A few Do’s and Don’t’s about Social Media for artists and small arts orgs
Do remember to include in your plan all your skills that are relevant to a successful social media campaign
You’ve been talking to your supporters, colleagues and audience for a long time and you know them and their interests better than anyone. You also are skilled at reaching out to them creatively and inexpensively. For pete’s sake, you are artists! Those skills will be key in making your social media campaign a success!
Don’t be phony in your social media voice
Social media is … well… social. It’s got a tone like talking to your neighbours about your work today. Your neighbours and friends will be delighted to hear your voice saying “here’s what we’ve been working at in the studio today” in your own voice. Having that voice delegated to someone outside your company will feel phony and insulting to them. If it feels like a trick in social media, people turn off.
Do have the confidence to run your own social media campaign
The best social media campaign is grass-roots, just like you started your arts organization.
Don’t feel you have to spend big bucks on a social marketing professional
No social media “guru” knows your art and your audience like you and your staff do. So what if they have 2,000 Twitter followers, are they relevant to you, or just other social media gurus all jabbering to each other with re-cycled tweets and links?
Do take the time to blog yourself
I know you don’t have the time, but you know the best blog-posts are short ones. Here’s some good tricks. A photo is worth 1,000 words. Snap photos with your cellphone or digital camera and post to your blog with a small comment. Tumblr is a great platform for quickie bloggers. If you are more of a talker than a writer, make brief voice recordings and ask someone to transpose them as blog posts. Or, make a time to sit down once a week with someone in your organization who does like to write and give him or her a list of things to interview you on. Or just have a chat and record it. A 30-60 minute meeting about what’s going on with the company right now should yield a week’s worth of blog posts that can be timed for daily release.
Don’t let a staff member turn the Artistic Director into a sock puppet
If a post is listed as being from the Music Director or AD, it really should be that person’s words. To charge a staff person to write on your behalf without input or approval isn’t fair to them or you.
Do make meaningful connections with colleagues and organizations with common-cause.
Guest write for your colleague’s blog and share your posts with organizations that will be interested for example your post on set-construction with an umbrella theatre organization or your post on financial planning with an arts administration website. Ask your colleagues to post to your sites. Include the news from other organizations in your tweets and Facebook updates.
Don’t be territorial in social media
If all you tout in your blog, facebook page or twitter stream is your own news, you will be preaching to the choir instead of reaching new audiences.
Do listen to your followers and engage with them
Social media is social, so a part of every social media campaign should be to spend a little time reading what your followers are saying: about you, about other arts organizations, and about things in general. Comment, re-tweet, and thank them for their favorable mentions of your organization.
Don’t be a broken record
You wouldn’t invite your neighbour to a party and then invite them again, and again, and again, using the same message, would you? So invite and follow-up in social media much as you would in other media.
Do use more than one social media that is relevant to your company
As a suggestion, pick one blog platform to share your news in greater length than a twitter post or Facebook update allows. Create a Facebook group for your followers to publicize events. Use a photo site like Flickr or Picasa to host photos & slideshows and a video site like YouTube for video snippets. You may or may not find the social aspect of the photo & video sites useful. But embedding photos in blogs and Facebook posts enlivens them. Finally use Twitter to connect followers in short news bursts to your content in blogs and Facebook. As you develop your social media campaign you will find other tools to use, but no one tool will make effective use of your social media time or effectively distribute your news.
Don’t get too enthusiastic about linking and automating your social media messages
As we’ve seen different social media platforms have different uses and formats. A 140 character twitter post sounds brief and possibly rude when repeated on Facebook, so be thoughtful about linking media. Auto welcoming followers used to be recommended but has become so prevalent that many people regard this as spam and will unfollow anyone who uses the tools. Services that spam followers with auto quotes are fairly universally despised and will lose you followers.
Do use buffer apps to time distribute your posts.
You may want to do all your social media posts at one time of day and all your blog posts one day a week, but many posts at one time will bore your audience and also not reach some potential followers. Twitter streams are one place where people only are likely to see the posts made in the last hour, so use a buffer to send your tweets over the day (twitter is probably the only social media where you can repeat a key message like an event reminder). Facebook posts can also be spaced through the day. (I use http://bufferapp.com ) and you can choose whether blog posts will be published now or at a future date.
Do remember that the message of your company is important
Probably only the artistic director and/or senior management can really articulate key messages about projects, mission and artistic direction of the company. Identify the person or people within your company who will craft the social media messages. Make sure everyone is comfortable with the plan and will follow-through.
Don’t give the social media job to the intern
The intern may be able to Facebook up a storm about their keg stand at the party last night but that doesn’t mean they know how to tell your story to your key audience. Interns can help but don’t leave them in charge of the process or be prepared to accept the results.
Do use your grassroots skills in building up your number of followers
Hey you built your mailing list & email list from 0 to thousands, right? How? By asking people who visited your website to join the mailing list right? By capturing Box Office data, by asking people to enter contests and by asking people to save money, save the trees by signing onto your email list instead. When you have events, that’s the time to ask people to join your Facebook group or follow you on twitter. Make it easy with slips of paper they can take away, inserted in programs or available in the lobby on info tables.
Don’t get greedy
Don’t try to build followers by following hundreds of random individuals. They won’t stay and aren’t relevant to your success. In the worst case scenario you could lose your account through being listed as a spammer. Having 100 followers who actually come to your events is better than having 3000 followers with only 25 actually coming to your events.
Do give incentives
You know how to do this! Give potential social media contacts incentives by running contests for free tickets or other goodies available only to Twitter followers or Facebook Friends (but don’t make these goodies valuable enough to annoy other contacts).
Do evaluate your social media plan
How are you doing? Did you sell out a show using just Facebook? Are you getting more re-tweets of your news? How many lists is your twitter stream on? How many mentions did you get on Twitter last month? How many blog visitors have you logged (Google analytics or site-tracker have good tools).
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away
A good social media campaign is not going to happen over-night for most of us. It is slogging work like building a mailing list. If you are not seeing results after a few months you may need to fine-tune your plan, discover why your blog posts and updates are not engaging & growing your audience.
Do remember the goal
You want to deepen the engagement of your existing audience with your company so that they will be more likely to support you by increased attendance and financial contribution. Plus, you want to reach new audiences– while spending less money on advertising and postage. You also want to be able to brag about how efficient and green your company is in achieving these goals.
That’s pretty hot stuff so it’s worth some work, right?
Choose the right arts marketing firm for your arts organization
There comes a time in every small, growing arts organization when the people involved realize that the busiest time for promoting their activity is also the time that they are busiest WITH the activity as they gear up for performances or art show. They can’t drop everything to follow-up on marketing opportunities but they need the marketing activity to keep on schedule, no matter what production complications might be thrown their way.
Because small arts orgs’ marketing needs are sporadic, they often think of shortterm contracts with a marketing company. How can they get the most out of this business relationship and avoid the horror stories that we sometimes hear when the arts meets the professional world of marketers.
Oh, you haven’t heard any horror stories? Let me share a few from my own experience.
I once came into a position and found the season brochure was behind schedule. The marketing firm had been secured on a contract that was based on a monthly fee rather than product delivery. All the budget was spent and the brochure was still at rough draft stage. The copy on the brochure was almost un-edited cut and paste supplied by the arts organization with in-consistent length of artist bios & performance description, wild shifts in style and a look which was out-of-step with the organization’s mission. After one try at salvaging the relationship, I canceled the contract and we were forced to pay a monetary settlement to extricate the company from a contract where we would be forced to pay for work that might not result in anything we could use.
Lesson No. 1: contract payments have to be attached to successful completion of materials by deadline.
In another larger arts organization where some of the work was outsourced to marketers, we were occasionally shocked and embarassed by advertising materials where the marketers’ lack of understanding of our artistic product led them to distort copy without checking the results with artistic leadership. On one memorable occasion, the marketing firm changed the orchestra’s working title for a concert “Memory and Reflection” to their preferred “Soothing Reverie”. But the work featured on the program was a symphony inspired by the Holocaust, so very far from “soothing”. This was a public relations disaster.
Lesson No. 2 : It has to be clear who has sign-off within your organization of marketing copy to avoid misinformation and/or public relations disasters.
Lastly, I remember an occasion when I asked an office assistant in my arts organization to do some tasks for me that day and had her break down in tears. What I didn’t know was that she was trying to do a full work load assigned by me, and a full workload assigned by our marketing company. She felt like she had two bosses as the marketers phoned each day with things she needed to get for them or materials that they wanted her to mail out. Much of the work she described I had expected the marketers to do themselves, using their own support staff. We had hired a Marketing firm because we did not have the staff resources to do the work ourselves, but they were pushing the work back on us to the extent where little gain was being realized.
Lesson No. 3: “Who does what” is an important part of the conversation with your Marketing company. If your staff has to provide some of the legwork for the Marketers, firm limits and process has to be put in place.
Does it sound like Marketing firms can be more trouble than they are worth? I certainly thought that at one time, but really all of the above situations were mostly the fault of the arts organization, who failed to be clear in their expectations when contracting a marketing firm.
Hiring a part time staff member with some training or experience in arts marketing and communications to work for you in-house is a preferable choice for many arts organizations. If you have a good mailing list and are not hoping to increase marketshare dramatically, this may be the best choice for you. A staff member is more responsive to your needs and more able to provide low-cost grassroots maketing solutions. The advantage of Marketing firms (that you want to assure they will bring to the table) is that they have access to lists of contacts that might be interested in your artistic product, and their volume buys of more expensive media spots will make for more choices in advertising, eg. advertising in an expensive high distribution newspaper will become possible at half price.
Questions to ask yourself as you think about your marketing needs:
- Do I most need a marketer or a publicist, or both?
- Is my marketing budget sufficient to maximize the contribution of a professional marketing company by making the media buys the firm will recommend?
- Can I articulate the look and feel that my company wants in their marketing through samples of our materials, or materials of other companies that we’d like to emulate and/or through a style sheet we’ve constructed?
- Have I done my research by asking colleagues who has done their excellent marketing campaigns?
- Have I considered who will provide sign-off on marketing materials (considering both knowledge and accessibility/availability)?
- Have I considered who will be the point person in assisting marketing company with acquiring the materials/information they need, and distribution of print materials? How much of that person’s job description/time is to be allocated to marketing liaison?
Once you have answered these questions, you are ready to book meetings with your chosen marketing firms. You will want to communicate the following when asking for a plan and quotes:
- An outline of your need for material with due dates.
- What you will be supplying and when it will be available (rough copy, artist bios, photos, etc.
- What you are hoping they will do. Finish copy or just edit and format? Find and supply art or use your art? Find new markets or use your lists? Leverage ad spots?
- Who will be point person and how much time/assistance they can give the marketers and who will have final sign off on copy.
- Lastly communicate which part of the marketing plan/campaign you will be keeping in-house (if any). Coordination of efforts like your inhouse flyer exchange campaign will help everyone. Surprising your Marketing firm with inhouse efforts will lead to bad feelings.
With all these things communicated, the Marketing firm should be able to present you with a clear plan and costing which will reflect a solid grounding in the reality of your organizational needs and expectations.