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:

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.

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 Project, Mashable, Social Media Today, Thomas Cott, Inside Facebook and Mobile Marketer.

Community relevance

This is from the concluding paragraph of Doug Borwick (President of the AAAE amongst other things)’s recent post, El Sistema: The Phenomenon:

As more established arts institutions come to understand the need to establish community relevance as part of their long-term prosperity (or survival) the more necessary it will be to develop models of work with communities that produce impressive results

You can get the full context of that quote via the link. I’m posting it here because I’d like to co-opt the sentiment, or perhaps extend it a little.

I think it’s relevant to how artists and organisations view themselves online in relation to their artform, location, other organisations, individuals and others. Or rather how they should view themselves. It’s probably worth a separate blog post or a rant over a pint sometime.