Rebecca Krause-Hardie

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

2009-11-03T12:24:48-05:00

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

Please help The Sharing Foundation Leverage $10 into $1000

2009-10-28T23:46:09-04:00

Please help The Sharing Foundation win the $1,000 Daily Giving Challenge prize by donating on Thursday 10/29/09. The organization with the most unique daily donors wins. Please donate $10 minimum beginning 3pm Thursday till 2:59pm Friday.

Click here to donate.

What are we donating for?

Meet Seiha, Sarem, Ratha, Darien, Makara, Sokret, Sowat and Naveth!

These are TSF's first college grads! Eight years ago, Seiha, Sarem, Ratha, Darien, Makara, Sokret, Sowat and Naveth would have said that graduating from college was impossible. Thanks to TSF scholarships to Universities in Phnom Penh, on top of their four previous of sponsored high school, they make a better live for themselves and their families. These young people are the sons and daughters of farmers, not one of whom had a parent or relative who had graduated from high school!

The Sharing Foundation supported each of them.... and that's only the beginning. Here's a great video that really helps us to get a really powerful sense of the success of TSF and impact on people's lives!

I've tagged a few people whose contributions last year made this possible. Thanks!

A Social Media Conversation with Rebecca Coleman

2009-10-23T12:28:08-04:00

A couple of weeks ago Rebecca Coleman and I met on Skype. We had a great conversation discovering lots of common interests. Here's a short interview with Rebecca:

What do you do?

I am a freelance theatre publicist in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I work primarily for independent theatre companies. My job, essentially, is to get my clients editorial coverage in the local newspapers, radio and television. More and more over the past year, that list is growing to include blogs and leveraging social media to get the word out.

What are you most passionate about? What really gets you going?

I love the arts, and theatre is my greatest passion. I’ve done it all when it comes to theatre, and acting is my greatest love, but I’m on a hiatus right now while I raise my young son.

For many years now, I’ve been helping artists to become better business people. It started many years ago when I facilitated a self-employment program for artists, and continues to this day. The business of being an artist is the topic of my blog, The Art of the Business.

Do you find the same questions or issues coming up with most clients? (if so, what are they?)

“Can I sell out my show if I get on Twitter?”
“If we are on Facebook, what percentage will it drive up our sales?”

I feel like there is a gross misunderstanding out there about social media. It can be a very powerful marketing tool. But you can’t just jump on Twitter and expect that you’ll sell out overnight. It doesn’t work that way: the machine needs time to get up and running.

On a deeper level, social media is about interactivity, and I think a lot of people are still stuck in the mentality that they will lose their privacy, or it will take over their lives, or it’s just about people talking about the boring minutiae of their lives. But if you do it right, and you manage it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with your potential clientele or new collaborators.

What do you think is the biggest obstacle for you and for your clients?
(Well lets leave money and time out for the moment....)

Ha! I was going to say time and money!

The biggest obstacle for my clients right now is the fact that traditional forms of media are suffering right now. One year ago, we had 6 theatre reviewers in Vancouver. We now have two. A smaller newspaper recently told me their arts section was cut. And I am hearing that story so much—less space for the arts. It’s very challenging. I am turning increasingly to non-traditional forms of media: blogs and social media.

Can you tell me a story about working with a particular client where you or they had a real ‘a ha’ moment?

If you don’t mind, I’d like to use a personal example.

I have done publicity for our local Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliances’ World Theatre Day Celebrations for the past two years. World Theatre Day is an international event that takes place on March 27 every year. Last year, I got to thinking, what if we made it a truly international celebration? So I created a blog, and assembled a team of international theatre artists (none of whom I have met in person to this day) that I had met through Twitter. We were able to spread the word and raise awareness about WTD and created events in places that had never celebrated WTD before. It was awesome.

What was your learning from that?

Social Networking is a very powerful tool for collaborating, spreading the word, and mobilizing the troops.

Thanks Rebecca Coleman!

Social Media 2020 Visions

2009-10-10T21:59:48-04:00

What’s the future of Social Media?

Today, I think of social media as a conversation I have; I begin by scanning, sorting through, listening to the buzz, and reflecting -before joining in - at least that’s current etiquette.

For example, I discovered that Beth Kanter just did a great post on the future of social media. (She’s prepping for a keynote presentation) Her post inspired me to pull together some of the elements that have been bubbling up for me as “core mission critical” in our consulting practice.

Creating the Future (both content and value by acting with Intention)
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about acting intentionality (individually and institutionally). How much of what we do is intentional vs. reacting to what’s right in front of us. We have to do both, but I find I’m leaning a bit more toward intentionality.

When I’m simply reacting to what’s in front, is there room for deeper thinking? If I focus only on what’s in front of me, because I am hesitant and caught up in a loop of reacting, not thinking through, I am forced to react to a poorly thought through decision.

There is a tension here – It reminds me of the BHAG’s (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) that Jim Collins speaks of in Good to Great: Don’t walk timidly into the future, go forth with big passion. Think really big, think it through - and go for it.

So, why don’t we do that (both as individuals and institutions)?
What are the obstacles?
Are we unable to connect to our passion?
Is it that we don’t know what to do next?
Are we too bogged down looking at the gravel at our feet, rather than raising our eyes and looking at the mountain we are climbing?
What are we afraid of?

Dealing With Fear (How we Decide)
I was listening to How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer - fantastic stuff! When we are afraid, there is actually a powerful chemical reaction in our brain that warns us – that takes over, that is 10 times as strong as a positive feeling, When we buy-into fear, we may be using the wrong part of our brain to do good problem solving. Who is in charge here? Good question – is it my emotional self or my rational self. If I’m in charge, I can choose what’s appropriate. When fear is the driver, creating our individual and institutional future is a bit like jumping into the abyss. So, we need to take on the future in clear focused bite sized pieces. What is the one small thing I can do today where I can confront my fear and just sit with it a bit? And take the next step – eyes up!

Question: What other ways do you get beyond?

Getting lost in the Waves (who controls the ocean?)

“There is already too much content on the web now, I can’t handle it or navigate it.” And it’s only going to grow worse, exponentially. How do I find stuff?

(Apparently there isn’t enough content out there for the ego’s that need to be heard - that are driving it. like me)

So how much content does each of us need? (Who are us?)
How much content does each us of need to create both individually and institutionally? How do we find the stuff we need, and discard the rest?
How do we ensure that folks find that content that I/we create, that they need?
How do we continue to have these ever expanding global multi-media high bandwidth conversations and transactions?
Where do we put it all?
Who owns it?

Do we assume that the internet, like the planet Earth will continue to have unlimited food to feed all of all of us on dwindling farms, expanding populations and mega cities. How about everybody else – the millions here in the US and the billions and billions who don’t have electricity, water, health, education, jobs, nutrition – let alone technology? How do we bridge the digital divide – the great technology abyss - and more importantly the digital informational content abyss across the globe?

Who controls and manages all this content that is washing over us like huge waves in the ocean? Is that Google? Big money? Government(s)? How do we deal with hundreds of countries, cultures, native languages, translations, storage, high speed open, throttled or censored access - or no access at all – for me and for our institutions? These are going to be the driving questions - that will determine our relevancy.

Here’s two little baby thoughts about the sorting part...

Tags and Keywords
The Steve project describes how tags can be used to describe objects in museums. (See my post here and here) Arts groups would invite tagging of all content elements and with two different kinds of tags. One uses physical descriptors such as tiger, blue, Japanese, neo-classical, etc. The other involves emotional or feeling tags, - how does this make me feel, or what does it feel like, i.e. something that helps us to bring a deeper level of meaning to it, at the feeling level. Then, couple that with ratings, comments, ratings of raters, etc. This becomes a really interesting cognitive mapping conversation.

Personal Referrals
Reichhold talks about this in his thoughtful studies of Net Promoters. The person most passionate about something referring others is super powerful. Alan Brown was probably the first person to explore this deeply in his seminal Initiators and Responders research done in 2004. The point in all this research is that to be relevant and successful in the social media web porous silo-free new age, we have to connect with and support these net promoters/initiators through dialogue and relationships.

Cultivating this social media referral network helps to bring visibility to those gems that might otherwise remain hidden under the tides.

We Start Where We End (a circle has no beginning)

Who is in charge, individually, institutionally, nationally, globally? How do we have individual, institutional, regional, national, and global collaborative conversations about these issues – where the currency won't be money but information? How likely are these conversations to be more successful than global diplomacy? We have to be really thoughtful.

What are our respective stakeholders intentions? What parts of the brain are each of us going to listen to and act on individually, institutionally ….and across the globe?

Hmmm... lots of questions.

Question: What are your thoughts?

photo attribution: Clark Little

Arts Journalism Summit Friday 12-4 EST

2009-10-02T09:10:00-04:00

From Arts Journal:

"This Friday - October 2 from 9AM-1PM PDT - we're holding a first ever National Summit on Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. We're presenting ten projects in arts journalism from around America, and each we think has something to say about the future of how we cover the arts. It will be in the auditorium of the journalism school in front of an audience of 200, but it's primarily conceived of as a virtual online event. You can read more about it here."

Doug asked if others interested could host a feed for this. I've embedded it below. Hope I can tune in for some of it between teaching students Friday afternoon.

Here's the stream, for the summit happening on Friday on Arts Journalism.