Anyone you know like ads? No. They’re the cackling crows getting between you and what you’re after. They’re uninvited, unwelcome, and we do whatever we can to swat them away. So why is my social media packed with ads for the arts? What’s the point?
Every arts organization does social media. But much of it is essentially self-serving product promotion. “Catch this show…” “This awesome artist is coming…” “We just had a rehearsal and it was incredible…” “See our fascinating behind-the-scenes process…”
What value does this really offer? This kind of Tweeting or Facebooking is bazaar (sorry) – as in laying out your goods on the racks of the local market and waiting for passersby to stop and inspect. Fine if the passersby are in a shopping mood and trust you. Mostly valueless if not. Artists who are on social media advertising their every little activity quickly grow tedious (and tuned out).
You’re doing incredible work. You want to get the word out. But is this the way? Big brands are finding that laying-out-your-wares type of advertising is less and less effective:
It is getting more and more difficult for brands to get their voices heard amidst the noise. People are reaching a saturation point where only so much content can be consumed, liked, or shared. At the same time, turning up the volume by increasing content production does not seem to be the answer, according to the report.
So why do it?
Instead of thinking of social media as a way to “get the word out,” or an add-on to what you really do, how about thinking of it as a way to talk about your aesthetic, to define your aesthetic, to provide value to those who choose to engage with you? As opposed to self-serving advertising.
The fastest growing category on YouTube is how-to videos:
Searches related to “how to” on YouTube are growing 70% year over year, and more than 100M hours of how-to content have been watched in North America so far this year. The most popular how-to educational searches show a range of interests—from the practical (“how to tie a tie”) to the creative (“how to draw”), from style (“how to curl your hair with a straightener”) to cuisine (“how to make a cake”). And although we see these searches across age groups, it’s most pronounced among millennials. In fact, 67% of millennials agree that they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn.
Sites like Houzz are hugely successful by creating massive communities of people – in this case of people looking to redecorate their homes – by using what visitors share to help other people hone their aesthetic. Members of the Houzz community get better (and make Houzz more useful) just by using it.
One last example. In the past year, sportswear companies have all bought their way into the fitness app business. Asics just bought Runkeeper and its 45 million users for $85 million.
Runkeeper is one of a number of fitness platforms that have been picked up by sports clothing makers in recent times. Indeed, today’s news comes six months after fellow fitness app Runtastic was snapped up by Adidas for $239 million, while American sports clothing company Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal and Endomondo — two massive fitness platforms — for $560 million, a year ago this month.
Companies have discovered that:
The big takeaway here is that social collateral is key. When brands make community involvement part of the process to engage and motivate customers; when they can converse with, and see how they stack up against, others, people are more likely to stick with a program.
So what would how-to arts social media look like? Next post.
So the question becomes, how do you create a short presentation presented via the web that will convince a sizeable public to accept your values, and exchange their thoughts about them, thus creating an interactive web community. Sportswear companies present exercise videos in which their products can be used and commented upon. Furniture stores present videos about interior decoration, with customers exchanging suggestions for creating nice living environments using their products. Voila! A community discusses the use of promoted products.
This principle has been used in music for decades. Instrument manufactures would produce LPs or CDs of performers who endorse their instruments, or subsidize workshops and master classes. This would inspire music students to use the company’s instruments. When the web came along, endless discussion evolved over models of instruments, mouthpieces, reeds, music stands, tuners, strings, rosin, etc. The interactive community of customers was strengthened.
Ethical issues arise because profit is the ulterior motive for engaging people. They can be given false values, like children so obsessed with Air Jordans that they murder. American military bands create instruction videos for young instrumentalists combined with discussion forums to increase recruitment, but the military has far more sinister ultimate goals.
The biggest problem is that the more complex the process of utilizing or appreciating a product, the more difficult this type of marketing becomes. Would a firm that sells scalpels want to produce do-it-yourself videos for brain surgery? Engage!
Through social media blips, art and human interaction is motivated by the administrator’s soap box sloganeering and merchandizing. Engage!
Classical music requires a complex and slowly developed process of appreciation. It is developed through education and a gradual increase in sophistication, mostly from children learning to play instruments or sing, and hopefully continuing as adults. The countries that have the most amateur adult music groups, are the ones with the highest attendance for opera and orchestras, and the ones that buy the most classical recordings.
People engage with the arts not through soundbite social media manipulation, but through genuine knowledge and understanding created by genuine education. Of course, this doesn’t fit with the current fads about entrepreneurship, engagement, alternate venues, street clothing, applause between movements, social media marketing, etc. Anything but intelligence created by genuine music education.
Clever uses of social media might enhance this form of education and amateur music-making, but it will never replace it. If we stopped looking for short cuts reality might set in.
William: So so cynical! If you hope something will be important in somebody’s life you need to find ways to be part of their life. Sure, you can think about this cynically as just a way to goose numbers and sell tickets. And I think that’s what a lot of social media is used for. Hence my post.
You write: “Classical music requires a complex and slowly developed process of appreciation. It is developed through education and a gradual increase in sophistication…” Exactly. It happens in many many ways. It can’t be hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. How are you supposed to develop sophistication if no one around you is even aware that the art you care about exists? Taste (and sophistication) get developed by being immersed in something AND being able to interact with others about it.
Sure the question could be: “how do you create a short presentation presented via the web that will convince a sizeable public to accept your values, and exchange their thoughts about them, thus creating an interactive web community.” If I wanted to be cynical I could ask that about any education program or attempt to study the art I love. For that matter I could ask that about many orchestra programs. Arts education in schools? Indoctrination of young minds to make them consumers of culture that can’t make it in the market on its own!
Absurd. Of course that shouldn’t be the question. It ought to be – how to make opportunities for people to have access to great art and great ideas and help them understand it. To do that you need to go where people are. And they’re online. No one is saying that snips of social media should or can replace art. But they can help connect people to it and help give context. Anything can be corrupted, sure, but it doesn’t have to be.
It’s quite true, I’ve become much too cynical. The new marketing principles, and changes to concert rituals are all useful. I just feel that in general, the emphasis on them has become too facile. It’s like trying to cure cancer with aspirin. More and more, they function as rationalizations that allow us to avoid the more fundamental problems with education, and that the USA is the only developed country in the world without comprehensive systems of public arts funding. I do not think we will make significant progress until those two problems are solved. These concepts of engagement, marketing, and ritual have been stressed for about 20 years, but their proponents cannot demonstrate genuinely substantive results in America’s cultural life.
The use of social media is just not an effective tool for solving the real world issues, or those that face the arts. It is conversation “light”. Make you feel good, perhaps sell you something, perhaps help you to understand something a “little” better.
To quote Wael Ghonim in a recent CBC interview about the Arab Spring:”Today, our social media experiences are designed to favour broadcasting over engagement. So, it’s like I’m going to post my opinion rather than I’m going to discuss my opinion because my opinion with others who probably don’t agree with me, and then writing shallow comments over having deep actual conversations. It’s kind of like people are talking at each other rather than talking with each other.” http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-february-25-2016-1.3463342/social-media-can-start-a-revolution-but-people-have-to-finish-it-says-wael-ghonim-1.3463362