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By James Kelly, July 27, 2010

Louise Walsh, Music Network’s PR & Marketing Manager was faced with the not insubstantial task of marketing Love: Live Music, a brand new nationwide event, at a time when across the arts, marketing budgets are rapidly disappearing. How could such a new event connect with audiences across the country when time was of the essence, and budgets were very limited? Clearly, the online communication strategy could play a big part. In the run in to the inaugural event, Louise received mentoring in this area from Lucy Campbell and Murne Laffan in RTÉ Publishing.

As the timeframe of the mentoring coincided with the run-in to the festival, Louise’s report on the lessons she learnt in the mentoring process is a good indicator of what can be achieved by those looking to build an online campaign around an event for the first time (to download a PDF, click on this link: Music Network – RTE Publishing mentoring report).

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Louise Walsh Report

Our Mentoring Requirement

RTE Publishing mentored us on the development of an online communications plan for Ireland’s first national music day, love:live music, that took place on Friday 16th April. We planned to use social networking and online platforms for the first time to generate viral marketing between the events participants and to a wider audience. As resources for the event were limited, online communications were central to the promotional strategy, working in tandem with in kind advertising and a PR Strategy.

With guidance from Lucy and Múirne, we started out by developing an online communications plan that aimed to generate general awareness of the event, to encourage people to find out what’s on in their area (thereby increasing the number of people attending the events) and to encourage people to get involved by registering their own event (thereby increasing the number of events taking place)

The elements of the online communications plan included:

Website Development

An event specific website (www.lovelivemusic.ie ) was developed by Pixel Design to which all offline and online activity directed people. Search engine optimisation functions were built into the event site so that it was easily found when searched for. The website included features such as RSS feeds, a blog, share buttons, google maps for events, enewsletter subscription, a featured event as well as links to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace.

Email Broadcasting

An email broadcasting account was set up in order to issue e newsletters to our contacts, again directing people to the event site.

Social Media Optimisation

The aim of using social media sites was to direct visitors to lovelivemusic.ie to either find out about an event in their area or to register an event of their own. Music Network set up accounts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. In order to generate friends/fans/followers to these platforms, Music Network invited all previous touring artists, all current artists on the Music Network roster, and all recipients of Music Network awards (and went from having no social media activity to having 194 followers on Twitter, 491 fans on Facebook and 344 friends on MySpace).

Finally, we targeted bloggers with event information via digital press releases.

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image courtesy Music Network

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What worked, what didn’t

RTE Publishing’s advice on our online communications, establishing and maintaining social networking and online platforms was of great value to the project, as we had no experience in this area. For me, the main benefit of the mentoring was being able to run the plans by people who have the expertise, and be assured by them that we were on the right track. Once we had set up accounts on the various platforms, they assured us that our numbers of fans/followers/friends were healthy.

The mentoring was also of great value in terms of troubleshooting, as and when problems emerged. One issue that arose for me early on was how to effectively brand the event without loosing the association with Music Network. The mentors suggested using a solution based on how RTE uses the corporate brand over a number of activity areas. They also stressed the importance from the outset of getting all the participants using the branding too by sending them branding guidelines.

The mentors had lots of suggestions and ideas, (not all of which we used this time around) which were really helpful in mapping out how far we could take the online communications. For us, all of their suggestions that we implemented worked, and the only downside was that we couldn’t implement them all this time around, or we underestimated the time that it would take realise those ideas.

For example, they stressed at an early stage to secure broadcasting and streaming rights from all participants so that we can use the content on online platforms, which we did. They also suggested engaging stringers to ensure that we could have content post events for the social media platforms. We managed to engage some stringers, but not enough, and missed the boat on getting the content, which is now lost to us. But, that was a huge learning for us.
We didn’t maximise the potential of You Tube to harness content from partner organisations. As mentioned above, next year we will engage much more stingers and use this content post event.

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Overall conclusions

Overall, the event was a success, due in no small part to the online communications plan and the mentoring received. As resources for the event were limited, we could not have achieved the reach that we did, without it.

Many of the ideas that were suggested by the mentors but not activated were ones that we simply didn’t have the people power to put in place. A huge learning from this project has been that while social media is free to use, it needs to be resourced with people and time in order to make the best use of it. Facebook and Twitter are constantly hungry and need to be fed content!

The mentoring was at a strategic level, but closer to the event, I realised that we would have benefited from some of the very basic skills in using the social media platforms. However, at that point, the event was gaining momentum and there was not the time to seek this resource, even though it could have been made available to us.

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By Una Carmody, July 13, 2010

Have you always wondered how many people in Ireland attend plays, or opera or classical music? What age they are? Or what newspapers they read?

For the first time this information is being made available through Arts Audiences with the support of the Arts Council and Temple Bar Cultural Trust.

Click here to access the report Arts Attendance In Ireland

TGI contains a wealth of information about audiences for the arts. Section 2 of the report will be of particular interest to those involved in marketing, as it gives some demographic information about regional audiences for the arts, and their media consumption and behaviour. We will be making a further release of information in August 2010 and are looking for your input about what you would find most useful. Marketing information by artform? More information about websites? Let us know by posting a comment below.

Appendix 1 gives more information about TGI and how it it carried out in Ireland Appendix 1 TGI repor

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By James Kelly, February 18, 2010

Duke Special: waiting for your call

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Thanks to Business to Arts for their recent tweet on the Pledge Music site. Readers of artsaudiences.ie may recall that last year we posted an article on Artistshare, a US based web organisation which enables those interested in the arts to directly provide project-specific funding to artists of their choice.

As with Artistshare, Pledge Music enables the individual to contribute at a variety of levels – in the example of Duke Special, £11 will buy you a signed EP, £55 would get a phonecall with the artist, and for £300 you could have dinner with the man himself.

Where the UK based Pledge Music surpasses Artistshare, is in the sense of community it builds around this new media patronage. The site has a high degree of social media functionality, and it incorporates donations to charities at the core of its activity.

Of course a site such as this can only succeed with a heavy inward traffic, and so the websites of featured artists must have links from their site into Pledge Music. Duke Special’s homepage has a prominent link to the Pledge Music site, as well as details of his upcoming Pledge concerts. It all seems to be working for him, he has received pledges 30% in excess of his initial requirement.

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By James Kelly, January 25, 2010

CMC’s new home page

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The Contemporary Music Centre has relaunched it’s website. With a new look home page which places an an increased emphasis on social networking and news, the site is nice to look at, easy to negotiate, and has a very dynamic feel to it.

As well as offering the visitor video and audio, the home page includes links to all the Centre’s different sites, including Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace, as well as featuring a feed to the CMC twitter page, meaning users can access the latest information on news and events.

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By James Kelly, September 21, 2009

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Fancy seeing the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on October 4th? Tickets are still available for their forthcoming performance of Chopin’s 1st and 2nd Piano Concertos, at a price of €9.90 a head.

The catch is, of course, that you will experience this concert live (8pm, Berlin time) via broadband beamed into the comfort of your own living room (kitchen, bedroom or study)… what you lose on the physical experience, you gain on savings (no need for flights / babysitters / taxis etc).

Launched at the end of 2008, the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall is an exciting development, and no doubt a sign of things to come over the coming years. Such online experiences will never replace the actual experience of attending a performance, and in this sense (I hope) would not compete with the live experience.

Rather, could it be the case that an increasingly diverse range of high quality artistic experiences will become available in the comfort of our own living room, providing stiff competition for television, which has long held a monopoly on such matters?

Faced with the choice of an evening with the Berlin Philharmonic, two hours of ‘Friends’, or another indepth report on ‘the crash’, the philharmonic could well win out.

It’s worth mentioning that there are still some barriers to be overcome – for one thing, computers on the whole still occupy a different space in our homes, and are more often located in a work context than a leisure one (e.g. in the not so comfortable ‘home office’). Secondly, you need a very good broadband signal to guarantee an uninterrupted experience. However, it is early days, and over the coming few years these barriers will be overcome.

I’ve yet to view a performance, and would be keen to hear if anyone has given it a go?

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Appearing one night only – Berlin Philharmonic – neat dress essential