Interested in volunteering at the AGO? Please take a peek at the discussion board!"
This missive went out to the Art Gallery of Ontario's fledgling Facebook group - all 34 members - in July of 2007. The result: a resounding silence, but also a valuable lesson on how not to use social media. "Why did we even post that?" says Sue Boyle, the AGO's co-ordinator of community relations. "We quickly realized that marketing messages weren't what the public wanted to hear."Much has changed about the AGO's strategy, which now includes buzzing Twitter posts, a blog, YouTube videos that go into the bowels of the gallery and podcasts. Oh, and about 10,000 Facebook fans.
Other arts groups are also getting the message. Social media are a boon when it comes to expanding audiences - if you get it right. Users want the full Monty - intimacy, conversation, all the bells and whistles of "rich media." Fail to deliver, and they won't hesitate to give you the dreaded "unfollow" treatment.In theory, arty types would seem to have a natural advantage when it comes to social media: They're storytellers by nature and bursting with creativity. But anecdotally, at least, they've done their fair share of hapless flailing, says social-media expert Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation. "I'm always shocked at how hesitant and slow these groups are," he says.
Most organizations still can't resist slipping in a ticket offer or an opening-night reminder, and some continue to dole out a heavy dose of advertising. Positive reviews are gleefully repeated, positive comments are widely disseminated, and "great offers" abound. Commercial organizations such as Mirvish Productions and rival Dancap Productions are some of the most obvious culprits, employing more "push marketing" than many of their not-for-profit counterparts. But Joel argues that is the wrong approach.
"You don't build a community because you have a festival coming up. You build a community. And then when you have your festival coming up, there's a community there to help you. Everybody does it sort of backward," he says.
The arts community does have a growing sense that it's important to weave social webs. Recent research by the Society of London Theatres (SOLT) in Britain reported that social media helped 65 per cent of people surveyed decide to go to the theatre, and choose what to see, while 41 per cent of U.K. theatregoers are Facebook users.
Virtually every Canadian arts organization, large or small, now has some social media presence and is starting to channel its audiences through a variety of venues, all relying more on conversation than pushiness. But a continuing dialogue requires time and resources. Tweeting every third day just isn't going to cut it, Joel says. "People sort of fall into that 'get me one of those' strategy," he says. "The hardest part, really, is the maintenance of it."
Vancouver Opera has been one of the more successful Canadian arts outfits online. Its Facebook and Twitter accounts hum with regular activity, and are quirky and revealing. One factor that contributes to its success? They have a dedicated employee to manage them.
Ling Chan joined Vancouver Opera in the fall of 2007 as an assistant to the managing director but soon had the company's social networking tasks added to her duties.
"As I was going along, that was [taking up]the bigger chunk of time," she says. "I ended up doing a lot of the social media off hours, at home, on weekends. That's how much it grew."
So last December, VO made her their full-time social media manager, and she now spends her days churning out content for Facebook, Twitter and the company blog, as well as setting up contests and promotions and scouring and commenting on other social media arts channels. The primary goal is "lifting the veil to demystify the industry." The company now live-tweets rehearsals and posts a "Fashion at the opera" feature, with photographs of patrons decked in their finery.
The Canadian Opera Company in Toronto is following suit, and has created the position of social and interactive media manager. But at most other companies, a small handful of staff share the load, dividing up the responsibilities for creating the videos and promotions.
Ontario's Shaw Festival has two employees working on its Twitter account, which the festival launched in earnest last summer with advice and support from a marketing firm it hired to help navigate "what is basically the Wild West," says Valerie Taylor, the company's director of marketing. One of the keys was to find a personal, recognizable voice to represent the festival: They chose George Bernard Shaw himself to pontificate under a grey-bearded thumbnail picture."Chekhov said, 'At the age of 40 we are already old.' I say we are all beginners at 40. He's still a good fellow & not too shabby with the pen," the digitally resurrected Shaw tweeted recently.
According to Dre Labre, creative director at Rethink Communications in Toronto, that voice is imperative to starting and maintaining a conversation.
"My take is that social media is kind of about being human," he says "You have to show that there's a person behind the scenes who's taking care of this."
That voice also has to be trustworthy, the experts say. Companies appear to have learned not to edit or remove comments from their pages (unless they turn outright obscene or offensive), and are beginning to accept there is no way to completely control negativity.
"It's a fairly risky proposition when you get down to it. People are having conversations and does it fit your PR policy?" says Labre.
Most arts organizations say they're more than willing to discuss negative comments, but Labre and Joel propose a more radical step: post bad reviews of shows.
Belinda Bale, director of communications at Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre, recoils at the idea.
"It's one thing that [a bad review is]in the paper and it's online and people can link to it and people can find it - that's fine. But actually promoting a review and saying, 'Everybody, what do you think?' I'm not sure we're ready for that yet," Bale says.
According to Joel, that's just the point: It's dangerous to be the only one avoiding the subject.
"The conversation is everywhere," Joel says. "You don't have your site open to let me do that, so I blog about it, I put it on Facebook, I put it on Twitter. Then people searching for [that review]think, 'look how closed this company is.'"
Bale concedes that it's a strategy Soulpepper will at least consider, and points out the company already responds to critical postings.
A year ago, Soulpepper had 200 Facebook fans. Now they have more than 1,400 and another 900 or so Twitter followers. The AGO, which got into the game early and played off the excitement surrounding its Frank Gehry-deigned renovation, is building on those 10,000 fans on Facebook.
These figures are still a far cry from the heavy hitters of the arts world abroad - the Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum in New York, or the Tate Gallery in London, which currently draw anywhere from 65,000 to 458,000 fans on any one site. And there will always be a "fan number ego" to social media, Labre says.
But fan or follower numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, he adds, because they don't show the level of engagement of any one person. Instead, Joel argues that Twitter's "Retweets" (the process of re-broadcasting a tweet to one's own list of followers) as "one of the best metrics [of success]we've ever experienced in the world of marketing and advertising."
"A consumer will read that tweet and actually find it so valuable that they're willing to put their own reputation on the line by sending it to their network." Perhaps it's no surprise that arts outfits routinely tweet out thank-yous laden with exclamation marks for favourable retweets.
Joel also points out that social media isn't without its limitations: It's a comparatively narrow channel, limited to one's friends and followers, and their friends and followers, and sometimes that ripple effect only travels so far. Traditional advertising's advantage is that it still has far greater potential for the random, serendipitous encounter that leads to an immediate transaction.
"It's like sex. Are you looking for a one-night stand? Because that is the traditional mass media mindset," Joel says.
Cultivating a loyal, long-term relationship, he argues, "is a whole different sale."
With a report from Guardian News Service.
James Bradshaw