I highly recommend #intermissiontweets on a Friday night

The latest experience I’ve had like this went pretty well — I was sitting in the back row for David Mamet’s Oleanna along with nine other Twitterati. I didn’t get to meet everybody, but I did shake hands with the person next to me, and then tweeted to him and vice versa throughout the show. There wasn’t a moderator at this show (see below) and although I tried to get some stimulating conversation going, it didn’t take off for this particular performance. It was still fun, but not the rich experience others have described the close connection of live tweeting can create. Let’s explore ways to maximize this technology and experience.

Invite a group of savvy Twitter stage people

In any tweet-seat event, you need some folks who are Twitter pros to help lead the conversation. It’s likely you know who some of these people are — you may be one yourself. But it’s important to have a couple of trusted folks in the mix along with new folks — don’t just send out an email to your list telling the regular public about your tweet-seats event without stacking the deck with a few trusted folks who are friendly to you and know what they are doing (and can pitch in as Twitter ambassadors if the need presents itself). Participants should be told to get there 15 minutes before the house opens so that they can have at least 5 minutes of real handshakes and introductions (ideal for the folks who will be there 10 minutes late). Remind everyone that each tweet is a mini-critique. I tell folks to be specific about compliments but general about dislikes.

Secure the theater back row

This one is probably obvious. You need to stick folks in the back row so that the light from their screens doesn’t bother the rest of the audience. If your theater is general admission, you’ll need to secure these seats in advance with a card or tape or something so non-twitter folks looking for an easy escape from your theater don’t steal the spots. If done right, the rest of the audience will have no clue that there are active phones in the audience.

Silence the phones, dim the screens

Remind your cadre that they need to dim their screens to the lowest setting, silence their ringtones, and shut off their vibration alerts (we all know we can hear that in a quiet stage scene too.) Either tell folks to do it when they come in, tell them in the curtain speech, or of course tweet it with your #hashtag so that everyone can see it.

Have a tweet-seat moderator/facilitator

This may be the most important point. Somebody, somewhere, needs to be acting as a moderator, a facilitator, and/or a voice of calm reason. This person should be tweeting the whole time along with everybody else, but should be focusing on facilitating interesting discussion, asking questions about the plot or the character or the symbolism or the time period, or what it would feel like to be in that characters shoes in that time period, etc. They offer a catalyst to steer the conversation into intellectual areas. And they answer questions and support the overall experience. You need this. The person doesn’t have to be sitting in the audience too (I’ve seen the stage manager act in this role, or you could be doing it from home). But if you don’t have this, the conversation degenerates into class clowning, show-off tweets that cheapen the whole experience. Let me be clear that 1) you can’t control this sort of behavior and 2) the fact that Twitter is freeform is part of the experience. But you CAN provide the alternative of a stimulating extended-arts experience that makes clowning around the side feature and not the main show.

“Today, the back of the theater is on Twitter” — tell the crowd

You don’t want someone with a special chip on his or her shoulder approaching your Tweet-seaters and barking “Turn your damn phone off!” You should let your audience know that there are people in the back who have special permission to be there and to do that. Point out that they are back there as an experiment, take some credit and mention what a cutting-edge theatre company you are, and remind folks that they are back there so everybody else won’t be bothered. Point out that only folks in the back can use their smartphones, but that if people want to join in on the tweet seats experiment next time, to sign up outside at the concessions table or wherever, etc. With this knowledge in place, I’ve never seen a problem between the traditionalists and the new media camps in the venue.

Let me know if you have any specific questions and good luck — this can be really fun.With these systems in place, you’ll be able to truly test out a live-tweet theatrical event, and minimize stepping on anybody’s real (or virtual) toes.

-Ron

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email orRSS to receive future updates. Ron Evans is an arts marketing and consumer psychology researcher, and principal consultant atGroupofminds.com Arts Marketing Consultants in Sunnyvale, CA, USA. He helps arts audiences increase their understanding, appreciation, and frequency of attendance through innovative uses of technology.

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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 to fully get on the bus, which I measure by the action of them uploading an image of themselves. That action is sort of “staking a claim” on your own little corner of Twitter, and letting everybody know you’re ready to play.

Twitter use by all arts organizations?

So, if you’re ok with making the jump to roughly apply the above data to all arts organizations, Twitter campaigns currently reach about 5% of your existing audiences who are active Twitter users. That’s pretty low currently, but it’s growing rapidly, and you should participate and continue to help it grow, as more and more focus is moving towards up-to-the-minute feedback and reviews after a performance for example.  Also, the ability to acquire new Twitter followers through friends of current followers IS a powerful reason to keep using Twitter, along with the generally younger audience base that comes with Twitter. But it is important to remember that “recently new” communication tools like email marketing are still the workhorses of arts marketing, reaching a much higher percentage of your arts patrons, so you definitely don’t want to slack on the “tried and true.”

I’m sure the above stats are changing as time marches on. Those 5% that are just experimenting right now may jump on board, and new folks will take their place experimenting. In a year, I expect more than 10% of arts audiences to be “actively” using Twitter (with their image uploaded) and a new 10% will be in the experimentation stage. We’re planning to repeat the same experiment in a year with these five clients, to see how the numbers changed. If you have any stats of your own on Twitter saturation in your arts audiences, please leave a comment and let us know. Also, groupofminds is on Twitter, so if you’re not currently a follower and would like to see more of the in-the-moment posts, please follow us.

Ron

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