A lot has happened since my last blog post. Remember I was moving down to Austin, Texas? I am settling in quite nicely. Where I would have been happy with a job, I ended up with a dream job. En route with the moving truck, somewhere in Arkansas, I learned that I was going to be the next Director of Marketing for the Austin Lyric Opera. I started four days later.

This is exciting. I cannot wait to put everything I have written about in the last couple of years into action. Social media is going to play an important role. I have been meeting with a lot of people, all warmly welcoming me to Texas, including good Twitter folk like David Neff and Travis Bedard.

I’ve been through a production already (in my second week!) and was blown away by the quality on display at The Italian Girl in Algiers. And the Long Center is just an amazing facility of which Austin can be proud (they are, by the way, also looking for a marketing manager). I can’t wait for Flight in April and then kicking off season 25 after the summer!

And yes, I’ve already bought a new bike. When we move to our new place in April, I can start that bike commute I have been waiting for!

I will keep the blog posts coming. Especially now that I am right in the middle of it 24/7 again. And to prove I have not been sitting idle, this Friday, March 4, Lacey Huszcza and I are putting on the second Ask the Musicians event in our ongoing series. As chosen by 86 voters, this round will cover composers in #askacomposer.

I hope you’ll be able to join us in #askacomposer, and I hope you’ll keep following me throughout my new Austin adventure!

I am no stranger to adventurous moves. In 2002, after finishing high school, I went to work in a ski resort in Austria. Later that year, I moved to London, England because of an American girl I met my first day in Austria. We simply packed our bags, took the bus to London from Amsterdam, and managed to find a place to live and jobs within a week.

After six months in London, we packed our bags again and moved to Chicago. Now, almost eight years later, after graduating from college, several jobs, marriage, and a lovely baby girl, we are once again packing our bags.

I am moving to Austin, Texas next week.

The big difference between the move in 2002 and the move in 2011 is the risk involved. In 2002, it was just me, without any responsibilities, trying to get a taste of life. In 2011, I have a wife and baby, car payments, student loans, and all the other adult stuff.

Moving without a job lined up is scary. But we’re closing on the condo this month, so we need to get moving. And at least I am interviewing.

But beyond the anxiety and fear, I am just so excited about the move. I have been visiting Austin for the past eight years and have seen it grow tremendously. I am thrilled to be in the middle of an environment with booming high-tech companies; to have the opportunity to bike year round and enjoy the Hill Country; and to be closer to family. Not to mention the barbeque.

The coming month or two will be frantic. But I have no doubt we’ll be right at home in Austin.

I am scouring the Interwebs for marketing, social media, communications and public relations jobs and I am encouraged by all the great opportunities. If you read this post, or better yet, if you’re an avid reader of this blog, and you think you might know of an opportunity in Austin, do let me know. I’ll take you out for some brisket.

If you’re an employer in Austin looking for a marketing communications guy, you can find out all about me on my Web site and on LinkedIn. As you can see, I’m a self-starter. If you hire me, I’ll take you out for some brisket. Or I can bring some deep dish pizza from Chicago. Your choice.

So, see you in Austin? Maybe you’ll pass me as I stumble through the Barton Creek Greenbelt on a shoddy mountain bike.

No, this is not a post about some massive arts marketing fail by an orchestra. I was just typing in “orchestra” on Google and it automatically suggested it be followed by “fail.” Now that piqued my interest and I couldn’t resist. Here’s the original #orchestrafail:

More than 1 million views already! It also spurred some mashups. Here are two funny ones:

Browsing through the related videos, I came across some more videos. I feel terribly sorry for these guys, but they’re pretty funny:

And finally, the worst conductor and orchestra ever:

Now there are some more videos that match the “orchestra fail” key words, but there’s no fun in showing some hard working, yet poor sounding kids. So, have you come across any other funny #orchestrafail videos? What about #operafail?

This September marks my five years of blogging (Mashable only beats me by a couple of months; read a nice roundup of the last 5 years of blogging from their perspective).

I just returned from the stART.10 Conference in Duisburg, Germany, where I delivered a keynote address last Friday. I now realize the presentation was a good culmination of the last five years of learning and blogging.

Five years ago, I had not imagined that my interest in the Internet and its applications for cultural institutions and nonprofits would get me to Germany. Although the convergence of marketing, culture and the Internet always guided my blogging efforts, the first three years didn’t make much of an impact. I was too general. My blog was more like the online journals from the early blogging years than the niche conversations of the more recent years. In 2006, I tried to narrow the scope of topics, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2008 I found my true niche. That’s when I started blogging specifically about orchestras and social media.

Spurred by my efforts at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (where I started the Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account, admittedly without much of a strategy behind it), I wanted to dig deeper into the material. I wrote a series of posts that would later become my “Orchestras and New Media: A Complete Guide” (which is more than a year old now and due for a revision or two; I lumped Twitter in with “other new media tools” for example). Last year, I surveyed American orchestras and their use of social media. It got me quoted in Symphony Magazine.

But this narrowing of focus, this writing for a niche was also coupled with my extension into other forms of social media. As Mashable writes in its look back: “The blogosphere of 2010 is also powered in many ways by social media, something that barely existed five years ago” Facebook and Twitter are major referrers to my blog nowadays.

Twitter especially has been a great networking tool for me. Just a day or so before I traveled to Germany, I published a post together with Devon Smith on QR codes for the 2AMt blog, a collection of writings for theater marketers. This post was born from a Twitter conversation, using the hashtag #2amt, with Devon and others.

In the last year, I have also written an occasional guest post for Beth Kanter’s blog, you can find those here, here and here. Beth is of course a master in weaving through social networks and she has an amazing ability to spur action; my classical music on Twitter list being one such example. This year’s presentation with Beth at the annual conference of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras was a real treat for me.

Additionally, I had some good fun writing a couple of guest posts for the Orchestra R/Evolution blog, surrounding the League of American Orchestras annual conference. And I can’t forget this year’s contribution to Drew McManus’ fantastic Take A Friend To the Orchestra project. It was an honor to be asked and I think I wrote one of my finest posts to date.

These guest posts enhance and enlarge my network as well. Now, unlike other bloggers, I don’t write a whole lot. In five years of blogging, I have only written 270 posts on this blog. But it’s not just five years of blogging. When I’m not writing, I’m reading, analyzing and learning. And it’s five years of getting to know people in the social media and cultural environment bit by bit, tweet by tweet, and preferably even face-to-face. It was truly wonderful to meet up with the stART.10 organizers: Frank Tentler, Christian Henner-Fehr, Christian Holst, and Karin Janner.

In these five years, cultural institutions have come a long way in terms of social media, but there remains much to be done. As my orchestra survey pointed out, organizations are all dipping their toes in the social media pool, but many have yet to think strategically and many have yet to truly evaluate their efforts. This blog will be a place where this discussion continues to take place over the next five years, advancing cultural institutions through the social media age. I’m certainly up for it. And I’m more than curious to see what my presentations will look like in another five years (wherever I might present them!).

The League of American Orchestras’ annual conference is just around the corner and this year, to my very pleasant surprise, they have set up a blog platform for (pre) conference discussion called “Orchestra R/Evolution.” I’m even more pleasantly surprised to see they have opened up posting to a broad host of people and inviting people to apply to post.

In Vince Ford’s post Keeping it Real, I got in somewhat of a heated discussion about ticket prices. What spurred it were William Osborne’s comments. William was misinformed about ticket prices. But it wasn’t his fault. Why? He simply googled “Chicago Symphony Orchestra tickets” and went to the first link. You might be surprised to learn that the first link was in fact not cso.org, but rather a ticket broker site that marked up prices considerably.

That made me think. How many people have bought tickets that way and paid up to six times as much? And how many people have been turned away due to the deceitful perception of exuberant ticket prices?

Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are not all that new, yet very few orchestras engage in optimizing their sites. And in a world where probably at least 40-50% of your site’s traffic comes from search engines, that’s risky. Orchestras need to claim their online territory back! (And Google is willing to help).

Now, search engine marketing is one topic. Regular readers will know that I have written about the topic a while ago. But social media is what I’ve written about most. So when I got a DM on Twitter from someone at the League to see if I was interested in posting on the Orchestra R/Evolution blog, I didn’t hesitate and wrote a post on social media.

With a post entitled “Social media… the tough questions” I want to challenge people in orchestra administrations to think harder and smarter about social media. So head over to the League’s blog and share your thoughts.

Just a couple of days ago, I marked my seven-year anniversary of living in the United States. That is more than a quarter of my life. Nearly five of those seven years, I have been blogging (I launched the first version of Dutch Perspective in September 2005).

The first three years weren’t focused. I hadn’t found my niche yet. But they sure were educational. Now ever since I started blogging with a more defined focus on culture, and orchestras in particular, and social media, beginning with a series in July 2008, I have noticed some gears turning. Not entirely coincidentally, this was paired with more engagement on Twitter.

I admittedly still don’t have an audience of thousands, but I do have a specific audience of cultural managers. Clearly, there was a need for information on orchestras and other cultural institutions and their usage of social media, and when I started filling that need; I started noticing a shift in my blog’s audience and my online network. I came in contact with some great people.

Perhaps a first validation and verification of this shift came in the form of an invitation to speak at the stART.09 Conference in Duisburg, Germany via webcast. Then, in March of this year, further validation was my four-day residency at the University of Missouri Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, where I presented to students, staff and faculty on classical music and social media. That was a tremendous experience.

Symphony Magazine quoted me in an article, due to my survey on how and if orchestras use social media. Drew McManus invited me to write a guest entry for the Take A Friend To the Orchestra project, in which I laid out my learning from the book Flip the Funnel.

And this year seems to be turning into quite the year. I have three more conferences coming up in which I will talk about my findings and writings on classical music and social media.

Opera Conference 2010
June 9 – Los Angeles, CA.
Making an Impact with Social Media and Technology

There are some obvious parallels to my writings on orchestras and social media and the world of opera. But there will also be some interesting subtle differences. I will be one of the seminar speakers along with Ling Chan, Vancouver Opera; Ceci Dadisman, Palm Beach Opera; and Margo Tatgenhorst Drakos, InstantEncore.com. And you know what? I can now forever claim that I spoke at the same conference as Placido Domingo…

Association of California Symphony Orchestras
July 23 – San Francisco, CA.
Contemporary Connectivity: Social Media

I am very excited about speaking at the ACSO Conference. Not only does it directly tie to my writings and experience, I will have the opportunity to speak alongside Beth Kanter. This is also slightly intimidating; Beth is of course the go-to person for nonprofit social media! San Francisco Symphony’s director of public relations, Oliver Theil, will moderate the session. The SFSO is doing some great stuff with social media, so that will be an interesting conversation.

stART.10 Conference
September 10 – Duisburg, Germany
A Framework for Social Media Strategy

This time around, I will actually be in Duisburg in person, so that promises to be a much better experience. I will be one of the key note speakers and will try to summarize all that I have learned over the past years into a framework for social media strategy. I can’t wait to finally meet the organizers of the stART Conference in person; they demonstrate that when it comes to culture and social media, things look very promising outside the English-speaking world. I’ll also be able to visit the family back in the Netherlands, just an hour or so away from Duisburg!

Good things all around and a busy summer and fall. I just hope I can miss my beautiful newborn Elli for those days!

It’s not an exercise in vanity. It’s an exercise in learning. I started a Facebook Fan Page for this blog and I have roughly two objectives: to learn more about Facebook in terms of options, best practices and measuring, and to learn more about who is exactly reading this blog (and reading it enough to become a fan on Facebook). Beth Kanter’s Facebook Fan Page was the inspiration behind it all.

Beth wrote a post on Facebook metrics, benchmarks and experiments last month (which I guess was inspired by a link I posted on her fan page!), that really got me thinking about how organizations can use Facebook and got me interested in the idea of Facebook landing pages. My rough first attempt to create a landing page has a big issue: image heavy (looks good, but slow to load and worthless for SEO).

Beth also recommends that you build the page around a very focused objective and a selective strategy. So for me, that turned into “a place to discuss with colleagues how to use social media in the changing cultural environment.” Perhaps not as narrowly defined as Beth’s Facebook-only focus, but then again, classical music is probably narrow enough.

The Facebook Fan Page is an effort to complement my blog (and other social media endeavors), not to substitute it. That’s an interesting topic that arts management blogger Andrew Taylor touched on last week, based on research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

On an only slightly related note. Another complement to my blog, as you can see by the shiny new banner ad, will be my guest contribution to Drew McManus’ annual Take A Friend To the Orchestra (TAFTO) project. I’m very excited about what I wrote. Stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll post it on my Facebook Fan Page as well.

I always stress measuring impact and results in social media planning. That’s why I was curious to see what exactly happened this past week. Last Friday, I posted the first list of people and organizations in classical music on Twitter, followed by a Twitter update. I know lists tend to be popular, but this one really took off.

First, the size of the list. The quick, down-and-dirty list I posted contained 138 people and organizations. I gave the option of adding and updating your information, which resulted in nearly 70 responses for people and 37 responses for organizations. Bit.ly counted 116 clicks for people and 65 clicks for organizations. Today, the list contains 259 people and organizations; it nearly doubled in size.

Second, how many people saw the list? Statistics provided by my site’s hosting service show that the original blog post received 2,409 views from 10/16 to 10/23. Bit.ly recorded 1,180 click-throughs from the original bit.ly link I created (this does not include other possible url-shortener links).

Looking at Google Analytics and comparing statistics from 10/16 to 10/23/09 with equivalent sites of the same size, I received more visits than average, but page views were below average or at par. Pages per visit were much lower and bounce rates were much higher than average. New visits were above average. Average time on the specific blog post was 00:05:23, which is double the average of equivalent sites.

Google Analytics tells me that I received a lot of single-focus traffic. People were interested in the list, but left as soon as they were done. The few people that did navigate further mostly went to the featured posts or the main index page. This is hardly surprising, seeing a lot of the traffic came from Twitter. But perhaps it illustrates clearly the need for enticing my audience with other content in a more effective manner.

So this brings me to my third point. Twitter reach. Backtweets indicates that 101 tweets were generated containing the link to the blog post. Looking at Twitter Analyzer, from 10/16 to 10/23, I reached a potential audience of 123,340 people. This, of course, includes the scarce tweets that weren’t related to the list, but it also excludes tweets that contained a link to the list, but neglected to mention my Twitter username.

In terms of influence on Twitter, from 10/12 to 10/23 I moved from a “casual” twitterer to a “connector,” according to Klout. My score increased from 31 to 41, which means an increase in engagement, reach, and network strength. Over the course of the week, I saw a steady increase in followers of 15-20%.

I also saw a modest blog subscriber increase from 145 on 10/16 to 164 on 10/23, according to Feedburner. The blog post generated 28 comments and also spurred the following posts by other bloggers:

Slipped Disc by Norman Lebrecht
Adaptistration by Drew McManus
Café Aman by Anastasia Tsioulcas
A Liberal’s Libretto by James Newman
Monotonous Forest by Bruce Hodges
Mob Sound
Orquestrando by Jefferson Paradello
Mirette’s posterous by Mirette Kanga
Peter’s preposterous by Peter Witte

And I should not forget the dozens of e-mails and direct messages on Twitter, either to add to or update the list, to give me some suggestions, or just to say thanks.

Those are all good examples of metrics and measurement, but I haven’t really described the goal. This is usually done first, but I did not have a clear goal of selling tickets or products. I suppose a broad and generic goal of increasing awareness of my blog (and me?) could be applied. In that aspect, I think the above metrics clearly demonstrate I have achieved a good increase in this awareness. But perhaps more important was the network building and the relationship forging. The dozens of e-mails and direct messages alone proof this achievement.

Lastly, applying the concepts I outlined in my e-book: I measured interest (page views, click-throughs, retweets); I measured attitude (comments, e-mail and direct message reactions, blog posts); and I measured action (people updating information, building relationship).

Overall, a very good exercise in the strength of social media. And all I did was create a list and tweet about it.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, good things are brewing. The first one I can tell you about is my speaking engagement at the stART.09 Conference in Duisburg, Germany on September 25.

A while ago, I got in touch with Christian Henner-Fehr of the Kultur Management blog, as I detailed in a blog post here. This later turned into an invitation to speak at the conference. I would have loved to be able to be there in person and listen in on some of the presentations as well, but fortunately technology at least allows me to do my presentation remotely in Chicago.

I will be covering much of what I wrote in my e-book on orchestras and new media, attempting to explain the following concepts in the 45 minutes allotted to me:

• The role of the changing media environment in your communication strategy;
• How social media strategically fits in your communication efforts and why it is important to fit it in (and how to convince your boss);
• Why social media is not a business model, but rather a channel to aid your organization in its core mission, and why arts organizations are uniquely primed to be great in social media; and
• How to measure the results of engaging your audience through social media and how to craft your social media strategic plan.

Those are lofty goals and I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I can at least get the thinking going. (And by the way, those were also the key bullets in my chapter proposal for the 20under40 challenge.)

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to tune in to my presentation unless you happen to be near Duisburg, Germany (then go buy your tickets). I will be using Adobe ConnectNow. And rest assured, I will upload my presentation to SlideShare shortly after September 25.

Lastly, while I am on the topic of orchestras and new media, I was recently blessed with two great reviews of my e-book. L. Corwin Christie reviewed it for the Technology In The Arts blogs of The Center for Arts Management and Technology at Carnegie Mellon. Find the post here. Zack Hayhurst reviewed the e-book in two parts on his blog Artistic Discourse. Find the posts here and here.

It gives me much satisfaction that people use and benefit from the energy I put in the project. I am currently hard at work on another closely related project, but that will take a fresh new batch of energy, writing and hard work.

I need a new lunch box. In less than two weeks, I will be starting the Integrated Marketing certificate program at the University of Chicago’s Graham School. Free courses are one of the perks of working for the university. I am very excited to start. It has been nearly five years since I last had to turn in homework.

I will be taking courses like Web Analytics, Mobile Web Marketing Strategies and Insights and Opportunities in Social Media. Here is an excerpt from what I wrote in my personal statement on my application:

When I started my degree in public relations in 2003, MySpace was launched. When I graduated in 2005, MySpace was sold for $580 million to News Corporation. Over the course of my short career, Facebook has replaced MySpace as the dominant social network, Twitter has endeared millions, and newspapers are struggling to find new business models that monetize their Internet presence.

Public relations and marketing practitioners need to be quick to adapt to this fast-changing media landscape. Only five years ago, there were no courses like Web and Mobile Web Marketing Strategies or Insights and Opportunities in Social Media. And while I have been keenly interested in these topics, and kept a detailed eye on these developments, I am excited to have a chance to explore them in an academic setting. How do traditional marketing concepts align with innovative new developments?

That is what I intend to learn. Having just started a new job that is very different from the previous position—in terms of audience, messages and objectives—I am eager to apply academic theories to my new experience. Most of all, I hope to gain new insights to enhance the research dissemination strategies in my new position.

And my hope is that fresh homework assignments will likely spur some new blog posts. I know they have been scarce over the past months. But rest assured, an absence of blog posts does certainly not mean I have been idle. Good things are brewing.