A blog, short for weblog, is a Web site with regular entries on any topic imaginable, an online journal. But who needs any explanation anymore these days? The more important questions for organizations are “how does our organization connect with bloggers?” and “why should our organization blog?”

But first, Cameron Marlow at the MIT Media Laboratory explains “what distinguishes weblogging from previous web media is the extent to which it is social, and one can say that the medium came into existence when the set of web journal writers recognized themselves as a community.”

He lists several features of blogging that are important in creating these communities:

• Blogrolls (a list of other weblogs that the author reads regularly);
• Permalinks (a link referring to a specific post instead of an entire weblog; allowing authors to have a concentrated, controlled conversation);
• Comments (a reader-contributed reply to a specific post within the site);
• Trackback (an automatic communication that occurs when one weblog references another)

iCrossing’s “What is Social Media?” e-book lists other defining features of blogging:

• Voice (who is writing? Personal or professional voice? Authority?);
• Topic (most blogs define their scope; an industry example, from general classical music to a double bass blog);
• Subscription (readers don’t need to look for content; content is delivered to readers)

How does our organization connect with blogs and their authors?

Ponder this: how did your organization connect with your hometown newspaper and local journalists? There are many similarities, but also some important differences. Connecting with bloggers generally consists of the following steps (sources: here and here):

• Read (know who is writing and what they are writing);
• Participate (comment first, pitch later);
• Build relationships (provide the same level of service you would provide a journalist);
• Adapt materials (if you think journalists are weary of press releases… blogging is even more personal than mainstream journalism; personalize your pitch and remember you are working with a multi-media outlet)

The best start in the blogosphere is simply reading. As mentioned above, one of the defining features of blogs is subscription. RSS (Really Simple Syndication—Web syndication) feeds are the standard method of distributing dynamic content to subscribers.

Many people on the Internet use a service to pull together a collection of RSS feeds, which is known as aggregation. A news aggregator, or feed reader, is software or a service on the Internet that uses RSS feeds to retrieve syndicated content from a Web site, every time content is updated. There are Web-based services, such as Bloglines or Google Reader, and software-based services, including options in Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer.

You can find blogs through specialized search engines like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Try typing in “classical music” in one of these engines and you will find an abundance of sources. Many, if not most, of these results might not be relevant to your organization and many, if not most, of these results are blogs with little or no reach or authority. Technorati offers an “authority rating” of each blog, which is one example of a tool to determine its relative (to other blogs) influence.

That is not to say you can’t learn from blogs with little authority. A good way to keep an eye on what’s being said about your organization is Google Alerts. This service not only picks up news from mainstream media, it also picks up blog mentions. Many of the results are blogs with little authority or influence, people’s personal online journals, but they often describe concert experiences, from first-time classical music patrons to long-time subscribers. Pay attention to what’s being said and you can learn—an unscientific focus group—about costumer service, artistic programming and general concert experiences.

Once you’re familiar with relevant blogs in your industry, participate. As an organization, make sure you have a solid blogging and commenting policy in place; do not limit an employee’s freedom to participate in online discussions, but make sure they understand your rules. As an employee, make sure you understand there are limitations to what you can or should say about your employer and understand your employer’s policy. Know that, even though you do not speak for them, you are always connected to your employer, willingly or not, and do not hide your identity; always participate in full transparency, under your real name.

As a general rule, as Darren Rowse writes, “comment first, pitch later.” He adds: “be genuine in these interactions, add value to the conversation happening on the blog and show that you’re not just there to ‘take’ but to ‘give’.”

Participation will build relationships, but as Drew McManus notes “be careful to distinguish active participation from direct pitches.” Once you do pitch, these direct pitches will only work if you provide the blogger the same level of service you would provide a journalist. A well-read blog can garner more readers than a small circulation newspaper, so do not be afraid to offer a blogger an interview once you have established a relationship and determined the blog’s authority, reach and found it to be credible.

A blogger’s needs are different than the traditional journalist’s needs. If you think journalists are weary of dull press releases, you should keep in mind that blogging is even more personal than mainstream journalism. Personalize your pitch and remember you are working with a multi-media outlet. Video, audio and images can really liven up a story and make the pitch much more attractive. Outside sources too, can add another perspective.

If you provide content, make utilization and attribution easy. Of course sound files of complete symphonies are copyright protected, but consider providing sound samples, interviews, videos and images under a Creative Commons license, which covers the spectrum between full copyright and the public domain and uses “private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses.”

More about adapting press materials later. And stay tuned for Weblogs (Part 2).

Public relations has traditionally held the reputation of being difficult to measure in terms of results. Measuring results, however, especially RoI (Return on Investment), is important for any business or organization. Just like in public relations, measuring results of social media strategies can be difficult; there are no standardized metrics yet.

What to measure?

A popular phrase among social media specialists is “return on influence,” a different take on “return on investment” found in regular business. The social media equivalent is a “broader, more long-term, long-lasting return,” according to a Dow Jones white paper titled “Tracking the Influence of Conversations.” “In social media and the blogosphere, being able to measure, track and compare the results is a requirement for determining next steps and strategy.”

First, an organization needs to find out what it is trying to accomplish. Are you spreading a message, building a community, raising awareness, forging relationships? From there, find out what to measure. The first and easiest attribute to measure is activity; page views and unique site visitor statistics can tell you broadly how much activity there is. But it doesn’t tell anything else and more importantly it doesn’t tell you what kind of activity. Earlier, we established some key elements of social media: community, conversation, participation and connectedness. And of course content; content drives the community. Now, how can we translate these concepts into measurable attributes?

Activity (page views, unique site visitors)

Community (who is your community)

• Demographics (age, location, income etc.);
• Psychographics (lifestyle, behavior, values etc.)

Conversation (what is the community talking about)

• Conversation Index (ratio between blog posts and comments-plus-trackbacks);
• Influential Ideas (memes; how long does a message remain in the arena of public opinion and interaction)

Participation (what is the community doing; what are its actions)

• Engagement (the recipient not only responds to a message but acts on it as well);
• Community Activation (specific actions; are recipients reacting to the message)

Connectedness (what is your relationship with the community)

• Relationships and Connections (influence within a specific community)

Content (what is the focus of the community)

• Relevance (how relevant to my company is a particular blog post);
• Tone (what is the sentiment associated with the response, positive, negative or neutral)

How do we measure these attributes? Many are self-evident and many social media services offer help. Facebook Pages, for example, offers basic demographics of your fans, such as age groups and sex. Psychographics are much harder to measure and might require a survey or two. The conversation attributes require monitoring of the conversations; the participation attributes can be measured variably (amount of tickets sold through a unique link; amount of responses to a contest etc.); connectedness can be surveyed by tallying your connections and monitoring the community; content can be monitored as well, in the same manner press clippings are analyzed.

Doug Costle, Senior Director at research firm Context Analysis, is quoted in the Dow Jones white paper: “Regardless of what we’re looking for in terms of developing attributes—relevance, frequency of posts, depth of content, all that stuff—it’s still going to come back to influence.”

The next step is to determine what impact these results have on your organization and the actions of your organization. Not all attributes might be important to your company. Owyang and Toll write that at the heart of any strategy “will be a company’s ability to identify the key attributes that are important to that organization, and develop and execute a plan to monitor and measure those attributes in the specific context of the company’s sphere of operation.”

Case Study

Kami Huyse, a public relations practitioner and social media advocate, presented a simple case study in April 2008. Huyse put together a social media campaign for the launch of SeaWorld San Antonio’s “Journey to Atlantis” ride. The campaign’s objectives were to build relationships with the coaster community, build awareness of Journey to Atlantis and assist in driving visitation to the park. Can you see the similarities with objectives for orchestras? (Build relationships with the classical music community; build awareness of a new concert format; assist in driving ticket sales for this new concert format).

The campaign was implemented and some of the measurable results included:

• 22 Web sites were identified; 12 covered the ride (Conversation);
• 50 links from unique Web sites; 30 of which were from coaster enthusiast sites (Conversation);
• The American Coaster Enthusiasts group brought 30 of its members to ride Journey to Atlantis on media day (Participation);
• The riders later left positive comments on YouTube videos (Content; Tone);
• The relationship is ongoing (Connectedness)

In terms of building awareness, according to Huyse a survey demonstrated that the Internet far outstripped all other sources, such as season pass member communication, soda can promotion, news stories and brochures. Only television advertisement closely followed the Internet. Keep in mind, however, that the Internet must be broken down into static and dynamic content. It is hard to measure whether the park’s static Web site or the social media campaign played the bigger part.

Perhaps the most compelling result, and argument for a social media strategy, was the overall cost of the program and the financial impact compared to other marketing tactics. Overall, the cost per impression for the social media campaign was $0.22 versus $1.00 for television.

A good start in sizing up an organization’s situation and crafting a strategy is the so-called SWOT analysis, which appraises a company’s resource strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats.

Orchestras share many strengths and opportunities, but also weaknesses and threats. Below, you will find a SWOT analysis focusing on general features. Many of these concepts are liberally taken from “Strategy: Core Concepts, Analytical Tools, Readings” by Thompson, Gamble and Strickland.

Strengths
Resources that enhances an organization’s competitiveness

Materials and media

• Vast amount of interesting (archival) content to share with its constituents; many materials are easily accessible or adaptable to the new media environment;
• Expertise in producing media and content (audio, program notes, knowledgeable employees and intellectual capital);
• Facilities and human assets to create content (recording studios, high profile guest artists);
• Strong global distribution capabilities.

Engaged and involved audience

• Orchestra audiences are involved and engaged with the product; participation and community is important;
• Strong niche market; classical music has an enormously strong and engaged community.

Established sites and places

• A powerful brand name within the community, country or world;
• Extensive and established Web sites;
• Established as an authoritative and credible source of information;
• Classical music is well-established on the Internet with several communities;

Weaknesses
Shortcomings in resources, representing competitive liabilities

Financial resources

• Budgets are stretched beyond facility; a weak balance sheet;
• Short on financial resources to grow the business and pursue promising initiatives.

Human resources

• New media is unchartered territory for many organizations; no intellectual capital or knowledgeable employees to make effective use of new media;
• Non-profit job descriptions are stretched and wide-ranging; very few to no orchestras have employed a new media person. Who is responsible for new media and how much time is devoted to new media?

Contracts and Copyright

• Musician contracts and copyright laws prevent full use of materials and media

Opportunities
Market prospects that can grow and profit an organization

Openings to exploit emerging new technologies

• New media can significantly extend the life a performance, reaching more patrons and increasing customer service;
• Online relationships work best when there is an established offline relationship. Online relationships will complement and add value to an offline relationship.

Expanding into new geographic markets and serving additional market segments

• The Internet is not bound by geography; patrons and fans from all over the world can enjoy a geographically confined orchestra outside of limited tours and recordings;
• Changes in social patterns online; 64% of teens are online content creators, therein lies a great opportunity to connect with a new market segment.

Openings to win market share from rivals

• Through a wide geographic coverage and strong global distribution capabilities, orchestras can capture market share from rivals that are not represented in new media.

Entering into alliances or joint ventures to expand the organization’s market coverage

• Collaboration with other arts organizations, community organizations or orchestras.

Threats
External forces that are a risk to an organization’s competitive well-being

Cluttered environment

• Breaking through the noise; with so many different niche markets and different media, it is hard to break through the clutter and determine the most effective channels;

Ever changing landscape

• Key rivals introduce innovative new products;
• Changes in technology and markets.

Demographic structure

• Difference in demographic makeup between orchestra audience and new media users limits demand.

These four lists—different for every organization or orchestra—show what conclusions can be drawn concerning the state of the company’s position and call for actions to improve the company’s strategy. Thompson, Gamble and Strickland recommend the following:

• Use company strengths and capabilities as cornerstones for strategy;
• Pursue those market opportunities best suited to company strengths and capabilities;
• Correct weaknesses and deficiencies that impair pursuit of important market opportunities or heighten vulnerability to external threats;
• Use company strengths to lessen the impact of important external threats.

This SWOT analysis is therefore not done, but I will leave it to each individual organization to create its own set of lists, draw its own conclusions and determine its own course of action. This brief and incomplete analysis merely serves as a guide and as a provoker of thought on orchestras and new media.

Source: Thompson, Arthur, John Gamble and A.J. Strickland. “Strategy: Core Concepts, Analytical Tools, Readings” Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2006.

The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Kansas City Star, Miami Herald, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and nearly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. What do these newspapers have in common? Over the past years, full-time classical music critic positions at these organizations have been eliminated.

In 2004, the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University published “Reporting the Arts II.” This expansive work takes a critical look at news coverage of arts and culture in the United States, comparing data with the identical earlier study in 1999.

Although Chicago comes out relatively strong in the study, compared to other cities nationwide—the Chicago Tribune was the only among 17 metropolitan newspapers to register a marginal increase in the size of its overall arts news hole—we have seen some recent changes that might cause concern, not the least being the exit of the full-time classical music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times. The resulting vacancy has been filled with freelance reporters.

Justin Davidson, critic for New York Magazine and former critic of Newsday, wrote for Musical America on July 3, 2008: “[…] it would be an error to attribute this dispiriting attrition to a philistine attack on the arts, or to focus too much on its meaning for cultural pursuits. The de-criticization of American journalism is a symptom of a much deeper tragedy in civic life: the lunatic suicide of the press.”

It’s not just anecdotes. Statistics from the Newspaper Association of America show a decline in circulation numbers since the mid 1980s; from a daily circulation of over 63 million in 1984 to a daily circulation of 52 million in 2006.

According to the Columbia University survey, the arts news hole went from an average of 5,489 column inches to 4,994 column inches, from 1998 to 2003. Articles have also gotten shorter: at nearly half of the researched newspapers, stories were at least 20 percent shorter.

Although arts gained ground on hard news, the arts lost ground to other sections, especially the well-read sport sections. At the Chicago Tribune, the daily Tempo section, which contains arts, culture, media and technology, represented only 5 percent of the papers pagination.

This is in stark contrast to the revenue the arts bring to newspapers. Cultural editor Steve Erlanger of The New York Times, which admittedly has the most prominent arts coverage, states in the report: “The arts section brings in 35 percent of the paper’s revenue. We know there is a large, interested audience out there.”

Yet, however much relative revenue arts sections generate, another tell-tale sign of declining business for newspapers are advertising expenditures. In general terms, advertising expenditures in newspapers decreased from $47.4 billion in 2005 to $42.2 billion in 2007. The first quarter of 2008 saw a decline in print advertising of nearly 15% compared to the same quarter in 2007; the sharpest decline since they started measuring in 1971.

However, in that same period from 2005 to 2007, online advertising expenditures increased from $2 billion to $3.2 billion. Not enough to cover the loss of advertising in print, but a good indicator of slowly shifting priorities. This shift is further highlighted by the fact that monthly unique visitor numbers for newspaper Web sites rose from 41 million in January 2004 to 69 million in May 2008 (and in active reach percentages, numbers rose from 27.5% to 41.7%).

The Columbia University study also reports that “there is an emerging awareness that the existing structures of arts journalism are overloaded and outmoded. […] incremental adjustments to the preview-review model of coverage cannot keep up with rapid changes in the cultural environment. As more news is forced down the same pipeline, the limitations of the arts-journalism infrastructure become increasingly evident.”

Davidson concludes his article for Musical America with some insightful pondering:

“So what’s a poor critic to do? For one thing, don’t cling to a leaky tub. The future of arts criticism may be as an extension of the arts world, rather than as a neglected corner of journalism. Museums, orchestras and performing organizations in each community could come together to set up an independent, hyper-local, online-only arts bulletin staffed by a formerly ink-stained wretch. The consortium could provide seed money, mailing lists, advertising and – most important – a guarantee of editorial independence […] the payoff would be an invigorated conversation about the arts, a built-in audience of readers who have been betrayed by the local paper and the beginnings of a strategy for surviving the implosion of traditional news.”

In the last decade, the Internet has evolved from providing information—static content—toward a more social and dynamic medium. Mary Madden of the Pew Internet project observed in an April 22, 2008 keynote address to the Chicago arts community: “the Internet moved from slow and stationary to fast and mobile.” In 1999, four authors wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which proclaimed the end of business as usual:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

In 95 theses, ranging from “Paranoia kills conversation. That’s its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies” to “We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal,” the authors urge companies to join “the conversation.”

Currently, terms such as “new media,” “social media” and “Web 2.0” are used to describe the move to more participation, openness, conversation, community, and connectedness on the Internet (from iCrossing’s “What is Social Media?”). Noted orchestra consultant and blogger Drew McManus writes: “For example, video games are a form of new media but there is little opportunity to create a two-way relationship with that particular platform.”

Back to The Cluetrain Manifesto: thesis number 57 pleads the case that “smart companies will get out of the way and help the inevitable to happen sooner.” Seeing the decline in traditional arts coverage, the inevitable, it seems, is an increase in participation and conversations with your community.