A week from today, I’ll be participating in a live chat on behalf of my client, Chamber Music America, focusing on an article about artists using social media that appears in the July/August issue of Chamber Music magazine. Since the thesis of the piece is that we need to continue the conversation off the stage and the page (zing!), Chamber Music America wants to do just that with this chat (see, I rhyme on Wednesdays). Click here to download a PDF if you don’t receive the publication. I sound terribly un-smart, but I’ll/you’ll/we’ll survive. My colleague Christina Jensen comes off much better, so she’ll be on hand for the chat to offer another publicist perspective. The author, Dave Allen, will also participate, and hopefully SO WILL YOU.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
Pianist Stephen Hough joined Twitter in January as an outgrowth of blogging. In his blog for England’s Telegraph website, he covers a lot of intellectual ground, ranging from religion to politics to his favorite restaurants, as well as strictly musical matters. He is now covering an equally wide territory in his tweets. “I’m enjoying it as a kind of online notebook–a place to jot down ideas, thoughts, poems which before I would write on the back of hotel envelopes,” he says. “I don’t want it to be a networking tool–it’s something private which I allow people to look at. And it’s a remarkable way to get to know an audience.”
Tim Munro became eighth blackbird’s official blogger when he joined the group in 2006. But like Hough, he has turned to Twitter; in fact, these days Twitter has largely supplanted his blog posts. (Dedicated applications on his iPhone make the process especially easy.) Munro’s tweets cover a wide range of cultural terrain, including links to news articles and reviews; he has even linked to bad reviews. But it all helps to keep the public conversation going.
Do you think Facebook and Twitter should be used to promote concerts and recordings, or should they simply be outlets through which fans get to know artists as people? Is there strategy involved? Should there be strategy involved? Could either replace traditional press entirely, or is an NPR hit or a New York Times review still what all artists really want? What artist Twitter feeds and Facebook pages annoy you? Which ones do you like? Have any presenters found ways to track ticket sales based on social media, or is their effectiveness still unknown?
Provided I don’t royally mess up this very cool (free) chat site, this is what we’ll be discussing next week. I’ll post to this blog, like so…
…or you can participate through the site directly. No need to sign up in advance, just come on digitally by. July 14th (Vive la France!) at 1pm EDT.
The web is all of the above elements–mostly for friends, family and audiences to get closer. Lucille Ball once asked me ‘can you get closer to your audiences?’–I believe she would have approved of our network apparati.
Amanda, chat is a great idea and the article was very good. But can you please ask the CMA people why they didn’t put this article on their website? A PDF really does not make it, especially when the whole point is to promote online media.
Whatever the reason (and I can hear a little voice saying something like “Oh we can’t do THAT because we don’t want to cut into our print readership”) I think it points up the fact that orgs –cultural and otherwise– need to rethink how they are using their existing online outlets (website!) even as they branch out into using social media.
Hi JoAnn! The only reason we can’t put the piece on the website is because CMA is in the process of completely overhauling their website this summer. The current site doesn’t allow for an online version of the magazine, but the new site will. They’re looking at a September launch. Thanks for reading, and I hope you can participate in the chat! Feel free to bring up this topic! -AA