Crowdsurfing

This blog post from Birmingham Opera Company has a lot to recommend it:

  • It’s on Tumblr, which means I can subscribe to get more updates, either by RSS or by hitting the ‘follow’ button. There are links to Twitter and Facebook accounts too if I’m interested in following along.
  • It’s clearly a message from a human, not just a regurgitated press release. Also, Jean’s left her initials at the end of the post, to show which human wrote it.
  • There’s a link to information about buying tickets. That’s good to see.
  • The video is an interesting little behind-the-scenes glimpse and only 99 seconds long. If you didn’t know what BOC’s productions were like you might not expect to see a mix of people in an old warehouse all having a laugh together.
  • The film has been shot on small handheld camera – maybe a phone, maybe a Flip. It might have been topped and tailed, but there’s no other editing going on and so fewer reasons not to get the thing online nice and quickly.

All of which is very nice.

However, the actual best thing about this post is that the video is of their Artistic Director, Graham Vick CBE, crowdsurfing the opera’s chorus. That’s just gold, that is.

Content is king, as they say.

Birmingham Opera Company

Analysis vs Reckoning

This post is a follow-up to my previous one and is about using data from social media to improve decision-making in marketing. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

First up, an example (with apologies to anyone who feels like I’m picking on them).

A poor assumption

I’d not come across The Les Mis Contract before – it’s a comedy skit featuring Matt Lucas, Cameron Mackintosh and Alfie Boe and is the 7th most popular of the 62 videos on the official Les Miserables YouTube account. At the Twespians event on Friday it was held up as an example of a more interesting approach to online theatre marketing. So far, so fair enough.

Someone in the audience asked how many views it had racked up – the answer at the time of typing being 38,874 over 11 months. The general muttered reaction in the room was ‘that’s not very good’, as reflected in this tweet:

Twitter @twespians

Presumably the thinking went like this – 40k people is barely enough to fill a West End theatre for a fortnight and you can bet not everyone who saw the video bought a ticket. Also, 40k views is nothing compared to what some videos on YouTube get. #FAIL.

The thing is, we need to know so much more before deciding whether or not that video worked. For instance:

  • How much did the video cost to produce?
  • How many people rang the box office number, entered the URL from the video or clicked the URL in the video’s description? (Assuming these things were being tracked properly).
  • How many tickets did each of those people book and at what price?
  • How many of the website visitors or tickets buyers were new ones?
  • Once a person has bought tickets and handed over their contact details, what’s that person’s lifetime value likely to be?
  • Was there any increase in organic search traffic around related keywords – for example, those that included ‘Matt Lucas’?
  • Did the video create any additional PR value? Did it lead to Les Mis being mentioned at more events and on more blogs?

And so on… you see what I’m getting at? The number of views tells us nothing. Just to hammer the point home:

  • If that video cost £1,500, took a couple of days to pull together, drove £10,000 of sales, added new contact details to the company’s email lists and was featured on a few theatre blogs then I’d call it a success.
  • If it cost £10,000, tied up resources for a fortnight and drove £1,500 of sales, with all but one customer already being on the company’s mailing list then I’d be chalking it up to experience.

The point is…

Far too many reports, articles and discussions about the effectiveness of social media marketing (especially in the arts and culture sector) are hampered by assumptions based on poor information. Just because some stats (followers, fans, subscribers, views, etc) are publicly available doesn’t mean they tell us anything conclusive.

I think all of this is caused by two things. The first is that although good, actionable data is there to be collected and analysed, it’s rarely made available to third parties (and nor would I expect it to be). However, people seem to enjoy talking about social media and so the vacuum is filled by people’s reckoning instead.

Secondly, I think there’s a big skills gap here and the landscape it constantly evolving. Web analytics aren’t part of the standard marketing syllabus and most arts organisations don’t have the resources to employ a specialist web analyst. The few that are out there aren’t especially vocal. As a result, most others don’t know what they’re missing out on and there’s nobody to pick up on any mistakes.

On that note, a couple of corrections…

There were a couple of things in Sven’s thesis that I’d like to bring up. It’ll be my last word on it, I swear, but I think it illustrates my point.

In the Recommendations section (on p40) there’s a SWOT analysis. The following are listed under ‘Weaknesses’:

6. Few people indicate social media marketing has influenced their buying decision. Then again, this is impossible to measure, just as it is impossible to determine which outdoor billboard influenced a persons buying decision

It’s not impossible to measure! That’s what Google Analytics, ecommerce tracking and a sensible approach to campaign URLs were all invented for. We’re not even limited to last click attribution – there’s fun to be had with the rest of the sales cycle too.

7. Measurement is available, but it usually comes at a high price. Even the most sophisticated measurement tools are not able to link a specific ticket sale to a message one posted on social networks. Twitter and Facebook do not allow tracking of that data

Wrong on the first two counts (but right on the last point). Google Analytics is a free service, awe.sm won’t exactly break the bank (although I’ve yet to have a proper play with it) and I’m sure there are other options out there too. Maybe the costly bit is in hiring a full-time analyst or getting someone like me in to do some training (and I’m a bargain, really). Meanwhile, see above regarding social media attribution.

Let’s push things forward

This is the kind of stuff that I pick through when I’m looking at social media strategies and measurement for clients (it’s not all lolcats in my job, y’know) so I know full well that it’s not glamorous and it can be difficult and frustrating.

However, it’s the kind of thing that can help arts organisations work smarter, increase sales and reduce costs. That’s why I think we should all talk about it more and encourage people to build the right skills and share what they know with each other.

I was chuffed to see SOLT‘s Katherine Wood commenting on my previous post to say that they’re interested in hosting round tables and panel discussions in the future as well as providing opportunities to share case studies. More of that kind of thing would be useful.

What I’d love to see is some top ecommerce managers from the commercial sector being invited to speak at arts marketing events. Although frankly I’m not sure whether that would be more likely to scare people rigid or send them to sleep.

Twespians Fringe: Social Media and Theatre

On Friday I went along to the Twespians Fringe: Social Media and Theatre talk given by Sven Ruggenberg (I mentioned his thesis on the topic in an earlier post). You can see Sven’s presentation on Prezi below.

The crowd was a mixture Twespians and Society of London Theatre members. The former tend to be on the more enthusiastic end of the spectrum when it comes to digital and social media; I’m not quite sure where you might place SOLT members.

Don’t believe the hype

Sven’s thesis is worth reading for the figures he dragged out of SOLT’s report on the West End Theatre Audience 2010 and the input from the likes of Mark Shenton, Dewynters, AKA Promotions, Sell! Sell! and Tony Coleman of Pitch Central.

For me though, the talk seemed to set up and attack something of a straw man. We were told that social media is overhyped, that it’s hovering around the peak of Gartner’s hype cycle and that there’s a gap between the technological possibilities and real life. We were told that it’s still early days for social media and we have to be realistic about what can be achieved with it.

The thing is, I don’t think anyone serious has really bought into the hype wholesale have they? I’ve yet to hear of anyone trying to sell out a West End show via social media alone. Sure, people seem interested in the possibilities, there’s an awful lot of talk around it and they’re trying things out (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) but that’s as far as it’s gone.

In fact, I’d say there’s quite a large degree of caution out there. I was under the impression that resources and budgets aren’t generally being allocated to social media activity and campaigns in much of a meaningful way. That would go some way to explaining why arts organisations’ efforts (and therefore results) tend to be unspectacular.

Of course a mix of tactics are required to sell a large show – that’s always been the case and I daresay it always will be. The only question is how you balance the various elements of a campaign – sometimes it might be appropriate for social media to play a lead role, other times it’ll be a member of the supporting cast.

I defer to Kingsley Jayakesera, Director of Communications and Digital Strategy at Sadler’s Wells, who said in a blog post yesterday:

The challenge going forward is how we create a new effective style of marketing that encompasses digital. No one can deny that many traditional marketing methods still work and work well, so what do we keep and what do we lose?  We certainly cannot keep adding more lines to small budgets; cut your cake too thin and it crumbles. At Sadler’s Wells we have cut back on print distribution and direct mail but have not yet moved a significant part of our budget online. The emphasis has been on cost saving not reallocation.

From blog to broadcast

Someone (Sven?) pointed out that the West End Whingers review of Paint Never Dries would never have reached such a large audience if it wasn’t for broadcast media picking up on it. True enough, but that story also illustrates how broadcast media are picking up stories from social media. Nowadays, what starts as a blog post could end up on the evening news.

More on theatres and video

The Les Mis Contract video was held up as a good example of someone trying something a bit different but was also criticised for not attracting many views – 38,000 is only a fortnight’s theatre attendance for a large West End show and you can bet not everyone who watched the vid bought a ticket.

I’ll talk about why that’s a poor assumption in another post but I think it’s fair to say that, as a piece of video intended for an online audience, there are a few things that could’ve been improved. The main thing for me is the content itself – it’s quite long, it takes a while to be funny and for the first minute it feels like a fairly dull sort of advert. I’d love to know what the audience retention rate was like.

I’ve talked about trailers before. I believe cinematic trailers are best suited to captive cinema audiences and that video made to be shown online should should follow the conventions of that format. That doesn’t just mean adding a cat (necessarily), but it does mean making it as likely to be shared around as possible – I don’t think this quite vid ticked that box.

Still, I think we should be grateful that someone’s taking a punt on this kind of thing and besides, there’s actually no way I can know whether that video was successful or not (on which point, see a forthcoming post).

Anyway…

I realise this might come across a little negative and I should say that I did agree with most of what was said. Besides, a sign of a good event is that it gives you food for thought and provokes discussion, for which thanks go to Sven for pushing things forward. Have a read of his thesis if you’ve not already.