The Arizona Republic
From the top institutions to the grass roots, Valley artists and performers are jumping on the social-media bandwagon, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to interact with their audiences, and maybe even to grow them.
But for Jennifer Spencer, marketing director for Arizona Theatre Company, the latter would just be icing on the cake.
"I don't care how many followers we have or how many people 'like' us," she says. "People who are liking us or fanning us on Facebook already know us. They're already interested. So it's not always just a sales message. You want to get them talking."
Conversation is the buzzword. ATC, with nearly 1,200 friends on Facebook, uses the platform to link to videos or photos taking fans backstage for its next show or to invite patrons to chat about news bits from the theater world.
"It's so easy to just throw a generic marketing message up there, but how do you have a presence without being boring?" Spencer says. "It's exciting when this conversation gets going. It affirms the fact that we're doing something that people care about. And we do pay attention to what people say."
That's exactly the right approach, says Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy, a California consulting firm.
"Social media is a way to serve and to support," she says. "You may get some sales off it, but if you enter the social Web with the idea that you're going to push propaganda, you're going to fail. You use the social Web as a way to offer quality information.
"We live in an era of mass collaboration, and we're looking for things that are useful and relevant."
Over at Phoenix Theatre (750-plus friends), public-relations rep Theresa Dickerson agrees that interacting with audiences is key, but she's convinced networking technologies have been gold for good old-fashioned sales as well.
"Word of mouth is one of our biggest tools to sell tickets, and social media makes that so much easier," she says.
The Valley arts group with the largest social-media following has to be the Phoenix Art Museum.
"We had a Facebook page for a while and it kind of sat there," museum director James Ballinger says. "So we went to a much more casual kind of language in our postings. We solicited feedback, so we've tried to have an active voice with our audience on Facebook. We try to change the message every few days, and the result is, over the past 12 or 14 months, we went from over 1,000 Facebook friends to over 16,000."
Furthermore, he's confident that online success has strengthened the institution's bottom line.
"I can't tell you that 7 percent of our attendance last year came from Facebook interaction," he says, "but I can tell you . . . it's clear that we have a much younger audience than we used to. Visibly, on a daily basis, you can tell. And attendance went up 10 percent last year, 10 percent again this year."
Individual artists are having success on social media as well, such as female impersonator Richard Stevens, better known as Barbra Seville, who is on Facebook throughout the day to keep her 3,000 friends amused.
"It's an extension of what I do onstage," Stevens says. "It's entertaining my audience."
Having a sizable online following helped Seville "go viral" with a video spoof of Gov. Jan Brewer last month that has racked up more than 67,000 views on YouTube. And that in turn brought more interest to the Facebook page.
"I was picking up five friend requests an hour for a while," Stevens says. "It was really crazy."
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