It's just around the corner

Yesterday I was invited by a national communications company to take part in a focus group concerning new advertising opportunities. The invitation was extended to me by the Publisher of a large newspaper, and since it piqued my interest, I decided to attend. The session lasted about two hours, and I was teamed with five other people, who primarily owned large for-profit businesses. The concept: if it was made available, would we take advantage of people's cell phones for advertising? The technology is now in place that makes it possible to send individuals coupons via text messaging. Encoded in the coupon would be a bar code, and the individual would take their cell phone to the box office to receive a discount. Other ideas were passed around during the session, including sending video previews of a performance to media-enabled cell phones. It seems like whether you like it or not, you better get ready to be marketed to via your cell phone.

Welcome to "Thank God that wasn't me!" Fridays

Some people say that the type of car you drive is directly proportional to the amount of action you get. The folks over at Honda Motor Company took that a little too literally when they printed up manuals for 18,000 Honda Fits and 8,000 units of the company's 2007 motorcycles. In an attempt to provide customers the number for a government hotline, the manual actually quotes the digits of an even "hotter" line at which a woman -- not the kind of girl you'd bring home to Mom, by the way -- lets callers know that they're welcome to talk at a rate of just 99 cents per minute. Jokes aside, the misprint has irritated enough customers to get the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and affected customers should be receiving a correction in the form of a postcard in the mail somewhat soon.

[Source: Associated Press via Winding Road]

PUT THOSE SPONSORS TO WORK FOR YOU

If you have large corporate sponsors, why not let them work for the marketing department as well as the development department? Tell each of your large corporate sponsors that as a benefit of their sponsorship, you will offer their employees a special discount to specific employees. Ask for their assistance in communicating the discount to their employees and see the dollars roll in. For example: Old Dominion University and Norfolk Southern are large sponsors of Virginia Stage Company. Both have over 1,000 employees and an intranet on which they communicate with them. The President of Old Dominion University and a Vice President of Norfolk Southern sit on our Board of Trustees. I design an attractive email which offers employees of both organizations a 20% discount on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings (which are our most difficult performances to sell). I them email it to our Board members, who in turn forward the email onto their employees. Each sponsor organization that is offered a special discount receives an individual password which they use to get the discount. This will allow you to track the success of each campaign. It is a win-win situation. The sponsor feels like they are getting added value to their sponsorship, and the arts organization is getting a lot of free exposure.

Won't you be my friend? MySpace.com and you

I get phone calls from marketing directors every week asking me whether or not they should use myspace.com to market their arts organizations, and they always get the same response from me: OF COURSE!

MySpace.com is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. MySpace currently reports just over 107 million accounts, with the 100 millionth account being created on August 9, 2006. According to recent reports, MySpace attracts new registrations at the rate of 230,000 per day. So what does this all mean to you?

Your audience is using MySpace and probably much more than you think. Virginia Stage Company created its MySpace page in January 2006. Currently, Virginia Stage Company's MySpace page accounts for the most referrals to our website, beating large search engines such as Google and Yahoo. And not only does it beat Google, it has doubled it.

MySpace allows you to interact with a group of "friends" on a regular basis, and it is FREE! There is no better investment out there. Later posts will discuss how to create a MySpace page, how to recruit friends, post pictures, send bulletins and even Instant Message with your customers! In the meantime, if you haven't already, check out MySpace at www.myspace.com. If you would like to see how an arts organization uses MySpace, check out Virginia Stage Company's MySpace page at www.myspace.com/vastage.

In transition....

I am in the process of relocating to Washington D.C. It might be a week or so before my next post. As soon as I get myself set-up, I will post more regularly. Let me leave you for the time being with this:

National elections are next week. If you are interested in knowing how your representative or senator has voted on arts related issues during the previous term, the Americans for the Arts has just released its 2006 Congressional Arts Report Card. Check it out here.

Engage your customers...

I am back just in time for Thanksgiving! I am starting to settle into my new job at the Americans for the Arts. I am sorry that I have been away for such a long period of time, however moving and starting a new job is kind of taxing. I have numerous posts that I am waiting to write, so keep tuned in.

I just finished reading the Wall Street Journal's article entitled Mark Kingdon: Using Social Sites as Dialogue To Engage Consumers, Brands. Check it out.

More to come--I promise!

If your marketing isn't working in real life, try second life...

A colleague I work with forwarded this onto me from Andrew Taylor's Arts Management blog:

A good prospect for a (virtual) board member, perhaps...

Anshe Chung has all the elements of a good prospect for your nonprofit board -- she's a millionaire, a real estate mogul, and an innovative entrepreneur with an eye for design and aesthetic value. While it's true that she's not technically a real person, but an avatar...an on-line character in the virtual world of Second Life...her influence, and her money, is real.

<>Chung is the construct of a Chinese-born language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany, who has been developing virtual real estate in virtual worlds for a while now. The practice is well established in multi-user on-line environments, where users can not only buy ''land'' but create and sell ''objects'' to other users. The difference with Second Life is that the virtual currency used in the on-line universe is convertible to U.S. dollars (at about 250 to 1).

Chung amassed her millions by buying up islands and exclusive areas of the Second Life universe, developing them with mansions, landscapes, and other such virtual amenities, and imposing strict zoning rules to keep the riff-raff out and the paying customers in. The CEO of the company that produces Second Life describes Chung as ''the government'' for her sequestered islands and continents (more details in this Wikipedia entry, and this Business Week article).
Strange and brain-bending stuff, to be sure. But a glimpse, perhaps, into the multiple worlds -- on-line and off-line -- where creative individuals and entrepreneurs will be creating their work. And if you think this doesn't apply to the lively arts, think again. The proposed New Globe Theater in New York already commissioned and opened a virtual version of the venue in Second Life. Says their overview of the effort (scroll down the page to the August 14 news item):
Since opening its doors, the New Globe has become the rock star of virtual destinations and the it-stage for cultural and intellectual exchange. In-world guest speakers on the stage have ranged from the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine to the Governor of Virginia. The opening performance featured actors from around the globe who had never met in person ... though time difference for rehearsals did prove a REAL problem!

The real governor of Virginia held a virtual town hall meeting in that virtual performing arts space back in August. Is the world weird enough for you yet?

Is an explanation needed?

I know that several people have contacted me with concerns about MySpace. So I took some time the other day to write this up. Hope it helps if you have to make the case to senior management:

As the baby boomer generation ages and heads toward retirement, Generation X has become the coveted new target market. Generation Xers do not respond well to traditional marketing and advertising mediums, and therefore those mediums have been losing market share during the past decade, including such staples as newspapers, radio, and television.

Generation Xers respond to marketing that can provide the following:
1. an interactive experience
2. exclusive content
3. on-demand timing

Traditional mediums, which previously did not provide these opportunities, are in the middle of a large paradigm shift. They understand the need to reach this target market and are shifting their priorities away from one-way communication vehicles to timely, interactive, on-demand vehicles. For example:

The American Broadcasting Channel (ABC) currently offers via its website (www.abc.com) interactive gaming, video on demand (including full-length episodes), blogs, behind-the-scenes information, mobile phone downloads, podcasting, instant messenger icons, and wallpapers. Current popular television shows, such as American Idol, even ask viewers to use their cell phones to “text message” their votes, allowing the viewer a real opportunity to decide the outcome of a particular episode.

The Washington Post currently offers via its website (www.washingtonpost.com) discussion and message boards, on-demand photos and video, podcasting and RSS feeds.

The online content of the two aforementioned companies are geared toward providing an interactive, on-demand experience that offers exclusive content that cannot be found in other locations.


The Case for MySpace

MySpace is an online social-networking site that is currently the most visited website in the United States, and one of the top ten visited sites on the entire Internet. MySpace continues to grow at an astonishing rate. The site had 17 million monthly visitors in July 2005, and currently boasts 54 million monthly visitors. MySpace features nearly 100 million personal profiles posted by users, many of whom are in their teens and twenties. Even more astonishing is that the average MySpace user spends two hours per visit on the site.

Advantages of using MySpace:
- MySpace offers a chance for companies to take their marketing into new, potentially more lucrative territory, by becoming, in effect, members of their customers’ network of “friends.”
- MySpace allows for a two-way interactive experience with a company’s brand. MySpace visitors can leave comments, send you a message, and rank your page.
- MySpace provides a means for distributing information that normally wouldn’t be found elsewhere, including blogs, vlogs, on-demand music/video, photos, podcasts, and bulletins.
- Return on investment: creating a MySpace page doesn’t cost a dime and allows you to access 100 million people.

The advantages of MySpace attract the Generation X market by providing an interactive, on-demand experience that offers exclusive content that cannot be found in other locations.

There is a concern that companies that use MySpace will alienate potential customers by being overtly commercial in an informal atmosphere. Kevin George, Marketing Executive a Unilever (see case studies below) addresses this concern with the following, “we need to be engaging with our customers, not banging them over the head with brandalism that pollutes their space. When you deliver 18- to 24-year-old guys content they want to engage with, they don’t mind if it comes from a brand.” John Deighton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, addressed the same concern in an interview for Harvard Business Journal (August 16, 2006) Deighton states:

An old rule of thumb in the advertising industry was “relevance and likeability.” If ads had both, no one seemed to feel manipulated when their sitcom was interrupted by a commercial message. That goes for MySpace commercial sites. Artic Monkeys, a Sheffield, England, post-punk revival band that is promoted from a MySpace site, is a case in point. The site is credited for their explosive global growth, yet the commercial exploitation of the social network is welcomed by fans. In true punk style the band claims no commercial motive. When asked in an interview with Prefix Magazine about the role of the MySpace site, they claimed that the site had originally been created by their fans.


Case Studies

Unilever
In 2006, Unilever, a consumer-goods giant, partnered with Christine Dole to promote Axe, a deodorant. Ms. Dolce, who goes by the alias ForBiddeN, boasts around 900,000 “friends” who link to her MySpace page. She was perfect to draw in the 18- to 24-year-old men to whom Axe is shamelessly marketed. Ms. Dolce hosted an interactive game, called “Gamekillers,” based around dating tips and designed to subtly to promote Axe. Some 75,000 MySpacers signed up for it. (The Economist, July 27, 2006)

Hyperactive Music Magazine
Since 2004, Hyperactive Music Magazine has used MySpace to connect with thousands—15,862 to date—of bands, readers, and anyone else interested in the publication. Hyperactive’s MySpace page plays music on a monthly basis from four unsigned bands that convince them in a 25-words-or-less essay that they should be featured. The publisher of Hyperactive says that she get hundreds of essays from bands looking to supply the tunes for Hyperactive’s page. They are looking to expand into music videos and live interviews in the future. (The Albuquerque Tribune, July 2, 2006)

Other Examples
Fox created a profile page for X-Men: The Last Stand. Disney ran a contest to place the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on the profile page of a MySpace member. Some of the most guarded brands in the nation are using MySpace, including Pepsi Cola, Procter & Gamble, State Farm Insurance, and the United States Marine Corps. Examples of large arts organizations that use MySpace include the Los Angeles Opera, Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, Washington National Opera, The Joffrey Ballet, Hartford Stage Company, Lincoln Center Festival, Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper Forum), UCLA Live, MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), and the Getty Museum of Art.

New Arts Marketing Book

Co-Author of Standing Room Only publishes new arts marketing book.

Arts Marketing InsightsThe Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences
by Joanne Scheff Bernstein

published by Jossey-Bass, an Imprint of Wiley, November 2006
Arts Marketing Insights offers managers, board members, professors, and students of arts management the ideas and information they need to market effectively and efficiently to customers today and into the future. Joanne Scheff Bernstein presents concepts and strategies that address the changing lifestyles, needs, interests, and preferences of current and potential audiences. She helps readers understand the mind-set of performing arts attenders and how to provide excellent customer service. She demonstrates that arts organizations can benefit by expanding the meaning of "valuable customer" to include single ticket buyers. She offers guidance on long-range marketing planning and explains how to leverage the Internet and e-mail as powerful marketing channels. Arts Marketing Insights is replete with vivid case studies and examples that illustrate the author's strategic principles in action from organizations large and small in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and other countries. This book combines the best of proven marketing wisdom with viable new ideas and approaches that arts marketers can adopt to help their organizations thrive while realizing their artistic missions.

Book Review: Arts Marketing Insights

Book: Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences by Joanne Scheff Bernstein.

In this book, the author sets out to describe the shifts in audience behaviors over the past decade, and how it affects the marketing strategies employed by arts marketing professionals. The author does a good job of describing the shifts which have occurred in audience behavior throughout the past decade, but if you are looking for the same level of insight and brilliance which she has demonstrated in earlier works (mostly her collaborative work with Philip Kotler), you will be disappointed. This book gives you the basics—understanding your customer, the use of marketing research, and yes, even the beloved four P’s: product, price, place and promotion. Bernstein even outlines some of the most feared problems in the industry such as declining subscription rates and the aging of our audiences, and suggests using the same techniques which marketers have used over the past ten years to combat those problems. And this is where the book stops. Forgive me, with all the stuff out there now on marketing in the arts, I expected someone with Bernstein’s reputation to add much to the current critical debate over the future of arts marketing. What she does is provide a nice recap of what most of us already know.

I found her chapter entitled “Leveraging the Internet and E-Mail Marketing” the most disappointing. For a book published in 2007, I found it odd that there was very little, if any, discussion on how the use of technologies, other than websites and e-mails, could be used to communicate with potential audiences. What about Podcasting? RSS feeds? Social networking websites? Blogging?

To wrap up, if you would like a basic snap shot of the current problems facing arts marketers today, as well as a nice review of marketing basics, this book is for you. If you are looking for anything else, I am afraid you will be disappointed.

Time Magazine's Person of the Year

You are Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. You were chosen over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong Il and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Congratulations.

Check out the entire article from CNN here.

I know that I have been focusing on less traditional, viral marketing applications lately. So, my next post will be some advise on direct mail marketing. I am studying several large direct mail campaigns for Americans for the Arts, and I what I am learning, I will share with you. Hope everyone is doing well.

Off for the holidays

I am heading back to Missouri for the holidays. I am spending a week on the family farm which doesn't have cable, internet or cell phone services. So, no blogging for the next week. However, I am bringing Joanne Scheff Bernstein's new book "Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences" with me. ArtsMarketing.org has asked me to write a review of the book. So when I return I will share my thoughts on the book with you. Have a great holiday season!

Freshen Up Your E-mail in the New Year

After a couple month study of e-communications at Americans for the Arts, I compiled some recommendations that I thought I would share with you:


To Improve Deliverability1. Eliminate Hard Bouncing E-Mail Addresses from your e-mail list. Once two e-mail campaigns have been sent to an e-mail address and have hard bounced, they should be flag as no longer active.
2. Be Careful When Writing Subject Lines. When writing a subject line, it is important to be proactive and stimulating with content, but be careful with your wording because it might trigger a spam filter on the receiver’s end. Subject lines with all CAPS, strange spacing, unusual symbols and the over use of common spam words such as FREE!, can cause a campaign to be caught in a spam filter. Check to see if your e-mail marketing provider has a spam content checker. In addition, you should set up a AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail test account and send each campaign to the account before sending to see if the message is blocked.


To Improve Open Rates
1. Avoid Sending E-Mail Campaigns on Monday or Friday. Industry best practices have always suggested that e-mail campaigns should not be sent on Monday or Friday. Typically, these two days of the week have the lowest open rates. Our data has shown the same results. Mondays have the worst open rates followed by Fridays.
2. Shorten the Length of E-mail Campaigns. Even a dedicated, loyal consumer will avoid reading a campaign if it is too long. No matter how important we think the copy is, a consumer will not read it if it isn’t presented in a succinct manner. Longer campaigns should be shortened by the use of a “more” button. Write a catchy headline and a very short description for each article. If a consumer would like to read more, he can click on the “more” feature. A website redirect can also be used. If the information is available on the web, there is no need to repeat it in its entirety in an e-mail campaign. Instead, use links to direct readers to the information on the web. Under no circumstances should we be sending a campaign with more than 1,000 words.
3. Improve Subject Lines. Many times, a consumer will make the decision to open or not open an e-mail campaign based on the subject line. Please use the following recommendations when writing a subject line:
a. Avoid the Use of Internal Jargon.Avoid using any internal jargon that general audiences may not understand.
b. Brand Your Subject Line.If you send out a monthly or regularly timed e-mail campaign, start branding it. A practice that has been recommended by e-mail experts is including the name of your company or entity (i.e., ABC/NY) in the subject line, usually at the beginning and enclosed in brackets. For example: {ABC/NY} Encore Award Nominations. This practice reinforces the from line, ensuring recipients that it's coming from a trusted source.
c. Have Someone Else Write, Edit, or Review Subject Lines.Oftentimes, the writer of the e-mail is too close to the content to write an intriguing and clear subject line. Have someone other than the person who creates the e-mail itself write, edit, or at least review the subject line. Use this person like a newspaper headline writer, and ask them to write the headline for the e-mail campaign.
d. The Shorter, the Better.National studies indicate that shorter subject lines (usually of less than 50 characters) have higher open rates than longer subject lines. Also be very careful when writing longer subject lines because most e-mail providers have a maximum number of characters they will allow in the subject field.
e. Make Sure the Subject Line Catches the Attention of the Reader.
The reader will make a decision based on the subject line whether or not they will open the e-mail. Don’t be afraid to try subject lines that are more aggressive, creative, or tantalizing.
4. Provide Readers an Incentive for Opening a Campaign. With every e-mail campaign, there should be an incentive for the reader to open the campaign and read it. These incentives don’t necessarily mean discounts, rewards, or other offers, although they can be used to generate more interest. Oftentimes, readers will read e-mail campaigns if they know they will be given something of value (i.e., content they couldn’t find otherwise or content that will improve their daily lives).
5. Personalize Subject Lines. Most e-mail marketing companies will allow and support personalized subject lines. For example: “Chad, Please Remember to Renew Your Membership.” We need to check with Magnet Mail to see if this is a possibility.


To Improve Click Rates
1. Actionable Items Should Be First Up to Bat. Many e-mails are read in a consumer’s preview pane. In 2007, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail will add preview panes to their Web-based clients, adding to the already significant use of preview panes through Outlook and Lotus Notes. When designing your campaign, make sure you put the most important, actionable items in the top two to four inches to ensure that those who will read the e-mail in the preview pane are able to view them.

The Evolution of the Bulletin Board, ListServs and Blogging

At work, I am preparing a couple of sessions on viral marketing and the use of new technologies. As part of this process, I started a discussion with my colleagues at Americans for the Arts about the pros and cons of using blogs, based upon an entry in Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager blog about how blogs are now being used as PR tools.

I am lucky to have as colleagues at Americans for the Arts some of the nation's foremost experts on arts marketing, including Gary Steuer (V.P. Arts & Business Council), Will Maitland Weiss (Executive Director of the Arts & Business Council of New York), Julie Peeler (Vice President of Arts & Business Programs) and Suzanne Ruley (Coordinator of the National Arts Marketing Project). I threw a couple of questions out to this group concerning blogging and started a great conversation.

I wanted to share with you an e-mail that I got from Gary Steuer yesterday. Gary not only provides some great insights on blogging, but gives a very good description of the evolution of bulletin boards, ListServs and now blogs.

From Gary's e-mail:

OK – time for me to weigh in – very interesting conversation! Opening up cans of worms not a bad thing – can’t fish without worms. While I have not entirely jumped on the RSS/Blog bandwagon yet, I suspect you are right Chad [on predicting that new technologies such as blogs will replace ListServs]. In many ways it reminds me of the way ListServs have replaced bulletin boards. In the early days of the internet (I am dating myself, but I go back to the early 80s when it was not even “The World Wide Web” yet and there was no GUI…), bulletin boards were all the rage, allowing users to post ideas that others then responded, creating an ongoing dialogue. One of the problems with bulletin boards was that they required users to visit them frequently, and actively participate, otherwise they sat there dead. In the beginning this was not hard to do, but over time, interest in bulletin boards waned, because it was too much work to remember to regularly visit them. They continued (and continue) to work only in certain very specific instances – when there was an issue people were truly passionate about, like medical and health issues, sports, or technology tech support. Once ListServs began growing in popularity, people found that means of communication much easier than bulletin boards because they had the dialogue “pushed” into their inbox, rather than having to visit a web site to participate. We had to respond to this even with the ArtsMarketing.Org Web site – in the early years it featured a bulletin board, with occasional guest experts to facilitate topical conversations. We could never get enough people to regularly visit to make it work. We had to switch to ListServ and e-newsletter communications which allowed us to push information into people’s in-boxes, making it easier for very busy people to stay informed.

However, as ListServs and e-mail volume in general have proliferated, I think there is something of a backlash against ListServs, and with ListServs you also lose the ability to follow a thread of conversation, since each contribution tends to exist as an individual nugget not easily connected to the larger conversation. As with bulletin boards, they still work, and I suspect will continue to play a communications and community-building role. But the advent of blogs, with the combination of RSS technology, multi-media, and now blog widgets, has created a new more dynamic communications medium that retains that same “push” feature – delivering the conversations you want right to your desktop.

The challenge will be that as more and more groups adopt blogs and RSS feeds, how much time and screen-space will people be able to devote to the thousands/millions of choices available to them, and how long will it take before we overload Blogs and move onto something new? Can direct feeds into our brains not be far behind? (Anyone ever see the movie “eXistenZ”? If so, you will understand what I am talking about…)

I do think it is important for us (and the arts as a whole) to stay at the leading edge of these trends, especially as we try to engage younger audiences – and field members – who will not respond to or even tolerate what they view as outmoded means of communication.

SAVE THE DATE

National Arts Marketing Project Conference
News Announcing the theme for the 2007 Conference:
Flourishing in the New Frontier: New Media, New Audiences, New Opportunities
November 2-5, 2007Hyatt Regency Miami, FL

You asked for it, you got it! A survey of arts marketers showed you wanted a conference focusing on technology and new audiences. You’ll learn about new media from RSS to pod casts, from blogging to texting, and optimizing e-mail and e-commerce to reach every segment of the marketplace from Millennials to Boomers, and from first generation Hispanics to third generation Asians. But the conference won’t forget the basics. We’ll cover direct marketing, branding and relevant messaging as well. Watch for the Call for Session Proposals, coming soon! It’s the conference for arts marketers by arts marketers!

Why not put your email signature to use?

Think about the number of people a day that you email? or even better, how many emails do you think your organization sends out everyday? Why not use your email signature as a guerilla marketing tool to promote your season? It is very simple to do. Just create a graphic and import it into your signature in Microsoft Outlook. If you do not know how to create a signature in Microsoft Outlook, under the help tab click on the Microsoft Office Assistant. Type "insert signature" into the search field. It will give you step by step instructions. Now that you have taken care of your email, encourage others in your organization to do the same thing. That way, every time an email is sent, your marketing message is sent as well.

Blogging...when to use it to raise your organization's visibility.

Ever since my return from the National Arts Marketing Conference in Los Angeles where I presented several sessions on technology and the arts, I have gotten a phone call at least once a week from organizations across the United States asking me why they should have a blog. I have found that blogging is one of the best ways to communicate to audiences, stakeholders and funders in an informal and inviting context. Most direct marketing is carefully crafted to elicit an anticipated response, and hence messaging in such contexts can seem contrived. A blog is an informal exchange between an organization and those interested in an organization. When writing the blog for Virginia Stage Company, I try to keep our posts light and entertaining. We try to offer our readers something that they would never be able to get from any other source. Mostly we try to give them a look into what is going on behind the scenes--from building the sets, casting the actors, rehearsing a play, etc. We provide audio and video from day one of the process until the time the show opens. We invite our creative staff to blog. It gives a director a forum to talk to his audience prior to them coming. It gives an actor the opportunity to discuss the rehearsal process. There is no better way to bring your audiences behind the scenes, and give them access to people they would normally never be able to touch.

Not to mention, setting up a blog is relatively easy and very inexpensive. I suggest going to www.blogger.com and signing up for a new blog (which is free). It will take all of fifteen minutes to design a basic blog and you do not have to have any html knowledge. Once it is created, place a prominent link to it on your website. Encourage staff members, including artists, to post. Once that is done, tell everyone about it. Don't be shy. If you keep it interesting as well as valuable, people will love it.

Thinking about blogging?

When I talk to folks about setting up a blog for their company, I tell them to really think about how they craft their language. People don't want to get a hard sell from the marketing department every time they read your blog. They want something interesting. Something exciting.

Dale Carnegie, one of America's most prolific writers on networking, once said "the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it. Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want."

Remember that thought when you are writing your company's blogs...

What do airlines and arts organizations have in common?

Let me leave you with this before I depart for NYC.

There has been a lot of talk about pricing tickets similar to the way airline tickets are priced. Well check out the story in the Chicago Tribune.

Quick Tip: You like filet, but you only need hamburger

Remember that when you are looking to get a better return on investment (ROI) for your direct marketing campaigns, that you need to increase returns AND decrease your expenses for maximum impact. Seems simple enough, but most folks fixate on getting better returns without looking at the expenses.

When examining your expenses, remember that almost every study that has been conducted on the effectiveness of direct marketing campaigns has showed us that the "creative" element of the campaign (i.e. design, print, etc) has less to do with its success then the proper targeting and pitch. However, how many of us get sucked into spending a majority of our budget on high dollar graphic designers and top end printing?

So here is my advice: unless your campaign absolutely needs a top dollar graphic designer and premium printing services, save your money and invest more time and energy into compiling your mailing list, analyzing the data in your database, and putting together your pitch.

Don't Wait, Innitiate

The key to any successful viral marketing campaign involves finding and activating innitiators. Different marketing directors call these people different things. I prefer the use of the term innitiators. Basically, these are people that have two things in common: 1) they have a lot of friends (and are usually early adopters), and 2) they have a lot of influence. The idea is to sell them on your product, and them have them peddle it to their friends. Social networking sites are great for finding initiators because many of them tell you how many friends a person has, and therefore how large their network in. In the above graph, you can see our friend network graph from our Care2 site. All those in blue are people Americans for the Arts has a direct connection with, and then all of those in purple are the friends of our friends. Our Care2 site is relatively new, so we only have around 120 friends, however because we have purposely sought out innitiators, we have over 77,000 people in our network.

So how is this appicable in your everyday life? Take for example Virginia Stage Company's fall production of CROWNS. I was still working at that time as the Company's Director of Marketing and Communications. CROWNS is a "play with music" based on the African American gospel tradition. Early in the marketing campaign for the show, we developed an innitiator strategy that proved to be quite effective. We invited all the ministers of the numerous historically black churches in our area to an exclusive preview on a Saturday evening. We provide them not only with a sneak peak of the performance, but dinner and drinks as well. We gave them promotional kits and asked them to advocate on behalf of the production. The hope was that the following Sunday morning, they would mention the show to their congregations and activate them in spreading the word. It worked like a charm and we had several very large group orders (100 tickets plus) come from local churches. The production went on to being the third best selling production in the company's 28 year history.

New posts coming

Sorry guys...I am frantically trying to get ready to fly to New York tomorrow. I am presenting a session on viral marketing and the arts at the Arts & Business Council of New York. I have many things that I want to blog on including "tryvertorials," direct mail testing and online fundraising. So as soon as I am back from NYC, I promise I will catch up. Thanks for understanding. Now I have to cross my fingers that the huge snow storm coming doesn't mess everything up. Sometimes I wish I still lived in Los Angeles.