Digitarts BlogIs Social Media destined to take over from traditional PR, as a primary means of raising awareness and engaging audiences? It depends how you see PR’s role in the arts. To me, it’s not a major source of ticket sales. Of course, there are chains of influence in the marketing mix (we see maybe half [...]
Sounds obvious but the point is Facebook and Twitter are about socialising and not business, and it can be very frustrating for a marketer not to be able to harness the enormous potential of social media. The thing is that it’s people that control the new media, not moguls or advertisers or editors with agendas. [...]
Last night I attended a talk, arranged by the Marketer’s Forum, by Ministry of Sound’s social media guy Ben Stroud. His presentation began slightly shambolically but it soon benefited from the fact that he’s not some slick marketing man, instead a savvy enthusiast who has built the club’s online presence very impressively. Of course, MOS’s [...]
We all face a challenge nowadays: to not let technology rule our lives. I love my computer; in fact, my partner threatens to cite my laptop as a co-respondent if it ever comes to court (“there are three parties in this relationship”). I find myself twitching because I don’t have access to my emails or [...]
The big issue about the democratization of opinion for most professional critics is quality (exceeded only, perhaps, by the fear that arts criticism will soon cease to exist as a profession). But need we fear a “dumbing down” of opinion? People have always had views (it’s not just journalists who are opinionated) and now they’re [...]
I love this story: Land Your Dream Job Using Google Adwords. I don’t know if that guy’s a genius or just struck lucky (what are the odds of a stunt like that actually working?) but it’s an imaginative use of technology, with a good bit of lateral thinking and a dash of cheek. It’s not [...]
I’ve carried out a considerable amount of audience research over the last 15 years, both qualitative (including many focus groups) and quantitative. The latter began with self-completion questionnaires which then had to be fed into the computer but I soon moved on to a customised online package, which I then exported to SPSS, the superb [...]
It may sound on this blog as though I am a rabid commercialite, with only an eye for a good return on investment, but it’s not the case. While I look after my investors’ interests when I’m working in a commercial context, my theatre gods are Samuel Beckett and Peter Handke (and no-one ever got [...]
I recently had a discussion with the marketing director of a large theatre, where my touring play was showing for one week. He was trying to persuade me to run a Google Adwords campaign and I was resisting. I’ve said below why I decided against a generic Adwords campaign and a localised one for a [...]
