Comments on: Across the twitterverse

By: Megan Mooney

Megan Mooney — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:17:25 +0000

I know I’m late to the game on this one (long boring story) but… I’m curious about the statement “Many people took this chat as an opportunity to express some frustrations with Twitter and Twitter users in general. There was commiseration over accounts used only for self-promotion, or retweeting everyone else’s content without adding anything to the conversation,” since this is something I think about a lot.

Anyone who follows me on twitter knows that a huge percentage of my tweets are retweets of theatre-related stuff from across Canada. When a conversation piques my interest I join in (I’d have been all over the #auddev but for, well, the long story I wasn’t going to bore you with earlier) but the lion’s share of what I put out there are things that catch my eye about Canadian theatre.

For instance, I re-tweeted things about this round-up of the #auddev talk, and I think I may have even managed to retweet a thing saying it was going to happen.

I often wonder if that make my feed boring, but then if I haven’t been tweeting for a while I get notes from people asking where I am. Or, for instance, some arts council was asking for help on something at some point and I retweeted it. The next day I got an email from them to say thank you very much, and that 3 different people came forward to offer help citing my retweet as what had let them know the council needed the assistance.

That said, if there were others retweeting everything they saw about theatre in Canada that seemed interesting, I’d probably back way off on my retweeting, because once you have multiple people retweeting everything their feeds look identical and there isn’t a point to it.

Oh. Look. I think I managed to just ramble without adding any particular commentary or asking any specific question. Cool. That’s skill that is…

By: rlaronde

rlaronde — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 23:46:48 +0000

I’m in San Francisco this week and was just reading this: (http://blogs.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2011/03/new_play_wirehead_actually_wan.php). Apparently the SF Playhouse has a “quarantine” section for people who want to tweet during the show, which is kinda neat. Now, I think I’d be the sort of person waaaay too distracted by the world of cyberspace to engage adequately with the world of the play, but on the other hand I’d be interested in any piece that would allow me to participate directly in the performance of piece onstage by tweeting from the audience and having the performers react to that input. There’s the danger of it being gimmicky, of course, but beyond that it might make for an interesting theatrical experience.

In regards to audience development and marketing via the twitterverse… well… it sometimes seems like a bit of a circle jerk. Cross promotion is great and all, but the relentless “Congrats on your dress rehearsal/opening/good review/run/closing” from one theatre company to another can be a bit annoying. I’d rather the web and social media be used for actual discussion (thanks Praxis!) than just mindless promotion. Maybe twitter and SM can be used to to provide the audience with the sort of contextual materials we expect in the program. At least that way we’d have a chance to read it leisurely before the lights go down.

By: Laura Hagglund

Laura Hagglund — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 18:40:18 +0000

Regarding “How to handle staffing”. A position concerned with Audience Development, our “under 30” ticketing program, and social media was created which is responsible for Twitter and other Marketing duties. I try to check in about 3x a day for 10 minutes or less, but I can’t always get to it. It’s hard to stay on top of the stream when you’re also juggling other responsibilities, but that’s how it’s handled here.

By: Nick May

Nick May — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:56:27 +0000

Loved taking part in this conversation. Social Media is a great way to encourage audience development, and I look forward to seeing it grow more in the upcoming months.