Twespians PR – Pushing it to its limits

Last week I was back at The Old Crown for a Twespians PR event. It was a follow-up to September’s PR-centric panel discussion and was titled ‘Pushing it to its limits’. Here’s some copy/pasted blurb by way of explanation:

we’re wanting to open up the floor to talk about pushing what we do in arts marketing and PR to it’s limits. With the digital world being so important, do we need to rethink the tried and tested methods that so many still rely on today? Can we learn from what people are doing in other disciplines? Is a fundamental shift required in how we perceive audience, community and promotion?

This time, I’d very kindly been asked to join the panel for the discussion alongside:

• Lindsay Watson from Cameron Mackintosh
• Luke Murphy from 33 Digital (and Twespians co-founder)
• Ben Matthews, freelance PR consultant and founding director of Bright One Comms

with Eleanor Turney as chair.

Looking back, it’s funny how many of the points I made are sat as unfinished posts for this blog. They included thoughts about how arts marketing conferences could be improved, where the arts and culture sector should be looking to learn lessons on marketing and PR and why it’s not always helpful to think of ‘doing social media’ on a budget/in your spare time.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the evening for me was the sense that everyone that room had an idea of how they want to take their craft forward – they just feel constrained by a range of circumstances. If those obstacles to progress could be identified and overcome (and there were some smart people at the event) then maybe things might improve.

The other thing was that I brought up John V Willshere’s ‘Advertising Fireworks, Social Bonfires‘ idea, having been reminded of it at the AMA Digital Marketing Day the other week. I wasn’t able to credit John properly at the time, so I’m doing it here.

Thanks to the Twepsians folks for inviting me along to speak, to everyone else who was there for contributing to the chat and to Mobius for sponsoring.

Andrew Girvan recorded the discussion and has uploaded it to Soundcloud:

Oh, and Richard Herring and Stewart Lee turned up to the pub later on. Somewhere I’ve got a Fist of Fun tour ticket from 1995(ish) with their signatures on.

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Links for 12 July 2009

• Social Media Releases for the music industry – MonkeyWatcher – Advice for bands – “send a quick press release by email, and provide a link to a social media release (SMR), or, in other words, a page aggregating the various items you want to share (music, pictures, videos, blog posts, tour dates, etc.)” I get a lot of adjective stuffed press releases from bands’ PR companies too – the essentials with links to further stuff would be so much more useful
• Putt’s Law – “Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand”
• Population : One – One Person is One Pixel – “Every pixel in the illustration represents one person alive on Earth. The first one is you. The rest are everyone else”. Reminiscent of Stans Cafe’s ‘Of All The People…’. It never hurts to get a sense of perspective once in a while
• Birmingham schools named in gang report – Google Maps – Someone’s plotted all the schools named in a report as being “at risk of becoming ‘feeder schools’ for city gangs into a Google Map. No idea which report and the colour-coding is a mystery. Still. As a side note, if anyone knows how to search Google Maps for user-generated maps then please let me know
• kala phool – Mother India – 21st Century Remix – The edit and live soundtracking of Mother India which Kala Phool produced last year was one of the best things I’ve seen in the past 12 months. I’ve just heard they’re taking the show on a UK tour between August and October. No dates yet but you heard it here first
• nycgo / this is new york city – New York’s official website for visitors was relaunched in Jan 09, partnering with Google, Travelocity, Time Out New York and others
• Spotted by Locals – Experience cities like a local – A collection of city blogs, all under the ‘Spotted by Locals’ roof. An interesting idea, not quite realised but still pretty good

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