Notes from the #acso2010 conference

July 26, 2010 By

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 book Flip the Funnel, which I have written about during the TAFTO month.

Below the embedded presentation follow some of the topics in more detail:

ACSO 2010 conference – Social Media For Orchestras Preso Final
View more presentations from Jean Shirk.

Classical music organizations and free agents

  • Beth’s book explains free agents as people who work outside the organization and are enthused by a cause rather than an institution. The job of the organization then becomes to make it “easy for outsiders to come in.” Marcia Adair’s #operaplot is the perfect example of an outsider, a free agent, coming up with a great idea and involving arts organizations in a way that is simple, effortless and risk-free. Read my interview with Marcia here.
  • Naturally, I briefly mentioned my very own free agent experiment #floodofsupport. There’s still time to get involved.

Integrated campaign around a viral video

  • Perhaps you’ve seen the video: a flashmob (or is it guerilla marketing) opera performance at a market in Valencia, Spain. The video received more than 4 million views. But that wasn’t it. The creative agency behind the video produced several complementing elements: a micro-site; Twitter, Facebook and other social networking profiles; and a print brochure. All for their client Palau de les Arts. The reason why people might not have known about that side of the effort, though, became painfully obvious when I contacted someone at the creative agency. He told me the powers that be at the Palau didn’t believe in the campaign and nixed it, including editing out any branding in the viral video. What a missed opportunity!

Saint Louis Symphony: cross-platform integration

  • The Saint Louis Symphony is an example of well-designed cross-platform integration of social media tools. Highlighting their connectedness on the front page with prominent links to Facebook and the orchestra’s blog. A page on the Web site lists all their social media efforts. Facebook or Twitter are not silos of interaction; social media tools work best across platforms and they work best when an organization’s Web site complements the tools, as well as offline complementing online.

Landing pages

  • Another page from Saint Louis Symphony’s book. They do a good job with a custom page on student efforts on their Facebook page. That led me to talk about landing pages and welcome tabs, items specifically designed to welcome new fans and call for a specific action. I saw a recent study where having a landing page/welcome tab on your Facebook page increases the “like” conversion from 23% to 47%. I have not yet seen an orchestra with a custom welcome tab.
  • Not to mention Twitter landing pages. Why not welcome people from Twitter to your site with a specific message to them? Moreover, if you set up a Twitter landing page on your site with a specific call to action that takes them through a specific path on your web site, you can measure conversion rates through Google Analytics with funnels. You can see where people dropped off, how many and where they went. Keep this in mind, not for just ticket sales, but for newsletter sign ups or other actionable items.

Measuring results

  • Due to time shortage, the only point I really wanted to make was that you should look at a social media effort as part of an integrated marketing communications effort, where communications result in behavior change and marketing is the financial value of this behavior. So if you’re measuring, you first have to know what this behavior change is. What are you looking to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years? Those sometimes 150-year-old mission statements can still be a guiding light. The principles don’t change much, the environment does, and that’s what is reflected in the last sentence of the New York Philharmonic’s mission statement, to bring classical music to the community “in any other manner now known or hereafter to be…” Read my series on Evaluating Social Media for Classical Music Organizations.
Filed Under: Communications, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

On purpose, change, structure and relevance

June 22, 2010 By

An interesting question from the League of American Orchestra, which had its annual conference just last week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, but that doesn’t preclude me from chiming in (I did here, here and here). In addition, the opening session was broadcasted and recorded. Find it here.

The question was “what is the most important question to discuss?” and the audience, both on- and offline was to pick from the following options:

Purpose: What makes an orchestra matter in the 21st century?

Change: If we “let go of the past” and “embrace the future,” what should we retain, release, and go for?

Structure: How should an orchestra be structured, organized, and behave to be successful?

Relevance: What does the artistically vibrant orchestra need to look like to be essential for its community?

Relevance won by a mile, followed by purpose, change and lastly structure. Those first three questions, to me, indicate that orchestras, or at least their managers, don’t quite know what they are. Ian David Moss at Createquity writes: “My sense is that the orchestra field is facing something of an existential crisis right now. Why else would it so openly welcome questions of its relevance to audiences and communities in the 21st century?”

Are we really in some kind of existential crisis? I’m not so sure. Each arts organization, each orchestra is of course unique, but they all have a broad purpose in common: art. In whatever shape or form and to be determined by more creative types. And artistic vibrancy creates relevancy. Sure, change is needed to let go of the past and embrace the future, but we’ve been talking about this for years and we’ve seen some answers: engagement. Ben Cameron, in his key note address, talked about a market less defined by consumption, but more and more by participation.

To me, it all boils down to the question: How are you going to change, how are you going to be relevant, how are you going to fulfill your purpose without the necessary structure?

Jesse Rosen, president of the League, in an online conversation with Doug McLennan, seemed to agree: “I couldn’t help but notice the lowest scoring question […] was the question about structure. […] It may be one of the elephants in the room, because it is one of the harder problems to solve.”

Although it’s perhaps something that can’t be discussed in snippets of 140 characters, on Twitter, I received some push back. Ian David Moss wrote in response to my tweet that the purpose is art: “Whenever anyone pushed the ‘what is the purpose of the orchestra’ or ‘what excites you,’ nobody took bait.” Conductor Stephen Brown wrote: “how do we know what structure is necessary?” and “an orchestra with a great structure will still die if it supports an irrelevant ‘experience/product.’”

My problem with discussions about purpose, relevance is that they are too abstract to facilitate real change. And purpose and relevance do not come in a one-size-fits-all package. What the field needs is a real, hands-on discussion about how to facilitate change and how to practically prepare for the future. The field needs a new structure in a new environment.

In this changing environment the structure would need to follow a couple of rules:

* Creativity nowadays means setting up a framework in which creativity can happen
Ben Cameron suggested in his key note that an orchestra’s role is maybe “an orchestration of social interaction.” Jesse Rosen even questioned “are we more about reenactment than creation?” Creativity not just stems from the organization anymore. The structure needs to provide a framework of resources for creativity and allow and set the stage for people, inside or outside, to become creators.

* The structure needs an organizational culture that supports it
As Joseph Jaffe writes in Flip the Funnel: “…without cultural buy-in, organizational resource allocation, system integration, and best practices are like a transplanted organ rejected by its host body.” In an older book, Strategy: Core Concepts, the authors explain how a mismatch in culture and strategy occurs. I wrote about that in an earlier blog post on organizational culture and change. I have also used the very same book to look at a decentralized organization versus a centralized organization. And for the Orchestra R/Evolution blog, I wrote about Google’s 20%-time rule, which is one idea to allow creativity to come back into the organizational culture.

In short, the new structure needs to reflect the new environment. The often heard words transparency, authenticity and sincerity are not just buzz words. Eric Booth mentioned that “anytime you engage workers in conversation about their work, productivity goes up.”

The purpose is art; vibrant art breeds relevancy; the change that’s needed is engagement; now let’s build the structure to support it.

* Update: there has been more discussion on the topic. Find it here:
Drew McManus | Adaptistration | Look Before You Leap
Stephen P Brown’s Blog | An Orchestra’s Relevance Isn’t Relevant?
Andrew Adler | Louisville Courier-Journal | Orchestra Leaders Only Talk of Change

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Notes from Opera America 2010 Conference

June 11, 2010 By

Last Wednesday, I had my whirlwind trip to Los Angeles to speak at the Opera America 2010 Conference. I arrived in L.A. Tuesday night—and was amazed at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra mural during my cab ride to downtown—but I had to leave again shortly after noon on Wednesday. That meant unfortunately missing two of my co-presenters, some exciting performances, Placido Domingo’s address, and of course, all the networking and meeting and greeting.

That said, it was great meeting Ling Chan, Ceci Dadisman and Margo Drakos in person. There’s hope for the arts in social media.

I was on first in the seminar. I delivered a presentation on a framework for social media strategy. I got lots of interesting questions. I’m not sure if I answered some of them satisfactory. Things are usually clearer in my head than coming from my mouth.

Here is the presentation:

Opera America 2010 Conference

The biggest struggle perhaps is gauging the level of knowledge and experience in the room. I was surprised to hear the question “what is Twitter?” in the middle of my presentation. But those questions are good to gain back perspective. I don’t think they really didn’t know what Twitter was, they wanted to know the why and how.

The framework I provided contained perhaps surprisingly few mentions of actual tools. I like to stress social media is not about the tools, it’s about the interaction and community. But people do like to hear about concrete examples and tools, about tips and tricks. It was a good lesson for me.

On the other hand, the reason I didn’t include those concrete examples was because I keep thinking about what they are going to do with those examples. Are they going to replicate them? What works for one company, doesn’t work for another. In Amber Nashlund’s popular post Social media topics that need to die, she writes: “If you’re spending all your time building your cloned safety net based on other people’s situations, you’re already behind the game, and not focused on what your business needs.”

I will need to find a happy intermedium. Illustrative examples, but stress that social media and Web 2.0 are contextual and technological (respectively) frameworks in which you can be creative. We’re in a creative industry after all.

Furthermore, if I had included concrete examples, I would have picked the Vancouver Opera…

I couldn’t be happier then to listen to Ling Chan’s presentation about Vancouver Opera’s social media efforts. I already knew the surface of their efforts, but Ling provided the most creative case study of an opera company’s use of social media. I recognized a lot of the same key points I tried to make from a theoretical point of view in Ling’s practical demonstration. She described her own experience of the presentation on her own blog.

I wasn’t ready to leave, but had to catch the flight back to Chicago without seeing Ceci’s and Margo’s presentations…

Filed Under: Communications, Culture, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , ,

Discussing the Orchestra R/Evolution

May 28, 2010 By

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.

Filed Under: Across the board, Culture, Social Media Tagged With: ,