Rebecca Krause-Hardie

San Francisco Symphony's Jean Shirk and their Ning Social Network

 

I recently talked with Jean Shirk, Public Relations Manager of the San Francisco Symphony about their social networking community on Ning.    How did they get started?   Jean says that they had been thinking about social media for a number of years, and wondered about the best way to engage with their audience. The SF Symphony established a YouTube channel in 2006 and had created a Facebook page.  They had organized a very successful blogger night in 2007. They wanted to know more about what their audience was doing on-line. 

Media was in a state of upheaval – arts coverage was declining and a lot less space was being devoted to the symphony in newspaper coverage.  The question was:  

“How do we continue to communicate with people interested in us and new people that want to find out more about us?”  

With the help of SF Symphony board member Matt Cohler (from Facebook), and through some surveying last year, they began to think it out and decided on a community site using NING.   

Partnering with NING

The Symphony partnered with NING to set up their community site. As part of that partnership they were advised about design, what features to include, the optimal layout, and how to get things to be robust looking at the very beginning. 

 

Getting Started - The Schedule

They began talking and planning last fall and began construction in January.  The building process took about 2 1/2 months. They launched on May 6, 2009, and now have over 1400 members.  

Participation

 

Cachet  -  The prestige of the Symphony and its existing relationship with its audience has helped to build the community. As one patron said:

“I never joined a social network before. If the San Francisco Symphony is doing it, it must be okay.” 

Popular Features - The most popular sections of the community site include the home page, the member profiles, the contests for Opening Gala and Final Fantasy concert tickets, photos and videos, and then the blogs and discussions.  

Contests –  For example, a contest was created around the popular iPhone SMULE apps  apps that turn your iPhone into an Ocarina or ‘Leaf Trombone’. Among other prizes, winners received tickets to a sold-out concert at which the San Francisco Symphony performed music from the Final Fantasy video game series. The evening included a class on how to play the Ocarina, and the class played music from Final Fantasy together.         

Rich Media Content -  The symphony has tremendous content that populates the site.  Excerpts from their ‘Keeping Score’ television series with PBS, or their Mahler recordings is a key part of enlivening the community experience.

 Musician Participation –  Musicians are encouraged to join, and a number of have done so including guest artists like Yuja Wang and tenor Alfie Boe, appearing at the Symphony’s New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball. Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik and new SF Symphony Youth Orchestra Music Director Donato Cabrera have done video Q&As for the social network. Principal Bassoon Stephen Paulson is featured in instructional videos made as part of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra project.  

Personal Profiles – Some interesting discoveries for the symphony

• Many people browse and read but don’t join 
• They thought more people would create content, but in fact most people are browsers
• The personal profiles of many people are very in-depth offering much deeper insights into themselves than could ever be gotten in a survey.
• They are offering themselves up in some detail including their favorite composers and concerts. 
• A key part of this is the implicit trust placed on the community.

Community Management

Jean oversees the care and feeding of the community.  She spends about an hour a day uploading content and monitoring.  Jean reviews the profiles of new members, welcomes them to the site, and highlights people and content.   Other important activities that are part of her day include:

• Listening to the community and responding as needed
• Insuring that the community is a civil place to be
• Tracking and removing spam

   

Some Social Media insights from Jean:

“Social Media touches every department in the organization in a way that more traditional media doesn’t.  For example, when single tickets went on sale, it was a huge day.  One person was having trouble on the website and posted a note on twitter about it.  Because we were monitoring Twitter, we were easily able to address the concerns of the ticket buyer. Sometimes you can’t fix it, but you can show you care and are not a mute institution behind an impenetrable wall.”    In addition to their community site, they use Twitter for listening as well as a news channel. They have a YouTube Channel, a rapidly growing Facebook presence, and of course their ongoing “Keeping Score”project, which encompasses a PBS television series, a public radio series, the website www.keepingscore.org, and a national education program for K-12 teachers that helps them integrate classical music into core subjects.  

Links

SF Symphony Social Network http://community.sfsymphony.org
SF Symphony   www.sfsymphony.org
SF Symphony on Facebook  www.facebook.com/sfsymphony
SF Symphony on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sanfransymphony
Jean Shirk on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bean
SF Symphony on YouTube: www.youtube.com/sfsymphony
Keeping Score www.keepingscore.org and  http://video.pbs.org/video/1295290184/search/keeping%20score
Matt Cohler  http://www.facebook.com/matt

 

 

NYSARTS SUMMIT

I had great pleasure to give a couple of presentations at the NYS Arts Summit Last Week.   

As promised.  Here are links to the presentations

Got Facebook? Now What? - Strategy

Social Media: Whats The Buzz?

View more presentations from Rebecca Krause-Hardie.

Special thanks to folks whose great insights I've referenced in the presentations:

Beth Kanter
Chris Brogan
Brian Solis
Nina Simon
Chris Heuer

FLickr attributions in notes

Call Fire Dept and social media communities

It’s about showing up

It’s 9:25 am.  I’m sitting at my desk at my home office, reading a note from Beth Kanter's facebook page about creating movements.  

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep  - my pager shrieks.  I grab the pager, head for the fire station.  It’s just the chief and me – a novice, heading off in the truck for smoke in a house. A couple of 50 some-things, to do whatever needs to be done.    

Our town covers 45 square miles, and it takes us a good 15 minutes on the windy bumpy back roads just to get there.  We size up the scene, head into the house.  Fortunately it’s a minor affair.  

In little towns like ours, we depend on ‘mutual aid’ – other towns' FD departments to help out if we need them.  That’s easily another 20-30 minutes before additional help can arrive.

Bring whatever you have to the table

I’m new at this.  I joined because there was a need for people to respond to Fire and Rescue calls, especially during the day.  We don’t have any industry in our town, so most people work elsewhere.  I work from home.  Usually there are a half dozen people who might respond, but not today.

While I’m still learning the basics, I do have an able body, and smart mind.  I just need a little guidance, training and leadership.  

There’s no need for me to go it alone.  The system works because we learn, we share what we learn, and even though we think we don’t know much, we can bring something to the table.  Talking through things together, the Chief and I figure out what we need to do.  I feel like I’ve contributed in my own small way. 

Social Media

There is so much to learn.  So much to try.  I learn so much from people like Beth Kanter and Jeremiah Owyang.   So when they post a question on Twitter, or questions on their fan page, I take the time to give back to them if I can.  

Community, virtual or actual, is about bringing something of yourself to share, even if it’s just showing up.

What do you do to support all  your communities?

Using Facebook to reach Alumni for SNAAP

Hello to everyone who participated in webinar.  

As promised you can find the presentation here.

S N A A P Facebook Final

View more documents from Rebecca Krause-hardie.

Please join the SNAAP Facebook Fan Page and share ideas about promoting SNAAP.

  Thanks so much!

Rebecca (and the whole team at SNAAP!

If you haven't already done so please help us make this better.  Take our survey if you attended the session.

Leveraging Social Media

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of doing a presentation with Erin West at the Technology and Arts Conference in Pittsburgh on leveraging Social Media.  We'd never worked together before and weren't quite sure how we were going to merge together all our ideas and content into one presentation.  Amazingly everything seemed to dovetail together with great ease.  Maybe because Erin did that part and her gift for organizing, and getting to the core ideas is fantastic.

I also just wanted to say that Conference organizer, David Dombrosky had the great wisdom to move the conference out of the CMU campus and down to the Hilton hotel.  That move transformed a really bad thing into a really good thing.  Lots of room and space and time for networking, and learning.  As David says, lots of things he'll do differently next year, but he's really on the right track!

So here is our presentation.  Feel to use with attribution.

Leveraging Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Come Participate in "We Are The Media!"

I am a religious reader of Beth's Blog.  And there is rarely a day that I don't learn something interesting there.  And Beth is one of those amazing people that shares everything she knows with you. 

But this post isn't exactly about Beth, its about the sharing part. I learn something and share it here and with clients. All over the web people are doing amazing things.  Just look at Brooklyn Museum, or the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the Boston Symphony, or the New York Philharmonic  (shameless plug here).   Can we help Beth and NTEN and all our friends in the non-profit community? 

Here's how:

NTEN and the Non-profit community, spear-headed by Beth Kanter are creating:

We Are Media Project:

The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits

There is a hugh amount of expertise in the non-profit community and the goal of the We Are The Media project is to harness that great collective of knowledge and experience and share the love.  This month is focusing on the social media tool box.

As the site header says...

Starting October 6th, WeAreMedia participants are going to unabashedly focus on the tools and collectively build the nonprofit social media tool box. Now that we've laid the strategic framework in the other modules, we can have some fun. So come join us ... it will be easy and quick. And, we'll be awarding special prizes for participation.

Have you experimented with any of these things?

• RSS Feeds
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting
• Blogs
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing
• Crowd Sourcing
• Lifestreams
• Social Networks
• Fundraising Apps
• Fundraising Widgets

Please go over to We Are The Media, join the group and join the conversation.  Your 2 cents makes a difference!

Brooklyn Museum Builds Community

Shelly Bernstein, Manager of Information Systems at the Brooklyn Museum shared some of her insights and approaches to the social network world with me recently.  (Thank you to Elena Park at the Met for pointing me here!!)   

Some of the key ideas that surfaced are:

• Web communities are about communities  (not necessarily marketing opportunities)
• Be creative and flexible and …
• Find the right activity for the right community
• Street ‘credibility’ -  walking the talk
• Work and develop your social web presence organically
• Finish what you start –   (or don’t start)
• Align your activities with your mission   

Here’s how they’ve been doing this.   

Web Communities are Communities
In 2006 the museum began to look around the web trying to understand what ‘community’ meant in that medium.  Because the Museum’s institutional mission is centered around ‘the visitor experience and community,’ this was a key issue. They found that these communities on the web were ‘real’ communities like MySpace , Friendster, and Flickr. Says Bernstein,

“We thought that just like how we extend ourselves in our own backyard, we should do that online as well.  We started to participate in the communities and the first thing that became clear is that these are real communities, and not necessarily marketing opportunities. For example, when we’re on Flickr, we answer questions, make sure comments get to the right people, and try to upload interesting content that people care about and really want to see.”

Be creative and flexible and …  Just Do It
Since there was a freeze on the current site spending at the time, they looked at what could be done elsewhere that would be dynamic and interesting. They looked at each community and tried to understand what that community was about and what would be the right thing to do for that community.

FLICKR - Find the right activity for the right community

In summer of 2006 the Brooklyn Museum did a show on Graffiti.

“We had a canvas show of graffiti canvasses from our collection.” Continues Bernstein, “When it was installed, a blank wall was put up in the middle of the gallery where people could tag the wall. The changing nature of it was the very nature of graffiti - it would get covered over and covered over because there was so much traffic. Weekly we took pictures of this ever-changing wall and posted it to Flickr. 

At the same time, we did an ‘interactive’ where people could take photos of graffiti in Brooklyn and post them on our Flickr profile. People were seeing the real theme that was happening in the street, and at the same time seeing the theme that was happening in the gallery, in addition to the works of art that were in the show.”

 

Another neat tool was an online drawing application to make virtual graffiti.

 

That is such a great example of what web 2.0 really means: participatory culture!

Later when they did a Ron Mueck exhibit this last fall, they took behind the scenes photos of Mueck loading in the art. It was hughly popular on Flickr.  It goes back to the concept of posting content that people find interesting and engaging, rather then strict marketing.

“Similarly when we started our blog,” says Shelley, “the initial blogs were just a way to put up our postcards. When we really started to blog we turned around and said that wasn’t really interesting. We began to open up the internal process of the museum and provide content that people care about.”

Electronic Comment Book in the Gallery - Street ‘credibility’ -  walking the talk

The idea of community has its roots in their gallery. For a long time they have had “Community Voice Labels.”  They would get quotes from visitors from the community, and these would be put on the wall, next to the official label. It has a physical presence. Now they have an electronic comment book both in the gallery and online at the same time. 

“‘Street cred’ … it’s not marketing, it’s community. It’s making that commitment, and if you make that commitment your audience, I hope will see it.  And then you get credibility and they care.  We see it in our testimonials.”

Statistics for sites like Flikr and YouTube show that fewer then 1% actually participates in adding content. The rest are just looking. The participation is building.  Bernstein says that, “We’re half way into the show and already have 300 comments.  We’re building an audience.  If you look at some of our older shows, we had fewer comments. This looks good to us.”

Finish what you start –   (or don’t start)

“It’s a sizable commitment.  If people are going to do this it’s a real commitment, and once you’ve jumped in, you have to keep on going.  You have to have the time and commitment to do this right, otherwise, don’t do it at all.”

Bernstein notes, “Someone contacts us and says ‘We want to do a Myspace page just for this show.’  I ask them ‘Why? You spend this effort to build an audience and then just leave them.’  It makes no sense.”

It’s a community effort within the museum to build and maintain their social and web activities.  Much of the Flickr content is provided by the education department, interns, and other staff, though all is updated by the IT department.  The blog is different because there are many authors and its a direct publish -  it doesn’t go through the Editorial, or Public Information Departments, but trust that the authors will follow the policies that have been set up.  For projects that are directly related to exhibitions, the curators, the interpretive materials manager, and education are all involved.

ArtShare on FaceBook -Work and develop your social web presence organically

The Brooklyn Museum just developed a new application for FaceBook called ArtShare.  This seemed like the right thing to do to engage with their community on this social site.  ArtShare allows people to take the art they like and put it on their profile. The application is open and other Museums are using it to add art from their collections.  In fact artists are encouraged to upload their own work too.

“The ideas often come up organically, we look at the exhibition schedule and talk about what might be appropriate. We have a conversation (internally), and then maybe come back to it a week or two later. The FaceBook idea came up really quickly, and we decided to do it. Almost all these things happen pretty fast and pretty organically. And I hope that that also comes across because it’s something that we try to do really hard here.”

VIDEO COMPETITON on YouTube - Align your activities with your mission
                    “…Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience…”

As with the other social networking sites, the team asked “What was the right kind of thing for YouTube?” “You have to define what the community is interested in and do that as opposed to constantly pushing your own stuff,” says Shelley. While they do have their own content there, they feel it’s really also about what other people produce. “Its funny,” says Shelley,  “when you look at the videos that were part of the competition, they have way more hits than anything we put on YouTube.”

Bernstein is doing a great job on the transparency side too.  Here are some pointers on the lessons learned from their video competition.

And let me know if you are doing something interesting and I'll write about it here!

Hartford Stage and Social Networking

An Interview with Julie Stapf,at the Hartford Stage

Julie Stapf, Director of Marketing and Sales for the Hartford Stage Theatre describes her view of Social Networking like this.

“It’s a long term audience building project.  It’s kind of like going to parties and networking with folks who are (demographically likely patrons), except doing it on the internet.  You are going around and showing your face and saying ‘Hi’. It gives you the opportunity to make a connection with them and to tell them something about yourself.  Hopefully by building this relationship you are then able to extend an invitation to them to come to the theatre.

These social networking accounts can’t be (must not be) static like our website.  Our website, like most is used pretty much as a tool to buy tickets.  We use Google Analytics, which shows that they come because they already know something about us, they know our web address like they know our phone number, and are coming to buy tickets.  They don’t visit the history page, or the information about every play that’s been done since the beginning of time”.

The Facebook and Myspace sites will just sit there if you put them up and leave them as a static entity.  You don’t get a lot of friends … you have to reach out. Making ‘friends’ is the first action step.

Our interns are going out there as “I am the Hartford Stage”. They are the face of the Hartford Stage, as is the Director, the Front of House Manager, the Group Sales Manager, and the usher that greets you.  It’s the same when they go out on the Internet – they are the face of the institution. We feel so strongly about this idea that it has become the theme for all our new marketing materials this coming year.

The Hartford Stage, through its interns, identified Facebook networks and groups of people who expressed a particular interest in theater. These people were sent invitations for a special offer, and as a result we got over a hundred new friends.  While it’s too early to translate this into tickets, it’s a powerful step in that direction.

Its pretty labor intensive.  I see it as a long term audience building project – similar to group sales.”

In a recent conversation Ms. Stapf had with Donna Walker-Kuhne, author of  Invitation to the Party, Donna said:

“In building a successful program, the common mistake that arts organizations make is thinking in too short a time period.  They say, ‘Hey, I got a two year grant.  I’m going to put together this program in two years.  I’m going to hire somebody, etc. and within two years we’re going to be raking in the dough off of all our community outreach programs’.  In practice, it just doesn’t happen, because two years isn’t enough time.  Five years, in Donna’s mind, is the minimum commitment to building a really strong and successful social networking program. And while I don’t know that it will take 5 years, it is a long term investment in what is another layer of our marketing program.” 

“It doesn’t replace our other activities, but represents another segment, and requires arts groups to be much more sophisticated in how we talk about segmenting.  It’s not just about demographics, but also how they get information, how they consume news.”   

One of the reasons Arts Institutions do not have an alignment around the value of some of these ideas – like social networking, is because of this short term focus.

“This has always been one of the burdens of marketing directors.  We have lots of conversations about marketing best practices and putting things into place that are going to build us longer term as institutions.  But short term when you sit down to do that budget it is so lean, and in non-profits in particular, you don’t have that R&D development.  You literally get to these points where you say. “We could run a couple more radio spots, which I know are going to produce x amount of audience for me more or less, or I can take that money and invest it in social networking which right now is not bringing a lot of money in the door, but which is a significant, self sustaining, viral audience multiplier … down stream.”