New Year’s resolution: organizational culture and change

January 5, 2010 By

Greg Sandow recently composed a list of the top ten changes in classical music in the past decade. It’s an interesting, albeit incomplete, list with plenty of agreeable and perhaps some disagreeable items. What stuck out for me was item number three: a new attitude toward classical music:

Mainstream classical music institutions have tried many innovations — new, informal ways of giving concerts, musicians talking to the audience, large videoscreens, and much, much more.

Some of these innovations have been smart, some have been silly, and many of them haven’t been well thought out. Rarely have mainstream classical institutions developed real strategic plans for change. More often (as I’ve observed firsthand), they’ve tried things out impulsively, only to discover, a year or two down the road, that their innovations don’t make much difference. In particular, they don’t attract a large new audience.

That’s because a single innovation isn’t enough. But all of them, taken as a whole, have changed the mood of classical music, bringing it closer to contemporary life.

A new attitude toward classical music is crucial. But I would like to frame it from a marketing and strategy perspective. The market has changed, now institutions and administrators must change. Let’s introduce two concepts: product-driven vs. market-driven organizations, and strategy in strong-culture organizations.

The latter concept comes from the book Strategy: Core Concepts, Analytical Tools, Readings by Thompson, Gamble and Strickland. A book I have used before. According to the authors, strong-culture organizations have well-defined corporate characters with deeply rooted values and behavioral norms. Clearly, orchestras fit this description.

But first, orchestras are by their very nature product-centered organizations, as opposed to market-centered organizations. The product (by that, I mean the production of art in any form) is the raison d’être, whereas for corporate institutions, the market (or maximized profit) is their reason for existence.

It is easy to be a product-centered organization when you hold a near monopoly and your product is in demand. But as we have seen before (PDF), the arts and culture have significantly proliferated in the last decades. According to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in the last 20 years, the number of performing arts groups has risen to an all-time high. On the other hand, as the NEA recently reported, fewer people attend the arts. In other words, more choices, but a shrinking market.

The danger in product-centered organizations is the assumption that the superiority of the product is the key to the success in the market and the dismissal of external information and sources. We all recognize a certain elitism in classical music institutions: an attitude of play it and they will come.

For years, decades even, institutions have dismissed reports that spoke about the decline of classical music. Greg Sandow calls it “the myth that the audience would always renew itself.” Let me bluntly generalize and state that orchestras are run in this culture of superiority, elitism and dismissal. There appear to be some cracks in the foundation of this culture, but only just recently, the League of American Orchestras recognized the dire situation of declining audiences.

The authors of Strategy: Core Concepts explain how a mismatch culture and strategy occurs in strong-culture organizations, such as orchestras. They “tend to occur when a company’s business environment undergoes significant change, prompting a drastic strategy revision that clashes with the entrenched culture. A strategy-culture clash can also occur in a strong-culture company whose business has gradually eroded…” That is already sounding familiar.

The authors cite the example of electric utility companies that were “long used to operating as slow-moving regulated monopolies with captive customers.” I think we can all recognize orchestras in this example.

Electric utility companies are now “confronting the emergence of a vigorously competitive market […] and growing freedom on the part of […] customers to choose their own energy supplier.” I think the comparison is canny.

Well then, what’s the answer? The authors recommend shifting “away from cultures predicated on risk avoidance, centralized control of decision making, and the politics of regulatory relationships and toward cultures aimed at entrepreneurial risk taking, product innovation, competitive thinking, greater attention to customer service, cost reduction, and competitive pricing.”

Should orchestras then change from a product-driven strategy to a market-driven strategy? Hold your horses, not so fast. In market-centered organizations, the product is born from, and evolves, based on the needs of the market. If this were applied to orchestras, they would all turn into Andre Rieu’s blasphemous Strauss orgy.

Thus, for orchestras, a market-driven strategy does not mean performing Beethoven’s Fifth in every concert because that’s what the market wants. The product should unwaveringly focus on artistic integrity and innovation. In marketing terms, the product is not up for grabs in a market-driven strategy.

But that still leaves the other three P’s in the marketing mix: price, place, and promotion. How can orchestras be a more market-driven organization in those aspects?

Greg Sandow’s list offers some insights on the changes that have happened in the last decade: Peter Gelb taking over at the Met and infusing its strategy with bold, risk-taking innovation; improved customer service; and artistic improvising.

But the greatest opportunity for innovation lies in Sandow’s eighth place item: classical music goes online. Think about the opportunities in place (streaming, social media, new sale outlets, partnerships etc.), promotion (search engine marketing, social media, partnerships etc.), price (micro-payments, donations, subscriptions etc.), and yes, even product (adaptations, mash-ups, collaborations etc.).

That is exactly why we need to get rid of the product-driven culture of superiority, elitism and dismissal. The Internet culture, and particularly social media, is the antithesis of those forces. Shift away from risk avoidance and centralized decision making and move toward innovation, competitive thinking, customer service, and competitive pricing.

Number one on Greg Sandow’s list is a movement for classical music change. “I know they’re out there,” writes Sandow:

So the next step might be to draw this movement together. Maybe we do need an organization. I’m available to help to build it. Or maybe we just need some new but more informal ways to meet each other, and connect. I’m available to help make that happen, too.

But that might be our new year’s resolution. Let’s make our movement stronger. Let’s connect, and make some noise.

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: , ,

Orchestra Survey: Monitoring and Measuring

December 17, 2009 By

None of the orchestras indicated they have implemented or established metrics for measuring social media activities. However, the majority of the orchestras (73%) recognized the need to measure social media activities and the remaining 27% were currently planning metrics for measuring social media.

This is one of the findings I found most interesting. In addition, the majority do find the need to measure and two-thirds of the managers rate importance of measuring social media at least a four (out of five). This, I believe, truly indicates that orchestras are at the brink of a strategic use of social media.

But they don’t quite seem to be ready to answer the tough questions. I can’t stress enough to read the wonderful report Are We There Yet? to get yourself ready for those tough questions. In a comment on yesterday’s post, I detailed an example for goals, objectives and milestones that should make measurement clearer.

Back to the survey, it seems contradictory that the question on what exactly managers measure yielded some results. Just over half of the managers claim to measure ticket sales and incoming traffic from blogs and social networking (even though they indicated earlier that they have no established metrics). Perhaps they are tracking these numbers, but have not connected them to a social media goal yet. And I wonder how many managers really do measure ticket sales that stem from social media efforts, or if they rather measure general online ticket sales.

Tracking these measurements then seems to fit more under social media monitoring, rather than measuring. Google Alerts is the main tool of choice for managers to monitor social media. It would have been interesting to see how many use the “comprehensive” alert versus the “news” alert. Obviously, you can’t monitor social media with just a “news” alert. Frequency of monitoring was not surveyed, but it is perhaps an important indicator of how involved the monitoring effort really is.

Just as the engagement question before, the relatively narrow framing doesn’t show the full scope of measuring and monitoring. Qualitative research on the topic, including interviews, would be a welcome addition to find out how managers keep on top of what’s being said in the social media sphere.

For more on social media monitoring (or listening), read Beth Kanter’s wiki on the topic with some great instructional materials.

How do you interpret the results? And how would you go about monitoring and measuring your social media efforts?

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

Orchestra Survey: Activities, Engagement and Goals

December 16, 2009 By

The survey demonstrates a high participation rate among orchestras in the different social media tools. All orchestras in the survey are on Facebook and 80% of the orchestras have a Twitter account. But this just shows that orchestras have set up a presence, not what they are doing with the presence.

That’s where the engagement question can answer some questions. Eighty percent of the orchestras respond to questions and comments on social networking sites. A little more than half (53%) of the orchestras adapt press and marketing materials for social media and 40% actively pitch bloggers, and 20% maintain a separate mailing or pitch list for new media outlets and authors.

There is an obvious problem with such narrow framing: it doesn’t show the full scope of engagement. Furthermore, the interpretation of the question leaves room for different answers.

I was surprised to find that a little more than half claim to adapt materials for social media. Then again, condensing a press release into a tweet and posting a link could be construed as adapting materials. And perhaps instead of “responding to questions and comments,” the question should have included “regularly” or some sense of frequency and a segmentation of platforms (blog comment, Facebook, Twitter etc.).

And what about pitching bloggers? What kind of bloggers are being pitched? Are they just the arts critics from traditional media who maintain a blog? Or do they include blogs like Sequenza21and Opera Chic, or local blogs like Gothamist and Chicagoist, or even local classical music enthusiasts who blog?

Most telling was the question about responses to negative comments. Nearly half of the orchestras said they did respond externally. All orchestras are on Facebook, yet only half respond to possible negative comments. Perhaps this finding tells the truest story about engagement.

The reason I highlight these points, is because I feel the survey findings might reflect an appearance of frequent engagement through social media. This doesn’t completely match up with my own observations, even though there are the obvious exceptions that show both quantity and quality.

I received a comment via e-mail:

What kind of content are these orgs trying to share over social media? I think videos, podcasts and blogs are the main types of content that orgs should be sharing when they get into social media. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Orchestras aren’t creating the kind of content that is popular to interact with, easily shareable with others, etc. Thoughts?

I think this touches on a very important point. Orchestras are just dipping their feet into social media. It seems a lot of organizations have joined to “keep up with the Joneses.” So yes, they’re active on Facebook and Twitter, spending time on social media, and yes, they find it moderately important, but there’s no know-how on communicating in a social media environment, and there’s no strategy or policy behind it. This knowledge and a well-defined goal, along with well-established metrics, is what’s lacking at most organizations.

And talking about goals: driving Web traffic and increasing awareness of programming and the organization are the most important social media goals, according to managers. Although opinions are split on increasing ticket sales, it is only ranked sixth out of eight.

Drew McManus writes:

Certainly, organizations shouldn’t exclusively use social media as an outlet to shill and sell tickets yet there is no way to reasonably separate revenue development from other mission related goals. Simply put, revenue performance and the institution’s mission are not mutually exclusive.

I would suspect that if managers were pressed on why they would want to increase Web traffic, or why they would want to increase awareness, it would all come back to ticket sales.

Then again, not necessarily. I believe social media can be a great tool to advance the orchestras mission of bringing classical music to the community. Although tremendously important for the bottom line, ticket sales is still only one of the components in that mission. That’s where the distinction between goals and objectives is important. Your mission is your goal; ticket sales is an objective toward that goal.

Update: Elliot Harmon at the techsoup blog finds it odd that orchestras focus on Web traffic as “it seems a clumsy proxy for the less transparent goals of awareness and education.”

What do you think?

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

Orchestra Survey: Budgets, Responsibilities and Time

December 15, 2009 By

This is the first post in a series to provide a more in-depth look at the orchestras and social media survey findings. I made the full report available yesterday, to give people the opportunity to take a complete look at the findings in hopes of a better discussion.

Others have chimed in already:
Drew McManus: Adaptistration
Christian Henner-Fehr: Das Kulturmanagement Blog
Guest post on Beth’s Blog

First, I would like to take the opportunity again to express the informative nature of the report, rather than an authoritative nature. The sample is small and must consequently allow for a large margin of error.

In the report, I occasionally switch from raw numbers to percentages and back. The percentages tell a bigger, clearer story, but the raw numbers are perhaps more credible. I ask you to keep in mind that the percentages are based on a number of 15 respondents, and one respondent represents 7% of the total. How did this look for you?

Furthermore, how much do the institutions that responded look like the ones that did not? It is perhaps reasonable to expect a certain bias toward orchestras that are already engaged in social media. The orchestras that received the survey were roughly the 53 largest budget orchestras in the country. As mentioned in the report, seven of those were Group 1 orchestras, four were Group 2 and four were Group 3. Other than the aforementioned bias, I have no reason to believe some other bias to be in place. I’d be interested to hear any other possible issues in the sample.

In the rest of this post, I’ll be looking at budgets, responsibilities and time commitment.

Budget

Half of the orchestras (53% / 8 out 15) do not have a budget for social media; a little more than a quarter (27% / 4 out 15) spends more than $1,000 annually on social media.

Budgets exclude employee salary and wages, but other than that, there are no particular guidelines to what exactly is or should be included in these budgets. Differences between each orchestra’s take on what goes in to a social media budget should be expected and is not accounted for in this survey.

The next step would be to look at those budgets. What does it mean if one orchestra spends more than $10,000 per year and another spends $500? What are the differences in their efforts, and most importantly, what are the differences in their goals and results?

Additionally, do those orchestras that have placed an ad on a social network account for that spending in a social media budget? Or does the money come from a regular marketing budget. How do those orchestras that do not have a budget account for costs associated with their social media activities? Again, is this covered in a different or general marketing budget?

Keep in mind that if you’re going to effectively measure your performance, you need to know what your efforts cost.

Responsibilities

A majority of orchestras (67% / 10 out 15) divide social media responsibilities among multiple staff members. More than a quarter (27% / 4 out 15) of the orchestras list social media responsibilities as part of an existing staff member’s duties.

Marketing departments are involved in managing social media at an overwhelming majority (87% / 13 out 15) of the orchestras, but at slightly less than half (47% / 7 out 15) of the orchestras it was the marketing department that was solely in charge.

It’s important to formalize the role of social media in the organization. Outside of the implausible hiring of new staff or freelancers, you can update staff positions and job descriptions to incorporate social media. Make it official. Bring these people together, under the auspices of a senior manager who has the strategic oversight and organizational knowledge.

In an earlier article “Social media in a decentralized organizational structure” I offer additional thoughts on how to handle social media responsibilities.

In addition, I received the following comment via e-mail:

For social media to be truly powerful, and for it to change how orgs interact with their “stakeholders,” I think the power in social media has to be better distributed. Conductors, musicians, board members, administrators, etc. – all should be involved. With 87% of the orgs having marketing in charge, that puts marketing in power over of the message. Which is why there is too much “marketing speak” going on with orchestras on Twitter right now.

This touches on a couple of very good points. The first being quality vs. quantity, as I explained in my recommendations: “This survey did intentionally not look at the quality of social media activities by orchestras, yet quality is an important factor in the effectiveness of your social media efforts.”

But also a pressing point I had neglected in the full report: the role of the artistic staff in social media. The London Symphony Orchestra demonstrates the qualitative achievements when musicians get involved in the social media efforts (article by Rebecca Krause-Hardie).

Time commitment

All orchestras spend at least some time on social media per work week. A large majority of the orchestras (80%) spends between 1 and 5 hours per work week on social media.

Clearly, here we see that social media is certainly not a large part of the job, whether scattered among multiple employees or focused on a dedicated staffer.

I received an interesting question via e-mail regarding that specific point and my related recommendation:

You show that only one institution spends as much as 20% of a full-time person on social media, with most spending less than 5% of someone’s time—but then you recommend formalizing social media participation. How do those two go together?

I have to be clear here that formalizing social media participation does not necessarily mean increasing your current efforts. Your time commitment depends on your goal; of course, if you have a lofty goal, you should commit the appropriate time. If you commit 5% of someone’s time, you can only expect a proportionate result.

The same can be said for budgets.

Or do you have some advice for how to formalize an engagement that continues to occupy only a small fraction of anyone’s time?

This, of course, all comes down to efficiency. Formalizing, in my opinion, is all about setting policies, practices and metrics. Those will take a bit of time to develop, but they will increase the efficiency of your social media efforts and operations. For example, a good monitoring system might take a while to set up, but then provides a dashboard of what’s being said about your organization, from where you can direct your engagement with relatively little effort.

Your turn

These are some of the points that came to mind when creating the report. As I explained in the preface, this survey might have raised more questions than answers. And that’s good. But now it’s your turn. What are your thoughts on the findings, on the questions and on the recommendations?

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

Search engine marketing and orchestras: part 4

December 3, 2009 By

Now that you know a little bit about how ads show up and the typical account structure, let’s look at three important, interdependent aspects of paid search: key words, creative and landing pages.

First, you have to build a key word list for each of the ad groups. The categories make it easier to think about what to use, but do the research. Know your industry and competitors (both in the real as well as the search world), understand your goal, and use your patron’s language.

Here are some tips for key words:

Key word themes should take into account the different phases of the buying cycle (and your creative and landing page should align with these phases as well).

The Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool shows suggestions for “Los Angeles Philharmonic Tickets” from the high volume “concert tickets” to the lower volume, yet more specific “walt disney concert hall schedule” and “la philharmonic tickets.”

You have to tailor your creative and your landing pages to these specific themes. Patrons who search “concert tickets” will be in a different phase of the buying cycle than people who search “la philharmonic tickets,” and those people will be even in a different phase than others who search the more specific “la philharmonic tickets beethoven.”

Each of these phases should generate different creative and guide the customer to a different landing page.

Let’s look at creative first. You should do continuous testing of customized messages in order to get maximum relevancy (quality score!) and maximum efficiency, click-through and conversion rate (depending on what your goal is). Specific ads typically convert more sales, general ads generate more clicks.

Keep in mind that the creative consists of the title (approx. 25 characters); the description (2 lines of 35 characters each); the display URL (e.g. www.laphil.org); and the invisible destination URL (e.g. http://www.laphil.com/tickets/2010/beethoven).

The example above could make up the following ad (keep in mind it’s sample copy; you will have to test different variations to see what works best!):

LA Phil plays Beethoven
Hear music by Beethoven at the LA Phil. See complete schedule and get great deals!
www.laphil.org

This ad would bring people to a full schedule of Beethoven concerts by the LA Phil (the fictional destination URL from above). This brings us to landing pages. So you’ve used the right key words and persuasive creative to land people on your page. What to do now? First, make sure that the page your patrons are reaching is the relevant page they were looking for. Assuming you want the patrons to take some kind of action (fill out a form, a survey, or simply buy tickets), make sure that that process is easy and short.

Drew McManus, in his Orchestra Web Site Reviews, has been telling managers for years to keep the purchasing (and donating) options short and painless. Don’t make users log in before trying to purchase tickets and don’t create unnecessary steps in the purchasing process. Make your landing page relevant and your purchase process clear and concise. Your conversation rate will depend on it.

Targeting your ads

Besides targeting your ads through key word selections, you can set other parameters to more specifically attract your desired audience. One of the main options is geo-targeting.

Let’s say someone searches “beethoven concert” without indicating a specific orchestra or location. Bidding on this high volume key word might be expensive and for someone in Atlanta an ad about a Beethoven concert in Los Angeles would not be relevant (so no click-throughs or conversions). But if someone searches that term in Los Angeles, it would most definitely be relevant. You can target your ads specifically to Los Angeles, California or a something-mile radius from a certain point. You can also indicate several different locations. Keep in mind, however, that the location of the user depends on the server they use, and that server might not be located in the area in which they live.

Another targeting method is using the hour of the day or day of the week. Perhaps your budget is limited and you have found that your best click-through and conversion rates happen on Friday at 4 p.m. You can specify your ads to only show up around that day and time. Yet another method is targeting on language. Perhaps a Mariachi group is scheduled to perform at the Walt Disney Hall. You might specifically target Spanish language searches.

Paid search performance metrics

You can’t set up a paid search effort without measuring your performance and using that data to optimize your efforts. But beware for over-analyzing; there are many factors influencing click-through and conversion rates, including external factors that have little to do with search. Don’t analyze every day; make it monthly or quarterly.

Click-through-rate (clicks/impressions) is a simple metric that is often used to demonstrate the effectiveness of your ad and ad copy. But unless you’re aiming to create general awareness, a click-through-rate might be misleading. More important is your conversion rate (# of orders/clicks) and your ROAS, or return on advertising spend (sales amount/costs).

For example, what would be better: a high click-through-rate with a low conversion rate, or a low click-through-rate with a high conversion rate? Well, it really depends on the exact numbers you put in and on your ROAS.

You can, for example, calculate your maximum cost-per-click based on ROAS. Let’s say you are aiming to make $5 on every advertising dollar spent, you have a conversion rate of 1.5%, and your average sale amount is $165. Your maximum cost-per-click would be ($165/$5) / (1/0.015) = $0.49. You can also determine your max CPC based on your desired cost-per-acquisition.

Benchmark your baseline performance metrics and set and check milestones along the way.

A little bit more about conversion rate. Let’s say, your average order is $100, your conversion rate is 1.25% and your sales revenue on your Web site from paid search ads is $100,000 annually. That means 1,000 out of 80,000 people who clicked-through that year purchased tickets. Well, let’s say you tweak your ad copy to be more effective, perhaps change your landing page a bit, and make the purchase process easier. You’ll get a conversion rate of 1.5%. Out of 80,000 people who clicked through, now 1,200 will purchase tickets. That means your sales revenue is $120,000. You tweak some more and you hit the 2008 e-commerce industry conversion rate average of 1.75%. You’ll now be making $140,000 annually.

Small changes can mean big results. Test, measure and optimize. Once again, you can’t live without measuring your performance and using that data to optimize your efforts.

This concludes the four part series on search engine marketing and orchestras. I have glossed over some of the basic concepts and hopefully shown that search engine marketing, both natural and paid, should be important parts of your online marketing and communications strategy. Remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day either, so take your time to find your groove. But I can’t mention enough that you should try things out in small steps and monitor for results, then use that data to optimize.

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

Search engine marketing and orchestras: part 3

December 2, 2009 By

After a couple more classes and a Thanksgiving break, I’m back with renewed energy to write more about search engine marketing and orchestras. This time, I’m covering paid search. As I wrote before, if natural search is public relations, then paid search is advertising. Paid search is instantaneous, direct and controllable, extremely measurable, and when done right, very cost effective.

To keep things simple, I will only be looking at Google, as it represents by far the biggest share of the pie, but other search engines will work in roughly the same manner. I will go into the basics of how an ad shows up, what a typical account structure looks like, tips and information about key words, creative, landing pages and targeting, and, of course, performance measurement. I’ll be taking the Los Angeles Philharmonic as an example this time. They currently do some paid search, but as I have no knowledge about its structure or strategy, I will ignore their current efforts and create a theoretical case.

What is paid search?

Paid search, or pay-per-click, is an Internet advertising model. This model is used by networks such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.

Advertisers pay these companies only when their ad is clicked. In these bid-based models, the advertisers pay the companies only when their ad is clicked. The advertiser competes against other advertisers in a blind auction.

How does your ad show up?

Although the exact algorithm is a secret, we know that your ad position is determined by two factors: quality score (relevance) x maximum cost-per-click (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to pay for one click).

Your quality score is determined by different kinds of relevance: the click-through-rate on Google.com (clicks divided by impressions), which shows how relevant consumers think your ad is to their query; the key word and ad text relevance to the query, and landing page quality and relevance to the query.

Here follows a simple, fictitious calculation to demonstrate that the New York Philharmonic would be positioned above the Los Angeles Philharmonic, despite a lesser willingness to pay.

Quality Score x Max CPC = Ad Rank
New York Philharmonic: 2.0 x $0.40 = 0.80
Los Angeles Philharmonic: 1.4 x $0.52 = 0.73

Keep in mind, the guy positioned below you sets the price; your cost is $0.01 more than the spot below you. So what does the New York Philharmonic pay per click? Remember that the actual cost-per-click is the same or lower than the maximum cost-per-click. In this case, the New York Philharmonic pays 0.73 (LA Phil Ad Rank) / 2.0 (NY Phil Quality Score) + $0.01 = $0.375 per click.

The bids are blind; organizations cannot see a competitor’s click-through-rate, max/actual CPC bid, or quality score. So you’ll need to tweak you own bid in order to gain prominence. But remember, as you can see, improving quality score is an effective way to raise ad position, while controlling costs.

Paid search account structure

Your paid search strategy is not just simply bidding on your own brand. In fact, your brand is probably a very small portion of the whole effort. You have to know, and test, what your patrons are looking for and use their language.

A typical account structure begins with the account itself; in this case the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The account has different campaigns. When I looked at the LA Phil’s Web site, I saw an almost natural ordering of the campaigns right on the front page: classical concerts, jazz concerts, world music concerts, and pop, family & others (and we can go on and create campaigns for brand, recordings, Dudamel, the Hollywood Bowl etc.).

Those different campaigns will be divided into several ad groups. For example, when hovering over the classical tab, concerts include Los Angeles Philharmonic, visiting orchestras, baroque variations, celebrity recitals, casual Friday, and chamber music.

Each of these ad groups will have scores of key words and certain key words can be grouped together with the same creative (ad copy) and landing page. But stay tuned for more about that in the next part.

Here below is an illustration of a part of the fictitious Los Angeles Philharmonic account structure.

Search Account Chart

Search Account Chart

I am aware that, unlike retailers such as Target or Home Depot, inventory for tickets at orchestras has a time limit and is ever evolving. Perhaps you could further divide Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts by weekly program and create key word themes for each of the weekly programs, ranging from repertoire to guest artists. You will have to make those decisions based on how you want to categorize your campaigns.

It will all make a bit more sense in the next part, when I delve deeper into key words, ad creative and landing pages. Stay tuned.

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

Search engine marketing and orchestras: part 2

November 10, 2009 By

The third class went a little deeper into natural search. I think it’s important to first reiterate some important matters. Search engine optimization (SEO) is not an overnight process; it might take 6 months for your efforts to show any results. The goal of SEO is to be the Web page with the most relevant content, all else follows.

There’s a difference between paid and natural search and I like to compare it with the difference between advertising and public relations. In very broad and general terms: advertising is paid, you control the message, but it is not as credible; public relations is “free,” you can’t control the message, but it is more credible.

Without further delay, here are some key lessons. This time, I used the Nashville Symphony Orchestra as guinea pig where needed.

  • You can’t optimize for an unlimited amount of terms. If you optimize your site, you want to optimize your home page for high volume words (remembering the 80/20 rule). Pages below the home page can be optimized for more specific terms.
  • Check to see what you’re up against. Your real-world competitors might not necessarily be your search engine competitors. Searching for the term “Nashville classical music” does not lead to the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. In fact, it does not lead to any classical music ensemble or opera company whatsoever. The search competitors are a radio station, a review site, an event listing site and a record label. In other words, not necessarily organizations you would see as competitors for tickets.
  • Are you speaking the language of our audience? In other words, do your key words match up with the search terms of our audience? Don’t use jargon, give people what they want. Sometimes, this might be counter intuitive, especially when you have to consider your branding efforts. For example, although you might want to brand yourself as “assisted living,” you will get searched as a “nursing home” (which has double the results). You will have to balance your branding and SEO efforts.
  • If your Web site has an internal search function, collect the data. This will offer great insight on what your audience wants and what terms they are using. If you’re interested in general trends and in what kind of searches are related to high volume terms, you should use Google Insight for Search.
  • What’s the deal with NOFOLLOW links? Links from Twitter, Facebook, Google Ads and most advertising banners tell spiders not to follow the link. Does this mean that they are useless for SEO? No. Mihaela Lica writes: “People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.” SEO is not just about getting links, it’s about creating and promoting valuable, relevant content.

Now for some specific coding and technical advice:

  • Spiders can’t crawl images, JavaScript and Flash. Don’t go overboard and balance your design and SEO efforts. Nick La has an excellent blog post “SEO Guide for Designers.”
  • Use the “title” tag wisely. Use a different title for each page, otherwise Google might think you’re offering the same content on multiple pages. Keep the title short; around a 90-character limit.
  • Always use “alt” tags for images. Not only is this user-friendly for people who are blind or visually impaired, it enhances your SEO efforts.
  • Always use a descriptive anchor text (don’t use “click here” or “read more”). Links can even have a “description” tag.
  • Use the meta “description” tag if you don’t want the search engine to describe the site for you. Nashville’s Web site is described by Google as: “The Nashville Symphony is joined by the U.S. Army’s premiere singing ambassadors, the Soldiers’ Chorus of the U.S. Army Field Band, this Thursday through…” As you can see, this is momentary copy that does not accurately describe the whole of the organization, and it gets cut off! Compare this to the tailored copy of engine manufacturer Briggs and Stratton: “Find out why Briggs & Stratton are the leading makers of small engines, lawn mower engines, portable generators, and home generators.” Keep the description below 170 characters (about the size of a tweet!).
  • Many sites work with dynamic content. Make sure the URLs that are generated are optimized. Session IDs, especially if they grow really long, don’t tell much about the content. For example: http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/main.taf?p=9 could be transformed into http://www.nashvillesymphony.org/parking_and_directions (this is advice I should heed for my own blog!)

Once again, these are only some of the lessons. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

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Search engine marketing and orchestras: part 1

November 5, 2009 By

This week, I started my second class in the Integrated Marketing certificate program at the University of Chicago’s Graham School. This one’s on search engine marketing, taught by David Gould of Resolution Media. Last night’s class delved a little into natural search and search engine optimization and there were some interesting points that I wanted to share while trying to put them into a cultural environment. Where needed, I’ll mostly take the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as an example, for old time’s sake.

  • Search is someone telling you what they’re looking for. And for a marketer, that’s pretty powerful stuff.
  • Check your organization’s Web site without images and JavaScript enabled. This is roughly the view that the search engine spiders see. What do you see? Here is a Wordle of the Chicago Symphony’s page:
CSO Keyword Wordle

CSO Keyword Wordle

  • The Long Tail of Search and the 80/20 rule. About 80% of the search volume comes from 20% of the keywords. The other 80% of the keywords are very specific keywords. But the specific keywords usually are much more likely to be associated with an action and are much more likely to end up as a sale. For example, a major keyword could be “classical music,” whereas a specific keyword sounds more like “Chicago Symphony Orchestra tickets.” In other terms, the major 20% that drive 80% of the volume create awareness; the specific 80% that drive 20% create actions and sales.
  • A quick word about paid search. You can clearly see the difference in paid search: the New York Philharmonic has bought certain keywords, whereas the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has not. In fact, searching for the CSO results in sponsored links to the Lyric Opera and the Goodman Theater! Those organizations must assume that if people search for the CSO, they must also be interested in other forms of cultural entertainment. In terms of natural search, both orchestras see heavy competition with third-party sellers. Looks like they need some optimization!
  • Another important lesson is that natural search is more than just optimizing your own site. It’s optimizing your content, including content on social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook and even Yelp. Both the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony’s social media efforts are appearing below the fold and in some cases not even until the second page. Organizations need to optimize so that their social media efforts appear above the third-party sellers, at the very least!
  • Search engine marketing does not work as a silo. Look at it as part of your integrated marketing efforts. Online, including banner ads, and offline, including radio spots, television spots and print ads. Integrated efforts are proven to be much more effective.
  • Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that 80% of Web browsing starts with search and those searches are spurred by offline stimuli, including your offline marketing efforts. Be sure to streamline the two.

There were more lessons and more takeaways and the class has just barely started. Future classes will lead to future posts, but let this conclude part 1 of search engine marketing and orchestras.

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