Purpose of Social Media in the American Orchestra Field - Part 2 - The Changing Strategies of Marketing and Public Relations Due in Part to the Influences of Web 2.0 Applications

The way arts non-profit organizations interact with individuals is constantly changing and evolving.  This trend is true of marketing and public relations for organizations in all industries, too.   As David Meerman Scott asserts his 2009 text, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, there are currently new rules that everyone is learning to live and play by.  What Scott’s work focuses upon most is how interactions are different in this new environment.  To him marketing and public relations is no longer a one-way announcement of events and news.  The focus now is on developing authentic relationships with individual relationships.  Marketing and public relations can no longer be solely based on what organizations want to tell people, it is now also about what they want to say back and meeting their needs.  Web 2.0 applications are the platform where these new strategies can be put into motion in the quickest, most effective, and most personal way.

Paul Gillin echoes these sentiments in The New Influencers (2009).  Chapter 7 of Gillin’s book is entitled “Putting the ‘Public’ Back Into Public Relations”.  In this chapter he focuses on how blogs and social media sites can be where the conversation is started by individuals and that conversation then moves to what becomes news.  Gillin’s main point is that the public relations field is now being driven by individuals and what they want to talk about which in turns forms where the news is and also decides where the organizations must focus its  marketing efforts.

While the way we interact with people is changing, there are general concepts that remain the same.  The much used arts administration textbook, Standing Room Only, by Kotler and Scheff is still relevant in terms of marketing demographics, individualization and various strategies (1997).  What the text is lacking and needs to be supplemented with is a focus on how these strategies can now be moved into Web 2.0 applications.  The same is true of Relationship Fundraising (Burnett, 2002).  Here Gillin’s thoughts are echoed on letting the conversation be driven by the interests of the individual.  While Burnett is focusing on fundraising he is also building relationships, which are one of the reasons Web 2.0 applications should be utilized.

It is clear that experts are now focusing on what the individual wants to hear, see and talk about when deciding how to present information to the public.  This is where Web 2.0 applications are relevant as they are a mechanism for achieving these new standards and doing so with minimal cost and maximum results.

The proceeding research looks at how orchestras in America are using social media / Web 2.0 applications.  Social media is one of the hottest topics today.  For many it is changing how businesses are run and how orchestras interact with their various audiences, patrons, and clients.  Organizations are encouraged to use this resource to help support their missions.  While there have been many works published on how to use social media, at the point this survey was distributed, no one had done a study to quantify how the field of American orchestras were actually using social media.  This study introduces those detailed findings to better understand what is occurring in the field.

The research portion of this study is purely quantitative.  To prepare for distributing the survey, email addresses of contacts were collected for the entire membership of the League of American Orchestras as of November 2011.  The orchestras surveyed therefore represented organizations with budgets as large as $100,000,000 and those with budgets less than $100,000.  All orchestras in America are categorized by numbers 1 through 8.  These numbers represent their budget size, with 1’s being the largest sized budget organizations and 8’s being the smallest.  Due to the drastic differences in sizes, the survey was distributed to the Executive Director, General Manager, or individual who was designated in charge of the administration for orchestras with budgets in the 5 to 8 groups.  For the 1 to 4 sized groups the survey was sent to the head of the organization’s Marketing Department.

The analysis of the collected data focuses purely on the quantitative results yielded from the survey, making no assumptions to the meaning.  The recommended strategies section of the paper draws assumptions on what orchestras could do to be more successful in the areas they indicated within the survey where they wanted better results and / or more audience engagement with their social media offerings.