Day one of the Arts Marketing Association Conference in Leeds, which this year has the theme of pulling power and focuses on how we can creating marketing which goes viral and takes on a life of its own, rather then the more traditional push marketing (i.e. advertising).
The first keynote was Mark Earls, the author of the book Herd: How to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature. In his presentation Mark discussed the social nature of human beings and how ideas can spread through our society.
Amazon.com was one example which Mark gave in his talk. Everyone familiar with Amazone will know that the website uses terms like ‘customers who bought this item also bought’ and ‘frequently bought together’. these selling techniques appeal to our herd instinct.
Another example is found in a hotel bathroom, in recent years signs have appeared which suggest that to save the environment you should ‘hang up your towels’ so that the cleaning staff don’t replace them with new towels. Mark said that the last line on these signs ‘most people do this’ again appeals to our herd instinct and we as human beings accept that this is the most acceptable behaviour and adopt it.
Mark said that as marketeers we must create opportunities for people to spread the word and make things worth spreading.
That led perfectly on to Nicky Webb from Artichoke speaking about her companies work, and particularly the One and Only project which they produced with Anthony Gormley on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
Interestingly Nicky spoke about how they like to use the element of surprise to promote their work, choosing not to promote an event in advance and instead relying on people stumbling upon something special and then virally spreading the word about this.
This technique has worked brilliantly for events such as The Sultan’s Elephant which saw over 1 million people scramble to catch a glimpse of the magnificent performance piece.
With the One and Only project, Artichoke needed to reach out to people across the UK and they did this through the web. The tools which they used didn’t interest me as much as the questions that they asked themselves in producing the piece.
‘Ask yourself what motivates people to get involved and how you can get people talking about it’ Nicky said.
In the afternoon Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum gave an impressive keynote presentation about how their organisation operates in the digital space. This wasn’t so much about marketing, but about an organisation which see’s itself at the centre of it’s community and which uses social media tools to connect with this community.
Shelley spoke about how Brooklyn Museum asks visitors to leave comments on computers in their galleries and then feeds these directly on to their website uncensored, which seemed to get a really positive reaction from the audience in Leeds.
Shelley finished by discussing the museums recent work with FourSquare, a platform which hasn’t really taken off in the UK to the same extent that it has in the States, and this encouraged me to look again at the possibilities of FourSquare.
Following the keynote, Shelley took questions about her work and I asked her if Brooklyn Museum ever fail when it comes to using technology, and in line with the openness of the organisation, Shelley told me that I could read about when things goes wrong on the Brooklyn Museum blog.
A great first day at the AMA conference.
