Groupofminds Arts Marketing + Technology Consultants

Thanking their patrons

I’ve been keeping my eye out to the way some of my favorite brands have been changing their messaging recently. Things of course are getting more filtered and specific to me, which is great, but a few companies are really standing out with messaging that is designed to make me feel good or take action. Take this screenshot from a recent email I received after flying with Southwest Airlines:

Nice Southwest! You didn't ask me for $!

Nice! They didn’t try to sell me another ticket right away. They are inviting me to write about my experience, but that doesn’t cost me anything but my time, and at the moment, I’m feeling pretty good about Southwest Airlines (and they just thanked me, so that might add to my decision to

write something good about them). Even though I may not choose to write anything in their travel guide, the thank you is nice and stands on its own.

Can the arts learn messaging tactics from Ebay?

Next up: Ebay. I recently purchased a piece of artwork on Ebay, and Ebay sent me this email message in an effort to get me to leave feedback for the seller of the item:

Read more…

Get your logins. Store them safely. Celebrate!

Reading time: 10 minutes

Every day is a holiday to somebody. What’s one more to add to the list? Let me give you a little background.

Often, I work with clients who have previously had a volunteer run some important part of their arts marketing arsenal — usually their website, or their email marketing. In many cases, the volunteer is a friend or family member connected to a board member, and the organization is drawn to the promise of free technical help. “My brother is a web developer; let me see if I can talk him into running our website for us!”

The concept of free service

The concept of free service because of a good connection is incredibly attractive to some arts groups where money is especially tight. And sometimes it works out really well for a long time. But it can also easily lead to disaster.

When the board member leaves the board, often the strength of the volunteer connection leaves too. Oh, that free web developer can stick around for awhile, but in many cases the response time to get something updated gets longer and longer. Finally it starts to damage the organization’s ability to manipulate their own marketing information, such as being able to update the website, send out the email, etc. And in the worst cases, your volunteer website updater just disappears into thin air, taking your logins and passwords with them. That’s bad. But it is not as rare as you might think — I’ve now worked with four clients who have had it happen to them. The most recent two needed to register totally new domain names and set up brand new websites at considerable expense, because they couldn’t get access from their previous web developer. Read more…

Only follow folks who post content you're interested in.

I usually write from the perspective of helping arts organizations in a promotional aspect, and I wanted to change lanes for a moment and talk about Twitter use by arts administrators as individuals who may be struggling with “why.”

“Why do I want to use Twitter?”

“What’s the point of knowing what somebody had for lunch? I really don’t care.”

“I followed everybody and now I can’t handle all the tweets.” (Or “twits,” perhaps if you’re referring the the people who tweet stupid things.)

To help answer these questions and more, I’m going to tell you a bit about how I use Twitter. Now, I’m coming from the perspective of using Twitter as a professional and artistic resource, not just another place to gab. More on that below.

1. Use Twitter as a human filter.

Many of you are I’m sure aware of Google Alerts, which is a service by Google that will deliver content via email to you, based on the keywords you select. I use Google Alerts to bring me all sorts of information. As an example, Google sends me alerts based on the keyword “Arts Marketing.” Most of the time, what is sent to me as something to do with the arts. But sometimes, Google does its best and sends me webpages about “Martial Arts Read more…

Reading time: 10 minutes

(Author’s note: this is an unreleased post from February 2009, which I’ve recently updated due to Zoomerang making some good changes to their website [good job Zoomerang!]. The process is a good exploration of user interface design consultations we do).

Do you have an easy-to-navigate arts website?

What information can we glean for our arts websites from the homepages of commercial companies? Turns out, quite a bit. Let’s look at online survey providers Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples. It’s a no-brainer that your website should be easy to navigate. People should be able to find the information they need, with a minimum number of clicks, and there should be as few things to steal my attention away as possible. No annoying ads (are you really making any money with google ads on your site? If not, take them down), no “website hosted by” badges, etc. Just the facts about your organization ma’am. But as I’ll show you in this article using Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples, we need to go deeper to make sure we’re displaying what are patrons are looking for right away.

I needed to do some research on online survey capabilities for one of our clients, an ethnic dance festival. I know that Zoomerang and Survey Monkey are the Coke and Pepsi of the online survey world, and for this round, I just needed to know:

• How much does using the service cost  for how long
• Does the service offer secure, encrypted surveys via SSL (https:// style), and how much was that in addition to the regular cost.

Pretty simple laundry list. Before I go into this article in detail, just a note to say that I have no real affiliation with either Zoomerang or Survey Read more…

We estimate roughly 10% of your arts audience is playing around with Twitter.

By now, you know about Twitter. You can’t avoid it — the mainstream media has picked up the love affair and is spreading the Twitter love far and wide. I recently did a bit of analysis on the Twitter account saturation in the email subscribers a few of our clients, and the results were intriguing.

I scanned the email address databases of five of my arts clients, looking for people who were in their email database, who also had a Twitter account. The five arts organizations were a variety of genres and budget sizes from small to large, so it was interesting to see the same statistics across the board.

Twitter statistics

• 10% of the email subscribers had a Twitter account associated with their email address.
• Roughly 1/2 of those patrons with Twitter accounts had not uploaded a picture to use as their Twitter avatar.

I interpret the latter to mean that those people who have not uploaded a picture are still in the “sampling Twitter” phase — just logging in and “lurking” around trying to figure it all out. That’s actually good — we want our audiences to be playing with the new tools. But I don’t count these folks as being “power players” yet, as they probably won’t be following a lot of people or participating to any great degree until they decide if they want Read more…

A revenue stream for Facebook -- a benefit for arts organizations!

When Facebook first launched, many people were confused about the two options available for featuring arts organizations: Facebook Groups vs. Facebook Pages. (I need to stop for a moment and mention that Facebook needs to work out a different name for “Facebook Pages” — isn’t every page on Facebook a Facebook page? Most people commonly refer to Facebook Pages as “fan pages” now, but Facebook has yet to officially update their documentation to reflect this. But I digress.)

In the beginning, there were Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. Groups offered the very special ability for the arts organization to directly connect with members of the group via a sort of intra-Facebook email system. So you could (and still can) use this tool to send a message that will arrive in the person’s “Facebook email” inbox. Fan pages offered a messaging system called an “update” that would allow you to send a message to all of your fans, but sadly the message would go to place in the user’s profile that most people never check. I’ve known folks to say “Yes, I became a fan, but I never hear from them” only to discover that their fan update inbox was filled with notes they had never seen. Given the checks and balances between the two options, Facebook Groups used to be the better way to go.

About three months ago, Facebook made a very significant change to the way fan pages function, making them much more powerful…

The change allowed Facebook fan pages to post to the individual fan’s newsfeed — that long, scrolling tickertape of never-ending message Read more…

Freedom from annoying audience members looks like this in France.

The French are known for many things… their appreciation of great food and wine, their love of art and culture, and now, by me, for their valiant belief that concert halls, movie theaters, and other public performance spaces should be free of that person next to you jabbering into his/her cell phone. Thanks to mobile phone jamming devices, you can actually hear the music without patron accompaniment.

Cell-phone jammers

We’ve all be sitting in the audience in the middle of a brilliant monologue, deeply in the moment, when someone’s ring tone starts chirping. It gets louder as the person digs it out of their pocket/bag, and hopefully shuts off. (Even worse, I saw an audience person answer it and carry on a conversation until the people in front of him got up, turned around, and shhhhhed him). Enter the cell-phone jammer.

A cell phone jammer is a (usually) small, hand-held device that transmits white noise on the same radio frequencies that cell phones use, thus scrambling their signal to the cell tower and rendering them useless. Usually they have a range of about 30 feet, and all cellular communications are interrupted within that radius with a simple flip of a switch. It sounds like the perfect form of revenge. Somebody being annoying on their phone? Hit the switch in your pocket and their line is dead. A larger version could blanket a concert hall with blissful silence during performances. Which is why the French jumped on the idea and in December of 2004, legalized cell-phone jammers in movie theaters, concert halls, and other Read more…

Only accept credit cards in a secure way, to protect your patron's information

I’d be hard pressed to find a member of an arts organization who doesn’t believe in the power of providing the option to sell tickets online. It gives many people a way to serve themselves (thus reducing your manpower needed at the box office to answer the phone), offers the patron the peace of mind of knowing that the ticket has been purchased, and usually offers additional benefits such as seeing your seat location, and being able to buy a ticket any night or day.

Some groups I know have chaffed at the additional credit card processing fees, merchant account fees, or ticketing vendor fees of using a real ticketing system, and opted instead to collect credit card information online via a form, through an email, or into an unsecure database. Yes, you avoid additional fees that way, but is the cost of potentially exposing your patron’s credit card and identity information to hackers and thieves worth it? I don’t think so — and one lawsuit from an angry patron would seal the deal.

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Beware the big email image

So if you’ve been here for a little while, you’ll know that the folks at GroupofMinds are big supporters of arts groups using email. I think it’s one of the most effective, efficient, and low-cost ways of getting your message out. I’ve blogged before about some things groups should avoid doing with email, and just recently, a couple of messages popped into my inbox that could use some improvement. Consider this screenshot of an email ad I received from the San Jose Mercury News:

An ad from the San Jose Mercury News (click to enlarge)

What’s missing here? Read more…

Markets are down, raise your marketing up!

Difficult economic times call for different ways of thinking about marketing. From arts organizations looking to fill a seat, to restaurant managers trying to sell a dinner, the issue is the same: how to keep patrons coming in and participating with your organization.

In many cases, an organization’s first response to needing to save money in a down economy is to cut costs, and often times the first budget to go is marketing. But when you stop to think about it, marketing is one of the only direct expense-to-income streams you have. Marketing is a revenue generator, not simply an expense, so your organization should be budgeting to market MORE in a down economy, and to market smartly as much as possible. Let’s talk about some easy ways to do this with a goal of not raising expenses or reducing revenues. Read more…