Archive for the ‘Conference’ Category

Arts Marketing Association Conference - Day 1

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

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.

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AMA and Twitter

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

At the Arts Marketing Association Digital Marketing Day last week there were some useful points raised regarding creating Twitter content. I thought I would put together some of the main ones in a blog post.

1) The importance of re-tweeting

In our Managing Director Jim’s keynote speech he cited this great quote:
“When a blogger asks for comments but never replies back, it’s like beginning a conversation and then leaving the room when someone else starts talking.”
One of the best attributes of Twitter, in my opinion, is the fact that you can contact people so succinctly and directly. As the social media fan and CNN anchorman Rick Sanchez tweeted, ‘i twitter because i need as a journalist to get what viewers think and say. w/out them i’m just another talking head.they complete me, lol!”

2) Dealing with negative feedback

Susan Hallam in her talk regarding digital marketing strategies, suggested that the best thing to do when your organisation is given negative feedback on Twitter is to wait. Not for long enough that your silence is noted, but for long enough that someone else from outside the organisation will step in and defend you. Though you may want to reinforce this, it is a more powerful defence if it comes spontaneously from a fan.

3) Planning to speak to each of your audiences

Though it’s not a new concept to plan a schedule of communication, or for this to include social media sites, I thought it was a great idea of Susan Hallam’s to divide up your schedule by audience, not necessarily by event. So rather than just thinking of the messages you want to put out to each audience in the launch of an exhibition, instead set yourself the task of putting out one message for each main target group each week or fortnight. She also reminded us of the importance of aiming messages at journalists - they are often big fans of the blogosphere too.

4) Lovelinks

DK  from Mediasnackers introduced us to the term ‘lovelinks’. If you’re nervous about having a Twitter feed directly into your website, an alternative is to provide links to anyone saying positive things about you under a ‘What people are saying’ type heading. A Tweet from agency Redfront during the AMA event pointed out that sites like Trip Advisor should be included too.
It’s not the ideal scenario in my opinion but if you can’t persuade your organisation to set up an incoming feed then this is a good compromise.

5) Meeting your audience

In large venues, it can be difficult to get to know your audiences, particularly where you don’t have ticketing and the chance to gather data. Susan Hallam suggested starting by finding out who your main Tweeters are by using one of the tools like www.socialmention.com and searching for your organisation’s name (and your competitors) being mentioned in microblogs. In the left hand side bar you’ll get the details of the main authors mentioning you and in turn you can look them up and find out more about them.

6) The method not the result

DK overtly urged organisations to ‘come out from behind the curtain’ and be personable, as part of getting involved in social media. He suggested, ‘Stop writing press releases and show what you’re doing’ and explained how powerful it can be, and how interested people are, in you updating them on your process and progress rather than just announcing finished ‘products’ (events or exhibitions). Jim has often cited the Brooklyn Museum blog for how well they do this. This approach also gives people information in bitesize pieces but with links to more detail, a good general principle for online communications now.
Susan Hallam suggested a great, simple way to give loyal audience members added value and to give them a reason to read your e-bulletins and link to your website -  to generate some exclusive information in the form of an interview with an upcoming artist, curator, speaker or similar and to provide a link for signed up fans to find it first. This could be part of the strategy of keeping the audience involved in the development process.

7) Calls to action

The National Theatre of Wales website, presented by their Artistic Director, John McGrath, reminded me of the importance of calls to action. ‘Find out more’ is more impactful than just a Ning link and ‘Visit our social network for reviews, comments and more…’ (as used on the NTW website) is even better because the audience can understand the reason for clicking.

And one final point which is much broader than just Twitter but, I thought important enough to be worth mentioning here:

Jon McGrath said that ‘Can we do it digitally?’ has become a kind of mantra for them. They had a really brave (and successful) online launch and are now committed to this a continue this approach as widely as possible (although their performance content will, for now at least, remain in person not online). This inspired me and I think we need to look at more opportunities for our clients to transfer processes online. We are currently developing an intranet and online ticketing functionality so hopefully these will be first of many such projects.

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Speaking Social Media

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

jim_speaks

I spent the last few days in Malaga at Communicating the Museum enjoying the sun, socialising and talking about how Social Media is changing the way that we market culture.

The two days provided plenty of inspiration, with presentations from institutions including Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Barbican, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Museo Picasso Málaga.

It wasn’t all sun and sangria for me I was there to give a talk about how to communicate your brand on social networks and to take part in a panel discussion. You can read a summary of what i spoke about below:

For those responsible for museum brands, the opportunities that social media provide come with new challenges: how can you control your brand in a space that offers little or no control.

The bad news is that whether you like it or not, nobody needs to ask your permission to talk about your museum on a blog or tell a friend about an exhibition on Facebook – positively or negatively – so your brand is already in this social media space.

You can’t control the conversation but you can participate in it. Take a minute to think about what your brand really is. Is it your logo? Is it your advertising campaign? Your collection? Your building? No, it is none of these things: your brand is the perception that people have of your organisation. You have never had total control over it, you have only ever been able to use all these touchpoints to help to shape this perception, and in the social media space that is no different.

Your first step in taking your museum and your brand into Social Media is to learn about these websites and, most importantly, how your audiences are using them. Each website has a different set of unwritten rules and spending time looking and listening helps you get into them. You start to realise that now any- and everybody gets to create content, distribute content and control their own user experiences and you can then consider how a museum can fit in to this.

Jumping into websites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr without understanding how these spaces work can be damaging to a museum’s brand, because it projects the image of an institution who can’t be bothered to learn how a space which is important to its audiences works.

 Social media is here to stay, it isn’t a fad, and while Facebook or Twitter may fade, people expecting to be part of the conversation rather than just talked at will not go away, and we need to adapt our brands to exist in this world.

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Talking branding

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

This afternoon I delivered a seminar on branding at the Museums and Heritage Show in London. Over the past few years we have worked on a lot of branding projects for Museums, so I was glad to be invited to share our experience.

The seminar brought to mind something I heard at a conference I attended last year. The speaker said “If you want to be sure that you know your stuff, talk at a conference, because you won’t want to stand up in front of an audience unless you’re sure that you’re not going to look like a fool”.

I talk about branding museums every week, but having to put together a formal presentation on the subject really made me take stock of our experience to date and think about how we should explain the process to clients in future. On the day, the seminar was well received and several kind people came up to me afterwards to say they had enjoyed the presentation. This was very satisfying, but best of all was the relief that I hadn’t looked like a fool!

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