Arts Intranet

Ron Evans

A year or so ago on another blog post I mentioned that there was a coming war, between the “traditionalists” or people (both patrons and arts producers) who want to produce and experience their art in a traditional style and the “new mediaists,” who want to bring out their cell phone in the performance, video it, and engage with it in a variety of different ways. That prediction has come true – I'm hearing a lot of stories about these two groups clashing, and it is still growing (and will be for awhile I'd imagine). Twitter and text messages seem to be in the middle of the fray, with sharp opinions on both sides. Let's consider for a moment the different sides and arts organization can be on, in trying to cater to all patrons (a very difficult task).

The “traditional” presenting arts organization

The traditional presenting arts organization is usually led by an experienced leader/board, who has been running the organization for a long time (most likely before the advent of Facebook/Twitter/Text messages). Traditional behavior is expected from the audience – you should come in, sit down, read your program, clap when certain things happen, not clap when other things happen, and generally sit and watch and be entertained. It's not cool to bring out your phone in the theater any more than it would be in church – the theater is a sacred space, where the art happens and you are there to see it by yourself, in person. You don't contribute to the art being created – that is the mastery of those presenting. And to be clear, this format of experiencing arts and cultural events is TOTALLY OK.

Brian Reich

1. Publish the production notes from your show as a presentation online and let your audience, as well as others who are staging a similar show, to access the details or add their own ideas.  Provide personal notes about your interpretation of the script.  Share a picture or diagram of the stage layout.  Include the back-of-the-napkin drawings that were first shared with the costume department.  You can create a basic Powerpoint or Keynote file and load it up to SlideShare (www.slideshare.net) or Scribd (www.scribd.com).  Integrate the links into all your marketing activities, promote the 'process story' to media and bloggers, even consider hosting pre-show discussions or events to discuss the notes that you have provided.  The more information you can provide to help a member of your audience gain greater understanding of the production, and the more accessible you can make those details, the more opportunities you create as an organization to engage people in a meaningful, measurable way.

Ron Evans

I'm really enjoying the blog salon discussion by so many smart folks here on ARTSBlog. Technology in the Arts' David Dombrosky and I both decided to pick up the banner of discussing citizen reviewers and trusting online commentary. In his recent post, he talks about the need to educate citizen reviewers so they know how to write an intelligent review. And in my recent post, I talk about training people to trust what people are reviewing right now.

I thought this was a cool way to attack the problem, and people seemed to dig the perspectives via the comments they left. So I emailed David and asked is he wanted to join my on Skype and talk about these two ways of attacking the problem on a deeper level. You can listen in on the recorded convo below:

Ian David Moss (fellow ARTSBlog writer) also chimed in with some thoughts on how he and his friend Daniel Reid had considered some of these issues when it comes to some of the big “vote for your arts group to get a grant” challenges that are happening all over the place. Based on these conversations, I decided to take a crack at a simple rating system, let's call the “scale of trustiness” (or SOT -- let's bring the great word SOT back from its original meaning!) that you can store in your head when you're reading an online review for an arts event. You won't need to remember any number of points or anything -- it's enough that you just consider a particular review on the SOT scale, and if you're weighing two shows to go to, perhaps each review's SOT score can help you decide what to attend.

Brian Reich

The latest book from Brian Solis, Engage, is written for champions and executives alike in business, marketing, branding, interactive, service, and communications with a mission to help all aspects of business to the table. But Brian Solis understands how arts organizations work, and how the lessons from his book, and his work with brands all around the world, can be applied to arts organizations.

More from my conversation with Brian Solis:

Reich: Arts organizations are ultimately competing for an audience’s attention just like every other brand out there – and in most cases, the competition has more resources to support their efforts to reach and engage customers. When an organization is small, its focus somewhat narrow, and its resources more limited – how can an arts organization compete?  Are there enough people who are interested in the arts, or who are looking to support a small organization, to justify the time and energy required to truly engage?

Solis: It comes down to the idea of a switch. Imagine that you are hosting an event, a conference. The challenge that arts organizations face will actually be very similar, and thus they will need to approach social media and audience engagement in much the same way a non-profit arts organization would. First, a conference, like an arts organization, is looking for people who are contextually bound – an audience focused on specific topic or theme. Well, one of the most underestimated powers of social networking and that is that you can identify clusters of individuals connected around topics and themes. But, to identify those clusters requires a little layer of intelligence. You need to you to connect the dots without necessarily saying: “I want to find everyone whose interested in, say, arts in Chicago” for example. You have to dig one or two layers deeper and develop a more complete understanding of the individuals you are trying to reach. There are so many different capacities on which you can connect with individuals. So if you’re working for an arts organizations and your job is to increase subscribers or donations, that’s one thing. If your role within that organization is filling seats in that particular house, maybe that’s something that complimentary but more likely the challenge is a little different. And then who you connect with and where are all going to be dictated by the results that come out of that initial searching. So if someone you are trying to reach is active on LinkedIn versus Twitter versus Facebook, that intelligence is there, and how you connect with them will be based on how people are interacting in those communities right now. I used conferences as an example because it is one of the more difficult things that you have to do – filling the seats in a particular house for a series of events in a local area for a very specific event. And then when you book a conference, for example, and you now have people who are connected from all over the world and you interact with them, and everyone is fighting for their attention, the challenge becomes even greater. The similarities to arts organizations are pretty clear.

Susannah Greenwood

Oh, Chad Bauman you might be my new hero. Your insightful article on A Collection of Worst Practices was in a word, awesome. In another word, brave. Just one more word… awesome. Oh, wait, I already said that. Dammit. But, seriously, we’re brought up all our lives to believe mistakes are bad. You mess up that one term paper and it’s 40% of your grade and your GPA is affected for life, you’ll never get into grad school, you’ll never attract a spouse, you’ll end up miserable living in a ditch, a worthless piece of detritus and probably a total sot (not to be confused with Scale of Trustiness). What, your parents never used that argument? Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but so many times the consequences of mistakes are seemingly so monumental that you don’t take any risk at all. You never grow. And let’s be honest, sometimes those BEST practices don’t have the same results for you in your organization.

I’m here to support loud and clear MISTAKES. Boy, do I love sharing the mistakes. Sure they can be a bit of a sucker punch to the pride, but mistakes and sharing them are at the core of collaboration, education, and the continued drive for improvement and ultimate success. Hopefully your mistakes aren’t BP sized, no one wants that, but it’s easier to rise from the ashes if you just approach things with the attitude of practice makes perfect…or maybe not perfect, but very respectable progress and desired outcomes. When people say we are building on our “experience” what they really mean is, “we messed up a lot, but we won’t do that again. Not the same way at least.”