Discussing the Orchestra R/Evolution

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.