What five years of blogging gets you

September 15, 2010 By

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

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!).

Filed Under: Across the board Tagged With: , , , , ,

A German orchestra and social media: Philharmonie 2.0

May 16, 2009 By

When I wrote the blog series and e-book on Orchestras and New Media, I looked almost exclusively to the English-speaking world. But there are some really interesting things happening in the rest of the world. On Twitter, for example, I’m following some classical music organizations from the Netherlands, including @radio4nl and @muziekgebouw.

And a short while ago, I found Christian Henner-Fehr (@kulturmanager), or rather, he found me. Christian has an interesting blog named Kultur Management and he told me about the stART Conference in Duisburg, Germany, which will take place in September of this year and looks like a must-see event for any European arts managers that want to know more about social media.

A little while later, Frank Tentler, who is also involved with the stART conference, contacted me about the Duisburger Philharmoniker project Philharmonie 2.0. Frank told me in an e-mail he normally works with corporate clients, but:

it is possible to create a company-like concept for an orchestra. I was fascinated: normally you have to create a story to tell at first, then to produce content around the story. But here all content was lying in front of me and I only had to pick it up and lead it to the most important communities.

As project manager, he built a team including a musician, a content manager, and a professor in communication design and his students. And, as Frank writes, “with this experience, I had the idea for a conference – the stART.09. One of the co-initiators, Christian Henner-Fehr told me, that he had contacted you, too.”

Don’t you just love the possibilities of social media and social networking? Through my blog and Twitter I was able to connect to these great resources and share thoughts and comments.

I had a brief look at the Philharmonie 2.0 concept as introduced by Christian and Frank. Frank also forwarded an article from a German orchestra trade magazine, which describes the project, its successes and core ideas. What stood out from the article was the following sentence:

Klassische Musik hat kein Problem mit ihrem Inhalt – es geht darum, mit ihr Leute persönlich anzusprechen

Or, in English, “classical music does not have a problem with its content; the point is to speak personally with your patrons.” Indeed, as I wrote in my brief SWOT analysis, content is one of the main strengths of orchestras. Use it to connect. And make it personal. And talking about content, a lot of content by the Duisburger Philharmoniker is licensed under a Creative Commons label. Smart move.

The channels used by the Duisburger Philharmoniker include Twitter (including separate accounts for the general manager and conductor, although there has not been any recent activity), YouTube, Delicious and Flickr. The orchestra is most active on its blog and they seemingly reach out to newcomers as well, inviting bloggers and Internet users to a free concert (reminiscent of San Francisco’s blogger night). Strangely, and unfortunately, although the orchestra is actively blogging, there are not a whole lot of user comments underneath its posts.

I will keep an eye on these developments in Germany and will continue to browse around the Philharmonie 2.0 project. If only to keep up my fast-dwindling German language skills. I’m curious to see if the orchestra will keep it up and what they learn in the process.

Mach’s gut!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,