Socialnomics at work
Last time I looked at the concept, coined by Erik Qualman, of Socialnomics. Quite literally, the economics of social media. For arts marketers, the measurement of success is certainly not always financial, but may be artistic, philosophical or social. However you measure it though, there has to be some return on time (ROT) if social media is to be usefully added to the arts marketer’s portfolio of activities.
There is a well known statistic about the percentage of people who trust advertising (14%) versus the percentage that trust friends/family (80%) or a ‘person like me’ (58%). The maths is pretty unequivocal on this one – using peer to peer influence is far more effective tactically than more traditional top-down marketing methods.
The arts have a particularly strong affinity with social media, offering a deeper, more emotional level of engagement. Much maligned and misunderstood, twitter is actually one of the most powerful search engines in existence. Only you don’t just search for information, you are searching people’s heads. If you don’t already tweet, go online and sign up for an account. Spend a couple of weeks watching and listening. Start by following Audiences North East, have a look through our lists of followers and those we follow – you will find many interesting and useful tweeters to follow, and if you have anything interesting/useful to say then they will probably follow you back.
Twitter was a major contributor to the recent crowd-sourced exhibition by Sumo Design. Democracy was a publicly curated design exhibition looking at the notion of using social media to promote, recruit submissions for, and display a real-world exhibition in Newcastle. Artists were responsible for promoting their entry via all their social media platforms including twitter, facebook, flickr, ning etc. The resulting exhibition was a brilliant example of the power of social media to engage new audiences, as more than 200 submissions were shortlisted from 30 countries, and thousands of votes were cast by members of the public from all over the world.
So what?
Democracy was a small scale real-world design show here in Newcastle. But there are new examples every day of arts organisations tapping into social media to create a currency of return. Tate Modern crowd sourced a photography exhibition via flickr. The V&A used blogs, facebook and a variety of social mediascapes to create buzz around its Cold War exhibition. Here at ANE we are about to launch our first social media marketing campaign aimed at generating sign-ups for our whatsonnortheast.com webclub. The key is to think about the objectives of the campaign and pick the appropriate mediums for delivery, whether that is through words, sounds, images or video.
Next time I’ll update you as to the Return on Time of our social media-driven Super Summer Ticket campaign, so that you can learn from our experiences.
Caroline Greener
Marketing Manager
Audiences North East