New new media
So you’ve got your new website up and running – all new and sparkly with lovely images and easy to find listings. Maybe you’ve even invested in a bespoke online booking system and are seeing ticket sales go up. Brilliant!
But here’s the bad news – what we used to call ‘new media’ is now ‘old media’. Websites as we traditionally think of them are falling out of favour. The handy online brochure containing all the information arts marketers think consumers care about (product, price, place, promotion) just doesn’t have the same pulling power as ‘new’ new media.
New new media is social media – websites or web applications that are pretty much entirely based on user generated content. After all, what is Facebook without the users? How on earth could Wikipedia, or Twitter, or Youtube have become so influential and ubiquitous without the millions of enthusiastic amateur editors and content providers we have become?
Using http://trends.google.com/websites, I looked at some of the biggest arts and cultural organisations’ web stats (eg Tate Modern, Barbican, Visit London) and found that the user figures have tended to remain fairly static in most cases. Looking at social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook the story is totally different. Twitter was undoubtedly the success story of 2009. Its popularity exploded through celebrity endorsements and word of mouth news stories such as the Iranian elections. More (much more) on Twitter later, but suffice to say that the much maligned and misunderstood medium is becoming one of the most powerful marketing tools we’ve ever had in our grubby little marketing hands.
LinkedIn has enjoyed a renaissance during the recession, and more and more people are using it to search for jobs and develop professional networks. Just last month (March 2010), Facebook overtook Google in the US in terms of market share of total web traffic at just over 7%. Seems almost inconceivable that we Facebook more than we search, but that’s the trend.
So what?
For arts marketers, new new media offers multiple opportunities to build audiences, not just using existing media but also by thinking about how to integrate social elements into in-house digital strategy. I feel the key to making this work is tapping into the current zeitgeist for ‘celebrity me’, and surely a perfect place for this is the arts?
If you would like advice or consultancy on developing a digital media strategy, contact Caroline Greener on 0191 269 1102 or email caroline.greener@audiencesnortheast.org.uk
