Arts Midwest

noted by Margaret Hasse, documentarian, Arts Learning Xchange

• Web 2.0 is the second generation of the World Wide Web that moves from static web pages to social networking and dynamic, shareable, and user-generated content.
• Effective marketing requires integrating Web 2.0, relational marketing, social media, and technology tools into organizations’ overall marketing plans.
• Arts marketing and communication in the current digital age creates a participatory culture with two-way communication that forms relationships between the organization and participants.
• Technology can be the great equalizer, enabling the voice of the individual to assert itself and contribute to a collective conversation about arts organizations and arts experiences; the balance of power in marketing is shifting from organizations to participants.
• Arts organizations must learn to pull, not push people and information; they must draw people in by content and relationships, enabling influencers to become communicators of an organization’s message, rather than simply pushing or distributing information, such as press releases, to media outlets.
• Creating meaningful content and communication requires the marketers in an organization to involve artists and non-communications staff in documentation and online activity.
• Administrators must overcome fears that they can’t completely control the message in cyber-space; the fact is, they can’t, but they can shape it and affect the organization’s target or niche.
• A cohesive relational marketing effort identifies, motivates, and enables staff, artists, and volunteers to become “influencers” who can be activated to share ideas, information, and enthusiasm with family, friends, and other networks through actual word-of-mouth and online interaction.
• Arts organizations can motivate people to be influencers by conferring social leadership status, inside organizational access or freebies such as complimentary tickets, and cash or membership incentives.
• Viral marketing, as a virtual word-of-mouth, is any technique that induces websites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, potentially creating an exponential growth effect.
• Current tools of viral marketing are social networking websites, image and video hosting websites, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Retweet, e-mail campaigns with forward-to-friend buttons, RSS feeds, podcasting, and blogging on much more than calendar information.
• A good blog requires clarity of purpose, a plan for frequency of postings, and a long-term commitment.
• Challenges in relational marketing include understanding and reaching an audience when all an organization has is an email address; blurring the line between sources of opinion and fact; cultivating changes in staff attitude and behavior; and measuring the outcome.
• Success in Web 2.0 doesn’t always translate into increases at the box office, but into a broader definition of audience that includes online participants.
• An integrated communications plan includes media and public relations, advertising and direct marketing, institutional communications, relational marketing, sales and service.