Surveys: Social Media in Theatre Marketing and The Fringe & Off West End Audience Report

There’s a general lack of decent information about the use of digital and social media in the arts and culture sector. It’s a frequent source of frustration when doing research and more strategic work. However, a couple of things have come along recently.

Social Media in Theatre Marketing

The first is by Sven Ruggenberg and is called Social Media in Theatre Marketing. It’s a thesis he wrote while doing an internship at Kevin Wallace Ltd.

Disappointingly there’s no download option, which has hampered my ability to read the thing. Still, I can at least embed it. Hoorah:

I’m actually going to leave off blogging any notes about this for now. Sven will be talking about social media and theatre at a joint-SOLT/Twespians event on Friday. I’m going along and chances are I’ll blog my notes from that (along with my standard grainy/blurred photo).

This report also mentions a dissertation by Andrew Harding called ‘The Impacts and Benefits of Social Media in West End Musical Theatre Marketing’. Intriguing.

The Fringe & Off West End Audience Report 2011

The other is The Fringe & Off West End Audience Report 2011 which has been published by iTrend Research and OffWestEnd.com. I discovered it via a blog post from The Stage’s Mark Shenton.

There’s a whole section given over to websites and social media but, to be honest, there’s not much in there of practical use (at least, not for my purposes). The relative popularity of various websites and blogs was interesting (pp 24-27) but the accuracy of the info has been questioned – Time Out’s theatre blog was surprisingly popular given that it doesn’t yet exist. BOP Consulting have also pointed out that some results may have been skewed by the survey being conducted online.

All that aside, I found the answers to Question 9 interesting:

9. How do you USUALLY find out about productions? Choose all appropriate answers.

Fringe and Off West End Report 2011 - page 16 of 31The top half of that chart is very digital-heavy.

Transmedia London 4

Transmedia London - Joe Lidster

On Thursday night I went along to the first Transmedia London of 2012, held in the rarefied surroundings of BAFTA. There were massive gold faces everywhere.

It was a good evening with a good variety of speakers speaking from different perspectives. Here are a few of the notes I scribbled…

Patrick O’Luanaigh

Patrick (@patrickol) is the CEO of nDreams, who I knew as the makers of Lewis Hamilton: Secret Life. They’ve done plenty more besides.

He spoke about their upcoming ‘Project Grid’, which will mix live events, social games and traditional games – cherry-picking what they see as the best elements of each.

He wasn’t keen on the term ‘ARG’ and had some general frustrations with the form – not least an all-too-common tendency not to promote them in order to maintain the pretence that it’s all real.

In the Q&A, Patrick was asked about the Double Fine Kickstarter project that had launched that day. He said he could see his studio going down the same route at some point and talked up the community angle of the thing. He said he liked how social media lets people get in touch with him directly – previously he had felt a bit distant from his games’ players, with all comms going through a marketing department.

A couple of other things he spoke about:

Alex Macmillan & Matt Wieteska

Alex and Matt work at Six to Start. They’re working on Zombies, Run which will be a combined game, story and fitness app.

It was funded via Kickstarter and, until that afternoon, it had been the most successful game on that platform. They had some good insights about that, actually:

  • The community input had been helpful. For instance, a helicopter pilot didn’t want to be annoyed with the game he’d helped to fund, so he sent them instructions for how to refer to helicopters
  • They talked up the benefits of a cunning reward scheme. One of the things they’d offered was the chance to contribute zombie noises to the game. The alternative was to pay for those to be recorded.

During Q&A-time, someone raised the idea of backers on Kickstarter helping to promote the game and increase visibility on the app store, which seems like a good ancillary benefit.

There was also lots of interesting stuff about the process and mechanics of building the game but nothing I could usefully describe here.

Joe Lidster

Joe (@joelidster) is a writer who, amongst other things, has created fictional websites for Doctor Who and Sherlock.

Although he apologised for his lack of web savvy, he served as a good counterpoint to the rest of us. It was also interesting to hear from a specialist rather than someone who turns their hand to a bit of everything.

I did wonder how easy it is for someone to write fictional blogs if they don’t write real ones. However, he’s catering for a very general audience – maybe the trick is to make these things look as that audience might expect them to look.

All told, it was a splendid evening. It was also good to bump into Alyson and Henry (who are currently working on the Apollo 11 app) and Lloyd Davis too.

Paying attention

Philip Hensher in the Independent has written one of those pieces lamenting the way people use technology at live events and experiences, asking ‘Do you want an experience, or just to film it?‘

I dunno. There’s a part of me that sympathises with this kind of thing and I agree with the article’s earlier point about respecting a venue/performer’s rules.

On the other hand, it’s a daft question.  Evidently some people would rather wave a camera around, capturing the moment to relive it later, than simply look at a picture. Besides, experiencing something and capturing it on film aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive acts.

I also think this might be over-egging things slightly:

In the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg last year, I saw any number of tourists enter an incomparable Matisse room with a camera already held up before their face; they walked around, and left still with the thing raised. What had they seen? How could they ever surrender to the vast magic of Matisse in full flood?

I’ve been to a fair few galleries in my time and can’t remember seeing the people without cameras “surrender to the vast magic” of anything very much, it just doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen all sorts – boredom, distraction, mild interest, animated discussion and quiet appreciation.

At classical concerts my attention has wandered so far from the music that I was tempted to go back, just for the chance to do some good, uninterrupted thinking. I’ve also chatted through bands at festivals, dropped off to sleep in the theatre and caught up on emails and RSS feeds during talks and lectures (proof below). This stuff happens. In that context (and I’m sticking up for these amateur filmmakers and their creative acts now) is holding up a camera really so bad?

I was listening, honest