Malcolm Gladwell takes social media activism to task in a new article in the New Yorker. In “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” Gladwell argues that the weak personal ties in social media, as opposed to strong ties in real world settings, and a Wikipedia-like network of supporters, as opposed to a hierarchical structure of advocacy organizations, cannot deliver real revolutions. He has a point, but largely misses the real point. The real point is that it’s not a case of social media activism versus real world activism; it’s a case of social media activism and...
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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...
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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. A strategic framework for social media View more presentations from Marc van Bree. Five years ago, I had not imagined that my interest in the Internet and its applications for cultural institutions...
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One of the key elements of social media is “the community.” Without a community, there wouldn’t be a social in social media. But what exactly is this community? In my post on a fictional online community manager position on the Orchestra Revolution blog, Jean Shirk, public relations manager at the San Francisco Symphony, posed some important questions: Do people actually want to meet and interact with one another online or in person, or do they want to read, watch, and listen online? Do they want to meet new people in person, or are they content with going with friends...
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There was a minor storm in the classical music blogosphere in the last two weeks or so. What started it was Heather Mac Donald’s article Classical Music’s New Golden Age and Greg Sandow’s massive, blunt, multiple post response, which was then again countered by Mac Donald. Mac Donald claims classical music has entered a new golden age and her central thesis is basically this: It is indisputable that classical-music lovers have never enjoyed such an abundance of great music, performed at levels of consummate artistry. Indeed, this is indisputable. There are some good arguments to back up her thesis...
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The title of this blog post is of course a wildly inaccurate claim. How did I get to the number? In my small-scale “free agent” crowdfunding experiment for the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, I ended up with $235 from 1,000 followers by the deadline. That translates to $0.24 per follower. The goal was $1,000, or one dollar per follower. It was a fairly arbitrary goal and I had no expectations. However, I’m still slightly disappointed I didn’t make the goal. But consider the following: Networking All communications were strictly limited to my blog, Twitter and Facebook. Since this was an...
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We have a little less than a week to go for my little crowdfunding experiment #floodofsupport. I have been learning some good lessons already, which–beside doing a good deed–was the point. Right now, unfortunately, I’m still ways away from the $1,000 goal. The project started out well, but has been stagnant for the last few days. Perhaps because I’ve been out of town and haven’t paid it the attention it deserves. You’ll have to wait for the write up of the learned lessons until after the project deadline. But I wanted to highlight the good people who have spread...
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I just returned from San Francisco, where I presented in a seminar on social media at the annual conference of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. I was invited by seminar moderator Oliver Theil, public relations director at the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. My co-presenter was–and I still get goose bumps saying this–the venerable Beth Kanter. Beth’s new book The Networked Nonprofit provided a framework for the presentation. I tried to provide concrete examples from my Orchestras and Social Media Survey and case studies from the field. I also touched on the orchestra “churn” study in connection to the...
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We all know that Nashville got hit with a terrible flood a few months ago. This terrible flood didn’t spare the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The orchestra’s damages were approximately $42 million and after insurance and support from FEMA, the remaining financial gap could be as much as $10 million. A flood is no fun. I know. In 2008, my neighborhood was hit with flooding from the Chicago River. I saw the whole community suffering, and many still are. I’m sure, scratch that, I’m hopeful, some wonderful major donors will step up the plate and help rescue the NSO...
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I’ve been an avid fan of Beth Kanter’s blog for the past few years. It might come as no surprise that I pre-ordered her, and co-author Allison Fine’s, book The Networked Nonprofit. And if you’re a reader of their blogs, it might also come as no surprise that the book fully lived up to its great expectations. My first reaction, on Twitter no less, was telling Beth that I liked the tone of the book. It doesn’t have the common “social media hippie” talk. You know, the long-haired, world-peace-wishing, tree-hugging, social-media-is-going-to-solve-all-your-problems-and-here-are-the-tools-to-do-it talk. Good social media books talk less about...
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Just published: an interesting study from the National Endowment for the Arts called “Audience 2.0: how Technology Influences Arts Participation.” I wanted to give a quick, initial overview with some quick, initial comments. One would think that with the opening up of the Internet, with the increased accessibility, arts participation through electronic media has risen significantly. But unfortunately, we can’t find that out through this report. It does note that arts participation through electronic media declined by almost 20 percent from 1992 to 2002. But first, let’s see what the NEA defines as electronic media: radio, audio recordings, television,...
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