potential future (young) audience, which is vast, all surf the net and text message for information and to keep in touch.

Bloggers are committed – they believe passionately in what they do and that enthusiasm and sense of purpose is conveyed to the reader. Even if you’ve no room for them at the opening (in my view a mistake), ensure that you include them later in the run when perhaps waning or competing interests or tepid reviews might have slowed down sales. Sometimes it takes a while for a show to get going, and initial criticism often leads to corrections and better performances. Let bloggers point the way to your doors.

Bloggers are the Pied Pipers of Modern Media – they’re ready, willing, and able to march this young crowd, who love to go out, into your better land of live entertainment. You only have to recognize this and let them. And do give them your undivided attention.

John’s site is at http://www.dramaurge.com

Back to top

Wolf Trap and Live 2.0: How One Arts Organization is Embracing New Media by Chris Guerre

Chris Guerre spent nine years as the Director of Public Relations at the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts.

Don’t fear not knowing how to reach out in our new millennium, and please don’t see any part of our new digital world as a hindrance or risk. See it, instead, as an opportunity to let your voice be heard far and wide.

In an age of shortened attention spans and clip-culture, you’ve got to think hard about the quickest and most impactful ways to grab someone’s attention, communicate your story, and swoop in to grab feedback in the 2.0 world.

At the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, we started sharing in 2.0 by blogging in a candid, personal voice and enabling readers to give us instant feedback. Kim Witman, Wolf Trap’s Director of Opera & Classical Programming, was one of the first arts administrators to start blogging behind the scenes at a major institution. Her Future of Opera blog, wrought with visionary musings and new perceptions of a beautiful but often misunderstood art form, currently gets an impressive 1,600 unique page views per week; we are reaching people.

We helped raise our national and international visibility by launching our own ’round-the-clock internet radio station, complete with podcasts and digital downloads, expanding the ways in which people can enjoy the live performance.

In 2007, inspired by NSO@Wolf Trap Festival Conductor Emil de Cou, we gave the iPod its live, symphonic debut in an effort to demystify classical music for young audiences. In store for a sequel this summer, we’re working with de Cou on a Beethoven program to be accompanied by live Twitter updates and, hopefully, reciprocal tweeting from the audience to vote on musical choices for the encore. Wolf Trap’s 2.0 palette also includes Graham Binder’s Wolf Trap From the Inside Out Blog, Facebook and MySpace pages, YouTube videos, VodPod video channels, Twitter accounts, online photo sharing, iTunes playlists and more. In a perfect world, I’d love everyone involved with Wolf Trap to voice at least some part of their work/life stream in 2.0 spaces. Many already do, and the numbers are only going to grow.

While organizations should not simply drop their traditional media campaigns and sprint to the newest and hottest 2.0 phenomenon, it is worthwhile to explore some of these newer marketing opportunities.

Don’t worry too much about catching-up, falling behind, or predicting what 3.0 will mean. Rather, seek to lead and innovate a little in whatever you’re doing right now.

http://twitter.com/chrisguerre

http://twitter.com/Wolf_Trap

Back to top

What Can Twitter Do For You? Three Arts Organizations Have the Answer by Danforth France

Danforth France is a freelance writer and comedian from Los Angeles.

Though Twitter has hundreds of thousands of users, there are still plenty of people who aren’t sure exactly what Twitter is or how it can work for them. The “twitter/tweet” jargon alone can be confusing.

That said, many arts organizations are ahead of the curve and have found innovative uses for this newish tool. A look at what they’re doing is a great step toward building or improving your own presence on Twitter.

But first, what exactly is Twitter? Much like a giant public chat room, Twitter is a web-based social networking tool where you can write short posts (less than 140 characters long) for all of your friends to read. If you’re familiar with Facebook, these posts are much like Facebook’s “status updates.” But on Twitter, the posts are called “tweets.”

You might tweet about what you’re doing right now or what mood you’re in. You might tweet a link to a video or an event listing. Or you might simply tweet a joke. Not only can your friends read your tweets, but you can read theirs, so you’re up to the minute on what they’re doing, thinking or laughing at. It’s a quick and easy way to stay in touch.

So how can arts organizations use Twitter to their advantage? There are two main ways: keeping audiences updated on their latest performances and fostering an interactive sense of community.

The immediacy of Twitter’s flurry of tweets provides live entertainment groups a way to not only share information with their audiences, but it also allows audience members to share back. People subscribe to, or “follow,” the group, which means that when the group tweets, the messages come into the followers’ feeds and they instantly know the latest news. They can view their feeds from the web, from their smart phones (and their dumb phones, actually) and on increasingly popular instant message-like desktop programs like TweetDeck, Twhirl, and Twittastic.

Washington D.C.’s historic Ford’s Theatre is a great example of a tweeting arts organization that “gets it.” They frequently tweet about current shows, posting links to behind-the-scenes videos with actors, discount ticket offers and forwarding, or “retweeting,” short reviews from their followers.

Ford’s also uses their Twitter feed to share links of historical interest about the theater’s tragic history as the site of President Lincoln’s assassination, posting everything from links to Lincoln’s poetry to online trivia quizzes about our 16th president to “Warner Bros is podcasting old radio shows including 1940′s Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”

In other words, even in between posts updating followers on upcoming shows, Ford’s has found a way, via trivia sharing, to engage followers continuously. This is a great way to build community.

Similarly, Los Angeles sketch, standup and improv venue, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB), keeps its tightly-knit community of comedy fans in the loop using Twitter, announcing lineups and limited ticket releases for its weekly sell-out hit show Comedy Death Ray: “Still have some CDR Tickets available!”

Following the UCB on Twitter also has its advantages for the hopeful comedy stars of tomorrow. The UCB’s schedule of improv and sketch comedy classes used to be filled by the lucky few who happened to visit the website at the right time, soon after the classes were posted. These days, attentive Twitterers get word of new classes in their feed (“One spot just opened in the Sketch 101 class that starts today!”), so they can swoop in and enroll early.

With the UCB on Twitter, calls to the UCB box office asking what improv team has won the weekly Cage Match competitions have significantly decreased. Dedicated comedy fans who may have missed a night in the tournament-style show now can get those results on Twitter just a few minutes after the performers have taken their onstage victory lap. Talk about instant gratification!

Also on Twitter is the New York Philharmonic, and this should come as no surprise, as they have truly embraced the Internet as a means to reach out to their audience. Not only does the Philharmonic have more than 700 followers on Twitter, but they also maintain a fan page on Facebook and produce a series of podcasts to shed more light on the music of their upcoming performances, often featuring the conductors themselves sharing personal insights.

Sometimes, they’ll even tweet color commentary from the concerts: “The audience leapt to their feet for Gilbert’s Mahler 1. Magnificent!” Followers are reminded of concerts, open rehearsal performances, invited to join in conductor Q&As on Facebook and are gently encouraged to subscribe to the Philharmonic for access to special member events.

Arts organizations like Ford’s Theatre, the UCB and the New York Philharmonic have found ways to further their organizations’ missions on Twitter, a platform that lets their audience engage with them in a new way, and with real immediacy. Live theater, comedy and music would be nothing without an engaged audience, and Twitter is helping make the audience a more active participant in the magic.

To follow Twitter accounts for the arts organizations mentioned in this article, visit:

http://twitter.com/fordstheatre

http://twitter.com/ucbtla

http://twitter.com/nyphil

Back to top