Hello Culture and the Tessitura UK User Conference

I’ve been involved in a few conferences, talks and livechats recently and am just catching up with notes and so on here.

Hello Culture

Due to a busy workload on the day, I was only able to duck into Hello Culture long enough to talk on a panel discussing digital distribution. There’s a video here if you weren’t there and are interested in hearing what was said:

It was great to have a panel (Rosie Kay, Steffan Aquarone, Alison Smith and myself) that came at the subject from so many points of view, but with such a large topic to talk around we didn’t really have a chance to delve into anything too deeply.

For maximum entertainment, panel discussions usually require either some amazing nuggets of information, a question from the floor that foxes everyone or a healthy disagreement. Rosie Kay and I just about started to differ slightly on what should come first – audience-building or the artistic work. I suspect there’s room for both our points of view but we didn’t quite have the time to resolve that one.

Tessitura UK User Conference

After that I hot-footed it over to Cardiff for the 8th Tessitura UK User Conference, held at the rather impressive and fantastic Wales Millennium Centre.

If you’ve not come across it, Tessitura is the box office software/CRM system used by many of the English speaking world’s major arts venues. My employers, Made Media, are becoming dab hands at Tessitura integration.

I spent most of the time manning our stand, so didn’t get to attend many of the sessions although I did meet a good number of people (hello if I met you there). I did make time for the Trends in Digital, Mobile and Social session that POP ran. Here are my notes from that:

Mobile purchasing is and will be important. A study by Jumptab found that 63% of tablet owners have bought something using their devices and that event tickets were the most popular purchase.

Social commerce is growing. This encompasses purchases on social platforms and purchases influenced by social media.

Forrester’s report on The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras.

Seven things a website should be:

  • Participative
  • Connected – see Roundabout Theatre‘s livechat (and Glyndebourne‘s for that matter)
  • Social
  • Relevant
  • Accessible – in the sense of being accessible beyond the theatre
  • Delightful – you only have one chance to delight someone. See 90% abandonment rate for iPhone apps

Resources: Pew Internet & American Life ProjectMashable, Social Media Today, Thomas Cott, Inside Facebook and Mobile Marketer.

Published by Chris Unitt

I work at One Further, doing digital projects with cultural organisations. Follow @ChrisUnitt or find me on LinkedIn.