Arts Intranet

Ron Evans

I miss newspapers.

No, I know we still have some daily, weekly, and other newspapers around the country (and my hat goes off to those still working in this field. I also miss hats). But the decline of arts journalism has been massive over the last few years. There are only a few newspapers left in the country that have dedicated arts reviewers/writers – writers who can be trusted to at least publicly declare that they continue to follow journalistic standards. And that's sad.

It's sad, because nothing good has risen up to replace them.

Sure, we have a million review sites out there that allow citizens to review this service or that theatre company, or this production. But who can trust these reviews? I really don't. But in an absence of any other information, they influence a lot of people.

I see a lot of fake reviews. A LOT. I've caught directors writing fake reviews for their shows under assumed names, people writing in fake reviews when they haven't seen the performance, people using assumed names and then just trashing individual actors by name – it's pretty horrible actually. Fake reviews are everywhere – check out this story of a guy who was totally blatent about hiring people to write fake reviews. And anonymity makes fake reviews much more likely – when people can't be held responsible for what they say, they will throw out all manner of bull.

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.

Ron Evans

Let's face it. Arts marketing and technology planning can be overwhelming at times. Especially for folks who are new to it.

I recently taught a class about self-marketing online, to a group of individual artists in San Francisco. They were all fired up about technology; it was awesome to see. But a lot of them didn't have a plan, and because of this, they didn't have consistent activities they could measure over time.

The effect was that that they were getting really frustrated chasing the next “silver bullet” and not finding any sort of results or satisfaction.

I can see how that can be really frustrating (especially for an individual artist with no staff to help). So we spent some time talking about creating a simple online marketing plan, and most importantly, establishing various behavior modification techniques to help them stick to a consistent marketing schedule.

I know many of you will have heard of S.M.A.R.T. Goals (hey everyone, did you know that S.M.A.R.T has been expanded to S.M.A.R.T.E.R?). This format is an excellent one for setting priorities so that you can get rid of the stuff that's not SMART(ER) and focus on the stuff that is.

Ron Evans

A colleague emailed me the other day and wrote “I gave a donation to an arts organization via (insert any popular online social fundraising site here). Does the organization get my information? I never got a thank you.”

Ouch!

Although it is possible that a fundraising site wouldn't share the information of a donor to an organization, it's really unlikely, and with this specific online social site, I know that they DO share the donor information.

So the organization didn't get back to their donor(s) to thank them. I see this happen a lot with donations through newer technology channels. I've seen statistics for something like 71% of nonprofits (not just arts organizations) don't send any sort of thank you (email or otherwise) to online donors. Wow!

The world is in constant change and is becoming more dominated by technology. Therefore, you should use all of your “technology weapons” to stand out from the crowd and create a successful arts marketing campaign.

Why is it important that we get these terms right? As we work to communicate the value of the work that we do, it’s important to paint an accurate and authentic picture. It is only once we acknowledge the work we are currently doing that we are able to grow.