onlineuniversalwork

I think there’s great value in referring back to Simon’s metaphor of the theatrosphere as a ongoing cocktail party. Right now there are a growing number of people who’ve heard there’s a cocktail party going on. “Some cool people are there,” they think, “and cocktail parties seem like a really good idea. But I have to be up early in the morning, and I’m really not sure what I want to get OUT of the cocktail party, so maybe this isn’t the right time. It’s not the kind of cocktail party I like, anyway — the music is loud, and let’s be honest: I prefer the kind of party where everyone is sitting politely in the dark with their cell-phones off watching important people play charades and reflecting on how awesome the experience is. Besides, I think it’s really important that we have a vision for what OUR Cocktail Party Experience should be before we go rushing off to just any old party. Is this party using industry-proven Best Party Practices? Because unless I can prove to my friends that I met at least Six Valuable People, which is a Clearly-Defined Goal for my Planned Party-Going Experience, the whole thing will be a waste of my time! And if I DO go, we’ll have to have a Party Post-Mortem tomorrow to figure out if the party was a good idea, and whether or not we should go to the next one.” Well… in the meantime, the party’s going on without those people. And the people AT the party are meeting other people, sometimes connecting and MANY times not connecting. Success ISN’T guaranteed — life sucks that way — but you have to be present, at least, to get any benefit.

So COME ON, people. Just put on a clean shirt and GO TO THE PARTY. Leave yourself open to who you might meet and what you might talk about once you’re there. You can test the waters by DOING, or you can plan too much, and miss the party altogether. I don’t care how much I get teased for it: snapping a quick pic and tweeting a caption only takes a few seconds, and costs nothing. MAYBE nobody will like it. Maybe everybody will. I may be sick of rehearsing Scene Four for 30 hours, but to somebody who never rehearses anything (read: someone who normally doesn’t ATTEND THEATRE), this could be cool and interesting stuff they’ve never heard before. Or maybe the ONE person who has a wig fitting fetish and loves my twitpic is also a patron, or a media person, or a philanthropist, or a historian, or a playwright, and that person responds, which starts a relationship that can bear an infinite variety of fruit over time.

ARTISTS, I firmly believe, need to start looking at this stuff with the same level of priority they give to things like keeping their resume up-to-date and keeping on top of audition postings and agent relationships. It’s a critical part of the business and, Manda, your job will get EASIER once you have artists around you who come to YOU and say “how can I help?”. Right now, the average theatre artists’ response to technology like this is like the marketing director asking for cast headshots and hearing “oh, I don’t HAVE one of those. Is that important?” in response.

And I want to talk about the issue with permissions, as well, because it is a constant source of frustration for me. We live in a world where average, normal people are using these tools ALL THE TIME: my neighbours have their own channel on YouTube. My buddy updates his Flickr stream constantly. Some kid at MIT has a Twitter account for his FLOWER GARDEN. Students half my age are shooting great-looking and creative videos, using their iPhones, on their weekends. And WE have a bunch of guilds and unions — everyone from Equity to ACTRA to IATSE — reacting in varying degrees with the same kind of outdated, protectionist claptrap that is killing the traditional broadcast and recording industries. They are (back to the metaphor) standing OUTSIDE the cocktail party, peeking in the window between bouts of navel-gazing, fretting about how going to the party will affect their income and the livelihood of old codgers who never liked parties in the first place. The problem definitely lies in their court, but folks who are making headway in this area need to throw that window open, show them the air is fertile rather than toxic, and invite them in.

Sometimes — I’ll freely admit it — I break the rules ON PURPOSE, just to prove that nobody has to go on the dole because I shot a 30-second clip of a lit set. In fact, these things sell tickets; they raise the profile of the work; they connect artists to one another. Hell, sometimes they do NONE of those things — but they DON’T HURT and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.

One final point, on inundation. Some people get DO annoyed by all the email and Facebook messages. And at that cocktail party — as Simon said — some folks are gentle and wise, and some are obnoxious and crass. There is work to be done in matching content to the right tool, and in terms of style and etiquette, but this comes with learning and experimentation — we can all participate here and learn together. In the early days of the web and email, people did all sorts of silly things, but we learn by doing and by sharing with other people who are doing. For example, I can tweet a pic of a wig fitting, but I dare not spend three hours writing a blog post about it, or an evening editing a video of a wig being put on my head. And NOBODY wants an email newsletter with “SEE A PIC OF MY WIG FITTING!” as a headline.

Some media — like email — is serial: people are expected to read every piece they get. Other media — like Twitter — is parallel: it’s like having 200 channels on my TV; I’m NEVER going to sit down and watch everything that was broadcast on every channel, but my friends tell me what shows they like, and once in a while I get told about something cool that I then choose to track down. Trepidation about getting into some forms of new media is sometimes a belief that the new thing is serial (like THEATRE — the thing we KNOW — AHA!), rather than parallel (the thing we’re afraid of).

You nailed a few really important points: There is the issue of that damn permissions that we are told are so necessary and so vague (much of which is rooted in the fear of new media I think), and I’m huge fan of the idea of identifying content, rather than thinking of our ourselves as having to go out and create it. The content is right in front of us.

But in the middle of six other fittings and needing to have lunch and a production meeting before running off to the preview of another show or an audition, or whatever one of the dozen balls that many artists and arts workers have to keep in the air in order to making a decent living… I think it’s fair to seriously ask yourself: Who wants to see my wig fitting? Is there enough of audience to warrant this investment of time? What is the method of sharing it and how do I attract the audience I think I have? I’m all for trying something and seeing what sticks, but in a situation short on money and people, I think you have to make some choices up front as well. That is why I ask how do your tools and your content serve your goals.

There is no point in just broadcasting, and broadcasting can be a set rendering as easily as it can be a dull old press release. People are getting fatigued, and they have more ways each day to ignore you.

It’s not the doing that takes the largest chunk of the time, it’s the thinking about how to do this in a purposeful and effective way.

I’m not going to argue for a second against engaged artists taking the lead on this. That would be fantastic and a really interesting departure from the the what does seem to be the common approach. The largest hurdle for me is that the vast majority of our artists are one with the organization for a limited period of very tightly scheduled time. Individuals, or theaters with resident companies, might have any easier time making their artists direct engagement with the ‘net a consistent and expected thing.

I can’t agree that there is an intrinsic problem with a staff person taking this on: You hire a graphic designer, you probably hire someone to build a website, you might even hire a publicist or a telemarketer, you might hire someone who does a large chunk of your grant writing… An arts organization or an individual artist may hire a lot of different people who are responsive and responsible to the artist and the work, and whose job is to help to craft messages for the desired purpose, and then “package … in a way that’s “engaging” and then send it out”. There is nothing magical or silo-esque about any of that. It’s hard damn work and requires constant dialogue.

Obviously I have a rather narrow perspective on this. As I mentioned in my first post, this is my first job post-graduation and this job is evolving, a lot. I wont hold myself up as someone who does this really well, but I will advocate, regardless of who does it, they better be very serious about doing it well and consistently, or else they are definitely be spinning their wheels.

Aside from my general thoughts on the Canadian theatre (and world theatre) fear of new media, I am particularly galvanized by this discussion’s slant towards the notion that blogs and Twitter require immense amounts of work. And I find it so typically Canadian that the response to this has been — for many “larger” theatres — to create STAFF positions to address the problem. So you’ve got some person in the office who’s paid to blog and tweet and manage a fan page, but that person is not an engaged artist working with the company, so that person has to find out what the engaged artists are doing and then package that in a way that’s “engaging” and then send it out. The notion is so odd — creating a staff position to handle new media is actually an exercise in spinning wheels. No wonder nobody gets traction.

I think the engagement of theatre arts with the ‘net has to come from the ground: the designers, crew, actors, directors, and playwrights working directly on material. If I have PERMISSION from the relevant guilds and unions (and there’s ANOTHER bear of an issue) all I have to do is carry an iPhone in my pocket and I can shoot footage of my wig fitting and snap pics of my set being built and record clips of rehearsal and BINGO — the content creates itself.

I’m not saying it doesn’t take work — but the notion of building a silo in the theatre building from within which this work must emanate somehow — magically — is mind-boggling to me. Theatre companies are RIGHT not to want to do it that way.

I am being paid to be on Facebook. To understand how to advertise there, how to run a Fan Page, how to engage (and when not too), how, when and what to post. I’m paid to help maintain the e-mail database, and to determine who to contact, how and why, and on top of all that, I’m paid to read blogs like this. Learning what other people are doing and using, and what they think of those tools and techniques is part of my job.

This isn’t necessarily the job I was hired to do, but it’s what my job has become, partly because of my own skill set, but mostly because I have the good fortune to be involved with a company that is willing to explore social media and online content in a thoughtful and deliberate way.

There is a lot that Tarragon (meaning the whole team here) don’t do. We don’t blog. We aren’t on Twitter. We are only very recently begun creating a YouTube presence.

We don’t blog (and we aren’t on Twitter) because of the very reason you mentioned: I want to engage, not broadcast. We aren’t willing to commit as an organization to putting in the resources to blog effectively, and I agree with that choice. I’m one of the main advocates of us not having blog at the moment! I’ll spare you my exhaustive thoughts on Twitter: I just don’t think it’s an efficient tool for us.

Would I like to do more? Yes! Am I happy with what we’ve achieved with the limited money and time we’ve got? Definitely, I think we’ve made some good choices. Will I continue to troll all sorts of blogs, Twitter accounts, Fan Pages and other sites to discover new tools and justifications for my time spent on social media? Absolutely.

There is so much I could address in the earlier posts, but before I succumb to all the fascinating questions I’ve not answered and the brilliant tangents that are possible, I wanted to address your final question, since it’s certainly extremely relevant to business of creating theatre: What is the return on investment?

I think we need to recognize that the investment made and the objective of blogs and other social media will be, and probably should be, different for every company, every one-off production and every individual creator. Our mandates are different and we have different goals which will determine which of the plethora of tools we use, and also, how we determine and measure the ROI.

I cannot turn to you and say that every $1 of time and money I invest in Tarragon’s presence on Facebook returns X amount of dollars (Yet! On a show-by-show basis, I actually can make some sensible estimates). I have several gauges and several different goals I keep in mind when I track online engagement with tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and YouTube statistics, as well as our own box office database. When I look at these in the context of our mandate and our goals, I think we are making progress in the right direction.

Obviously, you can’t measure your ROI until you know what goals you have for that investment. As non-profits or ‘social profits’ some of what we do will not be strictly tied to the bottom line, but tied instead to what we seek to provide to the community we serve.

So my questions for any company or creator that isn’t currently investing in social media or their online presence in a serious way are these:
What goals do you have which can be served by social media?
Which tools will be an effective and economic way to serve those goals?