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

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.

Being an interesting Blogger

Blogging for Community Building
One of the key tools that people use for online community building is blogging. We have this idea that if we build a blog that people will come flocking to our doors to buy tickets and attend performances.  If only it were that simple.

Being an Interested Blogger
I was reading a post today from Problogger about how to be an interesting blogger. The key take away for me in that post was about being interested in what you writing about and what your readers are interested in.  Being interested in your readers.  Are we writing because we love it, or because we are really intrigued with something?

Who is Your Blog Audience?

Audience in the KKL
Originally uploaded by Archangeli

Chris Brogan talks about this in his post today, with the really good point that we need to be clear about who our audience is and stay focused on writing about what they want to hear about.

Who is My Audience?
Well that really got me thinking.  Who am I writing for?  I'm really interested in knowing about how people in the arts are using social media tools.  What works, what doesn't. What can we learn from others using social media? I've mostly been interviewing people in this process.  But I think I need to branch out and try other things as well. I think my audience is people interested in the same things.

What are you looking for?  What interests you?

Social Media Plans

I was thinking about what some of the elements of an effective social media plan were. At its core social media is about the place where technology, content and social interactions meet. And conversations and relationships that were once invisible are now in plain sight. So what does that mean?

Here's four things that came to mind.

1. Community Building -   time consuming but essential -  reaching out to others as much as expressing oneself, and adding to the conversation
   
2. Getting Personal - People connect with people, allowing and encouraging personal voices to be heard rather than just 'institutional' ones
3. Engaging and Authentic Voices -  People are smart -  Its important to be real and authentic
4. Having Conversations -  Communities of people want to be part of a conversation, a two way deal

Now I have 2 questions.

1. What other things are important to the plan?
2. What are some specific examples of how Arts Organizations are using social media plans?

The Geisha and the Call Girl

I was sitting at lunch today talking with new friends from the Museum World about why I, an "Orchestra" person was at a conference for Museums and the Web.   

Well the first thing that popped into my mind was that there isn't an Orchestra and the Web Conference, nor has there ever been one, unlike the MW which has been going on for 12 years.  Thats Twelve Years...Were YOU even on the web 12 years ago???   Well I was, but barely.  There are over 600 amazing people here, from 32 countries from around the world.  Hello.

This got me thinking, about why is it the Museum world is doing all this amazing and hip stuff on the web, while I observe only a fraction of it on the Orchestra side.  Why is it that Museums are coming together in this way - discoursing on "The Semantic Web" and "Mash-Ups" and "The meaning of Open Content", Tagging Consortium, and what is really 'community" and "the place of openness, value, trust, give" and and and....   Inquiring minds want to know.

Well a provocative friend of mine said...  "Well its like Geisha's and high priced Call Girls.  The Museums, are a more passive experience, and so it takes more to make a connection, so circumstances require them to be like these  wonderful Geisha's that spend the entire evening and night with you listening and entertaining and discovering you.,  whereas orchestra's are like expensive call girls who just give you a quick hour or so experience without paying a whole lot of deep attention."   

Is that it?  Is there more to it then that?   I think so, but what do you think? 

 

Web Lessons from Rich Bradway at the Boston Symphony - Part II

So Yesterday we talked about Podcasts and how important they are for the Boston Symphony's business now....

With over 75,000 people subscribing...

Integrated Email Campaign

Boston Symphony created an email marketing campaign that sends out a preview email for the concerts coming up the following week.  It includes links to podcasts, music clips, program notes, and bios.  They send it to ticket holders and those whose musical interests match those on the program as identified in the MY BSO profile.  The profile includes musical interests, genre, and types of soloists and day of the week.  If there is a match, they get an email.

New Opportunity for Sponsor Support
Their season sponsors are interested in extending their sponsorships to include the podcasts because they now see the exposure.  That helps to underwrite the costs of doing them. 

INTERNET TV

The BSO began to explore the idea of Video on Demand, through a project launched in October called “Internet TV”.  The project is a parallel program to their latest Pops CD.  Its like a mini concert on the web.  The reaction has been very positive.  People have been asking for the DVD of it and it’s had about 60,000 views in the first 6 weeks. 

If the value is there, it may translate into buying a CD, or attendance at a concert, and in the future a video on demand.

The podcasts, and Internet TV, are in large part driven by the agreement with the union as well as requirements from the music publishers.  Everything was specifically delineated for the website by the business agreements which currently don’t address reusing at other sites like YouTube.  While the agreement allows the podcasts and Internet TV to be used without additional compensation, there are payments to musicians for any sales directly attributable from the Internet TV, such as CDs. 

Interestingly, for Rich, like a lot of others, his job has gone from being a technical person, to having to deal with business issues and overall strategy.   

Music Distribution On The Web - with CD Baby

As Rich says, taking the ‘Distribution Method for Idiots’ approach, they are taking their self produced albums and distributing them through CD Baby. The barrier for entry is low with a setup fee of $35.  They distribute to iTunes-  (all the 6-7 versions across the world), Napster, Rhapsody, Amazon Music, etc. 

This is allowing them to explore the online distribution and learn the ropes.  Later they may do these things themselves to increase their cut.  This lets them see which functionality and channels offer the best opportunities

The downside is that since CD Baby acts as middleman, they take a cut in addition to the retail sites. 

CD Baby sells conventional CD’s as well as digitizing and selling individual tracks or the entire CD. The Oscar and Tony CD they put out had the benefit of promotion from the Internet TV site and sold a thousand conventional CD’s, enough to register on Billboard.

New Amazon MP3 Service

Amazon has a new MP3 service.  It includes an MP3 downloader which allows the download manager to ‘resume’ downloads.   It will go and find which players you have and distribute to those libraries like iTunes or Windows music player.   It’s cheaper for the consumer then iTunes and the bit rate is much higher then the standard iTunes MP3s. iTunes does offer the higher quality versions but at a higher cost.      

Offering the higher bit rate, and having the functionality of the Amazon downloader are attractive features to the BSO.  They like to the model.  The downside - While you can use Amazon’s technology, you are then required to have them host your files and use their technology to sell and distribute it.   While their agreement works for CDs the pricing model doesn’t work for longer files like concert performances.

Social Network Based Advertising with PaperG


Rich mentioned a new advertising model that they are looking into called PaperG. It's a flash based advertising model that works on social networks.  The idea is like a digital version of the postcards that one can pick up at a nightclub, and then pass along to friends.  This digital version has a virtual ‘cork board’ where you can post your flyer.  Anyone clicking on it can then forward it to a friend. 

I can’t wait to hear more about this.   Anyone using anything like this?

Web Lessons from Rich Bradway at the Boston Symphony

Meet Rich Bradway at the Boston Symphony

Rich Bradway, Associate Director of E-Commerce and New Media for the Boston Symphony, and I spoke the other day about the BSO’s strategies for the web.

What’s the goal?   First Things First.

I’m so interested in exploring social media and web 2.0 and for me it’s a really good reminder that first things come first. One of the first goals is to enhance the user experience, and make things as easy as possible.  There is no point in making all sorts of content and connections out on the web only to have people struggle to get around and find what they want when they land back at your site.

For the BSO, on the most fundamental level, one way to accomplish this has been to find ways to make navigation simpler and reduce the number of clicks and pages that have to be refreshed.

Calendars:

Says Rich, “One of the most visited places on the site is the calendar. To navigate between all the performances, flip flopping between Pops, and Tanglewood, or trying to find Mahler required a lot of clicks.”

Using web 2.0 technologies like those that underlay tools like Google calendars and maps, they rebuilt their calendars so that that they automatically refresh content without having to reload pages.

Continues Rich, “Visitors can now navigate through each month and pages automatically update without having to be refreshed.  They can go from calendar view to list view, or search within list view to dynamically narrow their search so people can see what they want to.”

 

This is really important for the BSO because they have 4 brands and hundreds of events to manage. Their new rebuild allows a visitor to see any of the events for any of the brands with just one click.

Similarly, they wanted to keep a calendar on every page, wanted a small foot-print and also to maintain functionality. Now with their horizontal calendar anyone can easily see a month out and every event with one click.

The goal:  It helps people get to what they want more quickly. 

Creating Versatile Module Based Content: Flash

The BSO is changing how it presents its interactive and educational content.  They are converting their “Online Conservatory” to something more accessible and versatile called Classical Companion. The Online Conservatory was an in-depth look at just a few programs from the season, with all the content combined together in a way that limited its ability to be used for other purposes.

Now each small piece of content is being created as separate flash modules that can be used more frequently and in varying contexts.  Rich notes that “we have the ability to showcase many more programs, or composers, or music being performed.” Something that could be dropped in and not its own separate website. 

Starting last fall with their Carter program, and continuing with other concerts like their Family concerts, they are creating small modules showcasing each of the composers and including kid friendly interactive modules with quizzes, and timelines with certain milestones in a composer’s life or other important dates in history.  Another basic module will be called Timbre – and it explores the ‘colors’ of music and how you can orchestrate or arrange a piece of music to create or change that timbre.   

The long-term goal is to build an interface independent of the programs so content can be used anywhere on the site.

Podcasts are Incredibly Powerful! 
Direct link between podcasts and increased ticket sales.

Last year the BSO started producing podcasts that were concert previews for the BSO season. 

“We tried to create a slimmed down version of our pre-concert lectures that we could extend through the Internet and allow people to subscribe to.  Over the course of time, while the audio portion is still trying to be a snap shot of the pre-concert lecture, these podcasts are getting longer and with more ancillary content. People started asking for the program notes at the same time, so now we also pass in the program notes at the same time as the podcast.  We try to supplement with other content.  For example when we did Daphne and Chloe, we were able to put up some footage of a concert we did in 1967, and getting our toes wet in doing video podcasts” says Rich.   

WGBH had some great features and interviews that they were unable to reuse and were happy to provide to the BSO for the podcasts.

So here is the amazing thing….

“We saw a very direct relationship between the podcasts and sales and a direct increase in online ticket sales which increased 50% over the year.”   

Every year online BSO ticket sales tend to go up 10-12 % each year, and that was the only thing that they really did differently. This year they are continuing with excellent results.  The current challenge is to be balanced with the right amount of content without overdoing it.  At the same time keeping the content compelling with each item supportive of the next.

So Podcasts are an important part of their business now.
75,000 subscribers!
 

There are over 75,000 people subscribing to their podcasts, of which about 40,000 are regular down-loaders  -  (either every week or every other week). 

Rich says, “Its gotten to the point if we are 2 hours late in posting a podcast we hear about it.  Someone is saying, ‘I’m at Logan, at the airport, and I’m waiting to hear this podcast…’ People are clamoring for this.“

Considering how many people come to the BSO during any given week, this seems like a huge following. 

The podcasts were originally designed to augment the concert experience, and make the experience more enriching for those already planning to attend. They thought it might be helpful to those ‘on the fence’. 

This is part 1 of a  2 part series.  Part 2 tomorrow.

Tribute to Beth Dunn (or learning about Community)

Okay, so I should know what I'm doing but I don't.  I haven't really gotten clear on how to do the whole community and dialogue thing.  I think I've been thinking web 1.0.   

What am I talking about?   I have this great conversation with Beth Dunn, Communications Director of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod a couple of weeks ago.  Its about our mutual interests in Social Media.

The Arts Foundation is a private organization that supports local arts groups by providing training and support to local individual artists, and doing collaborative marketing.  Local corporations sponsor an annual Pops by the Sea event featuring the Boston Pops Esplanade orchestra, which generates about 80% of the funds for the foundation.

Beth does training on social media for local artists as part of her job, but hasn't been able to implement some of those great tools for her own organization.  I found it interesting that she hasn't been able to implement a lot of the social media strategies she's so good at, in her job because it seems there is not yet the level of understanding and appreciation yet of these tools.  I think that it's hard in small communities that haven't a broad perspective.

Beth mentioned how difficult it is when someone opens up the local paper and reads about the Internet and Blogs and so on and all they see is stories about children being at risk, and slanderous behavior etc.  They end up completely jaded and not very open to exploring these great tools. 

Vince Ford at the New York Philharmonic suggests spending some time with people on an individual basis getting them online, showing them how to use tools, and doing a little show an tell to move it from an intellectual exercise to something within their experience. 

What else works?

_______________________________
But why is this a Tribute to Beth Dunn?
_______________________________

Beth is really good at building community and interaction between people. 

I just realized that I was 2 weeks delinquent in seeing that I was Tagged by Beth, and that she had written about our conversation and I had sat on my hands, or so it felt. 

So this is what I have learned today from Beth. (Now I knew this intellectually, but somehow it wasn't turning into  reality!)

• Track conversations that include me.  Beth Kanter refers to this as "Ego Search".

I just did this with Google search and found 3 beginnings of conversations to me that I had completely missed somehow.  I still haven't gotten this to show up well in my reader for some reason.

• Respond  immediately and thoughtfully to these conversations.   That could be in either comments, or posts, and with email.

• Use the Blog Reader!   As one of my tai chi teachers said to me "You Know It!  Why you no do it?"

Thanks Beth!