Off for the holidays...

I am heading back to Missouri for the holidays. I am spending a week on the family farm which doesn't have cable, internet or cell phone services. So, no blogging for the next week. However, I am bringing Joanne Scheff Bernstein's new book "Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences" with me. ArtsMarketing.org has asked me to write a review of the book. So when I return I will share my thoughts on the book with you. Have a great holiday season!

Time Magazine's Person of the Year

You are Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. You were chosen over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong Il and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Congratulations.

Check out the entire article from CNN here.

I know that I have been focusing on less traditional, viral marketing applications lately. So, my next post will be some advise on direct mail marketing. I am studying several large direct mail campaigns for Americans for the Arts, and I what I am learning, I will share with you. Hope everyone is doing well.

If your marketing isn't working in real life, try second life...

A colleague I work with forwarded this onto me from Andrew Taylor's Arts Management blog:

A good prospect for a (virtual) board member, perhaps...

Anshe Chung has all the elements of a good prospect for your nonprofit board -- she's a millionaire, a real estate mogul, and an innovative entrepreneur with an eye for design and aesthetic value. While it's true that she's not technically a real person, but an avatar...an on-line character in the virtual world of Second Life...her influence, and her money, is real.

<>Chung is the construct of a Chinese-born language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany, who has been developing virtual real estate in virtual worlds for a while now. The practice is well established in multi-user on-line environments, where users can not only buy ''land'' but create and sell ''objects'' to other users. The difference with Second Life is that the virtual currency used in the on-line universe is convertible to U.S. dollars (at about 250 to 1).

Chung amassed her millions by buying up islands and exclusive areas of the Second Life universe, developing them with mansions, landscapes, and other such virtual amenities, and imposing strict zoning rules to keep the riff-raff out and the paying customers in. The CEO of the company that produces Second Life describes Chung as ''the government'' for her sequestered islands and continents (more details in this Wikipedia entry, and this Business Week article).
Strange and brain-bending stuff, to be sure. But a glimpse, perhaps, into the multiple worlds -- on-line and off-line -- where creative individuals and entrepreneurs will be creating their work. And if you think this doesn't apply to the lively arts, think again. The proposed New Globe Theater in New York already commissioned and opened a virtual version of the venue in Second Life. Says their overview of the effort (scroll down the page to the August 14 news item):
Since opening its doors, the New Globe has become the rock star of virtual destinations and the it-stage for cultural and intellectual exchange. In-world guest speakers on the stage have ranged from the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine to the Governor of Virginia. The opening performance featured actors from around the globe who had never met in person ... though time difference for rehearsals did prove a REAL problem!

The real governor of Virginia held a virtual town hall meeting in that virtual performing arts space back in August. Is the world weird enough for you yet?

SAVE THE DATE

National Arts Marketing Project Conference
News Announcing the theme for the 2007 Conference:
Flourishing in the New Frontier: New Media, New Audiences, New Opportunities
November 2-5, 2007Hyatt Regency Miami, FL

You asked for it, you got it! A survey of arts marketers showed you wanted a conference focusing on technology and new audiences. You’ll learn about new media from RSS to pod casts, from blogging to texting, and optimizing e-mail and e-commerce to reach every segment of the marketplace from Millennials to Boomers, and from first generation Hispanics to third generation Asians. But the conference won’t forget the basics. We’ll cover direct marketing, branding and relevant messaging as well. Watch for the Call for Session Proposals, coming soon! It’s the conference for arts marketers by arts marketers!

New Arts Marketing Book

Co-Author of Standing Room Only publishes new arts marketing book.

Arts Marketing Insights
The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences
by Joanne Scheff Bernstein

published by Jossey-Bass, an Imprint of Wiley, November 2006
Arts Marketing Insights offers managers, board members, professors, and students of arts management the ideas and information they need to market effectively and efficiently to customers today and into the future. Joanne Scheff Bernstein presents concepts and strategies that address the changing lifestyles, needs, interests, and preferences of current and potential audiences. She helps readers understand the mind-set of performing arts attenders and how to provide excellent customer service. She demonstrates that arts organizations can benefit by expanding the meaning of "valuable customer" to include single ticket buyers. She offers guidance on long-range marketing planning and explains how to leverage the Internet and e-mail as powerful marketing channels. Arts Marketing Insights is replete with vivid case studies and examples that illustrate the author's strategic principles in action from organizations large and small in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and other countries. This book combines the best of proven marketing wisdom with viable new ideas and approaches that arts marketers can adopt to help their organizations thrive while realizing their artistic missions.

Is an explanation needed?

I know that several people have contacted me with concerns about MySpace. So I took some time the other day to write this up. Hope it helps if you have to make the case to senior management:

As the baby boomer generation ages and heads toward retirement, Generation X has become the coveted new target market. Generation Xers do not respond well to traditional marketing and advertising mediums, and therefore those mediums have been losing market share during the past decade, including such staples as newspapers, radio, and television.

Generation Xers respond to marketing that can provide the following:
1. an interactive experience
2. exclusive content
3. on-demand timing

Traditional mediums, which previously did not provide these opportunities, are in the middle of a large paradigm shift. They understand the need to reach this target market and are shifting their priorities away from one-way communication vehicles to timely, interactive, on-demand vehicles. For example:

The American Broadcasting Channel (ABC) currently offers via its website (www.abc.com) interactive gaming, video on demand (including full-length episodes), blogs, behind-the-scenes information, mobile phone downloads, podcasting, instant messenger icons, and wallpapers. Current popular television shows, such as American Idol, even ask viewers to use their cell phones to “text message” their votes, allowing the viewer a real opportunity to decide the outcome of a particular episode.

The Washington Post currently offers via its website (www.washingtonpost.com) discussion and message boards, on-demand photos and video, podcasting and RSS feeds.

The online content of the two aforementioned companies are geared toward providing an interactive, on-demand experience that offers exclusive content that cannot be found in other locations.


The Case for MySpace

MySpace is an online social-networking site that is currently the most visited website in the United States, and one of the top ten visited sites on the entire Internet. MySpace continues to grow at an astonishing rate. The site had 17 million monthly visitors in July 2005, and currently boasts 54 million monthly visitors. MySpace features nearly 100 million personal profiles posted by users, many of whom are in their teens and twenties. Even more astonishing is that the average MySpace user spends two hours per visit on the site.

Advantages of using MySpace:
- MySpace offers a chance for companies to take their marketing into new, potentially more lucrative territory, by becoming, in effect, members of their customers’ network of “friends.”
- MySpace allows for a two-way interactive experience with a company’s brand. MySpace visitors can leave comments, send you a message, and rank your page.
- MySpace provides a means for distributing information that normally wouldn’t be found elsewhere, including blogs, vlogs, on-demand music/video, photos, podcasts, and bulletins.
- Return on investment: creating a MySpace page doesn’t cost a dime and allows you to access 100 million people.

The advantages of MySpace attract the Generation X market by providing an interactive, on-demand experience that offers exclusive content that cannot be found in other locations.

There is a concern that companies that use MySpace will alienate potential customers by being overtly commercial in an informal atmosphere. Kevin George, Marketing Executive a Unilever (see case studies below) addresses this concern with the following, “we need to be engaging with our customers, not banging them over the head with brandalism that pollutes their space. When you deliver 18- to 24-year-old guys content they want to engage with, they don’t mind if it comes from a brand.” John Deighton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, addressed the same concern in an interview for Harvard Business Journal (August 16, 2006) Deighton states:

An old rule of thumb in the advertising industry was “relevance and likeability.” If ads had both, no one seemed to feel manipulated when their sitcom was interrupted by a commercial message. That goes for MySpace commercial sites. Artic Monkeys, a Sheffield, England, post-punk revival band that is promoted from a MySpace site, is a case in point. The site is credited for their explosive global growth, yet the commercial exploitation of the social network is welcomed by fans. In true punk style the band claims no commercial motive. When asked in an interview with Prefix Magazine about the role of the MySpace site, they claimed that the site had originally been created by their fans.


Case Studies

Unilever
In 2006, Unilever, a consumer-goods giant, partnered with Christine Dole to promote Axe, a deodorant. Ms. Dolce, who goes by the alias ForBiddeN, boasts around 900,000 “friends” who link to her MySpace page. She was perfect to draw in the 18- to 24-year-old men to whom Axe is shamelessly marketed. Ms. Dolce hosted an interactive game, called “Gamekillers,” based around dating tips and designed to subtly to promote Axe. Some 75,000 MySpacers signed up for it. (The Economist, July 27, 2006)

Hyperactive Music Magazine
Since 2004, Hyperactive Music Magazine has used MySpace to connect with thousands—15,862 to date—of bands, readers, and anyone else interested in the publication. Hyperactive’s MySpace page plays music on a monthly basis from four unsigned bands that convince them in a 25-words-or-less essay that they should be featured. The publisher of Hyperactive says that she get hundreds of essays from bands looking to supply the tunes for Hyperactive’s page. They are looking to expand into music videos and live interviews in the future. (The Albuquerque Tribune, July 2, 2006)

Other Examples
Fox created a profile page for X-Men: The Last Stand. Disney ran a contest to place the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on the profile page of a MySpace member. Some of the most guarded brands in the nation are using MySpace, including Pepsi Cola, Procter & Gamble, State Farm Insurance, and the United States Marine Corps. Examples of large arts organizations that use MySpace include the Los Angeles Opera, Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, Washington National Opera, The Joffrey Ballet, Hartford Stage Company, Lincoln Center Festival, Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper Forum), UCLA Live, MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), and the Getty Museum of Art.

Engage your customers...

I am back just in time for Thanksgiving! I am starting to settle into my new job at the Americans for the Arts. I am sorry that I have been away for such a long period of time, however moving and starting a new job is kind of taxing. I have numerous posts that I am waiting to write, so keep tuned in.

I just finished reading the Wall Street Journal's article entitled Mark Kingdon: Using Social Sites as Dialogue To Engage Consumers, Brands. Check it out.

More to come--I promise!