For three years now I’ve used an approach I first read about by Chris Brogan that said to choose three words for the coming year that will guide you in what you do, personally and professionally instead of making a New Year’s resolution.

The basic concept is that you view things you do and the way you live through these three words which are like guiding principles.

My three words for 2012 are:

Construct

I want to work on a taking disparate elements and pulling them together into some coherent entity that has new meaning. My partner and I are having a house built across the lane from us that we will move into in 2012. Watching its construction is fascinating. All kinds of little and big pieces of wood, concrete, glass and metal that are meaningless on their own come together to create a meaningful structure for us to live in.

The graphic design work I do is similar. A blank page with components added turns it into a meaningful communication piece. Beyond that, I want to find out from other artists and those working in the arts how they pull together what they do and communicate it and with that, see a bigger, more meaningful picture.

Campfire

Since hearing Laurie Anderson say in the 1990s that “technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories,” I’ve been fascinated by how tools at our disposal can be used to do something that goes back to the earliest parts of human history: tell stories. My online endeavours will keep the notion of “campfire” at the core. Offline, I now live in a new and small community on a little island on the West coast of Canada. The stories of the people around me are fascinating and I hope to hear more of them as I meet and get to know people.

Celebrate

Celebrating what we have in our lives—personal and professional—seems like a good approach to take with our adventures. It’s very easy to be cynical and snide about so many things but it makes more sense to celebrate what’s good about our lives. Personally, I’ll be celebrating moving into my new, custom-designed and built house in 2012 and professionally, I’d like to celebrate people who work in the arts doing amazing things.

Do you have three words for 2012 that you’d like to share?

Chris Brogan wrote a piece about “are you a show or a station?” in what you put out in social media. If your program is a show you stick very closely to a narrow focus but if you’re a station you put out a variety of content.

A good example of this would be someone at an organization who tweets or does Facebook updates about all kinds of things from how they “are eating a muffin on the way to the airport to head to a conference” to linking to some industry link they found interesting and think you may too.

The first example is a station comment whereas the second is a show link.

Maybe another way of looking at it is that some people lean more to the personal sharing while others lean more to a very focused approach to what they put out into the world.

Before social media, the options for doing any of this were very limited. The best you could do is provide a written piece in a newsletter that you mailed out once or twice a year. Even there, it was probably a very formal writing style. It was expensive, too.

Finding what’s right for you or your organization is your challenge. That is, if you’ve been able to get past the first challenge which is to do anything with social media in the first place.

What is your approach?

Perhaps today, Vivian Maier would have posted her more than 100,000 photographs of everyday life in Chicago on Flickr or Facebook. In the 1950s, this was not an option.

Why did she take so many photographs when she clearly knew that hardly anyone would ever see them?

It’s always struck me that though it’s wonderful for an artist to be discovered and to have his or her worked shared, it’s really, at the core, about the process for the artist and that more genuine work is created. What happens after that is secondary.

Unless or course, you’re trying to make your living from your art, in which case, you do need to worry about sharing it and getting it out there.

What do you think of this balancing act?

–

There is a book of her images here.

Spreading Jubilation Across the Nation

Podcast #10 with Jeff Bryant (40:13) is available for download or you can listen in iTunes (you may need to view in iTunes and actually “subscribe” to see the most recent episode).

I got to know Jeff through a booking conference for the performing arts in Vancouver called Pacific Contact. Well, in fact, I got to know him first through Twitter during the conference and then after, face-to-face at an arts grant jury he was a part of.

Jeff wears many hats, but perhaps his primary hat is that of one half of the duo, The Human Statues.

I spoke with Jeff earlier in the fall as he was about set off on a very busy schedule of performing and touring about his approach to social media and why and how he uses it. I think Jeff does so much right and perhaps the biggest “right” he does is have an open (and super enthusiastic) attitude to trying different things to see what works and what doesn’t and not getting hung up about it.

We’ll do another podcast soon to hear how all the touring went and how he’s been using things such as Facebook and Twitter while on the road (very well, I’d say so far).

Jeff can be found here:

• Twitter
• Facebook (The Human Statues)
• Facebook (The Real Jeff Bryant)
• Website

There I was presenting a workshop on arts marketing and I casually asked the group of 45 artists and people working for or volunteering for arts organizations how many used a blog as part of their overall strategy. One person put their hand up!

My learnable moment had come. I was humbled and realized how easy it is to think that because I do something, others must also be aware or be even interested in doing the same. Of course this is a good lesson for all of us. So often we make the mistake of thinking that others think like we do.

Mitch Joel calls this “the market of one” and it’s a dangerous place to be because you can end up making all kinds of decisions that your audience may not be the slightest bit interested in.

Like a Don Quixote I will persist in encouraging you to consider having a blog for your arts business. Perhaps think of it, not as a blog but rather as just a part of your web site that you use to put out little updates on what you’re up to or what’s important to you or your organization.

Jazz artist Karin Plato uses a blog to post a monthly (or every so often) update about what she’s up to and what she’s thinking about. It’s a way to let her fans into her life and it’s also a great journal for her career. She stopped for awhile and people asked where she’d been.

The simplest step you could take would be to get a free blog at WordPress and link to it from your site then write something once per month about anything that matters to you.

It’s not that difficult. 

Artists L-R: Scenic Route to Alaska, Fast Moving Mountains, 100 Mile House, Michael Bernard Fitzgerald

In the performing arts world of community-based presenters, there is often talk about “how to get younger audience members?” I took part in a discussion about this at Alberta Showcase in Edmonton, Alberta.

How to market younger or what are deemed more “edgy” artists in a community concert series was the question being asked after the performances by four artists/groups that were selected by Alberta Showcase’s “Street Team.” They were 100 Mile House, Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, Fast Moving Mountains and Scenic Route to Alaska.

The discussion was between community presenters from around Alberta and the four members of the Street Team who chose these four artists to present a showcase.

If you are a community performing arts presenter you may find some of these pointers helpful should you be considering presenting younger artists or artists that you are concerned may alienate your core—older—audience members.

1. You have to get local young champions to sell the show. Having a middle-aged plus person trying to sell to a 20-something crowd simply isn’t going to work. The target group buys from their own cohort and on the recommendation of their friends. A friend will go to something simply based on a recommendation even if they don’t know anything about the artist in question.
2. Use social media. Make sure your young champion(s) are using social media. Ideal channels are Twitter and Facebook. This can also be a way of bringing in the artists to the conversation as well because more than likely, they too are using social media. It’s a conversation, not “one-way.”
3. Online, online, online. That’s where the audience for these performances live. They use links to artists sites, myspace, YouTube videos etc. Make sure you have lots of connections through to the artist(s) you are presenting.
4. Ticket prices should be capped at about $20 but you should also consider “pay what you can” or “two-for-one” offers. This is scary to a presenter. In addition, ticket sales will be last minute at the event so you need courage to wait until performance time.
5. Market this show somewhat outside of your regular series so it’s clear to your regular patrons that it’s a show they can attend but that it is clearly geared to a different group. Depending on how “edgy” it is, it could be a “come at your own risk” situation.
6. The venue could be set up differently. Tables and a more open area could be really good. People like to socialize.
7. Provide alcohol at the event!
8. Encourage the use of social media at the event itself. It’s OK! Maybe provide WiFi in the venue.
9. Try setting the show time a little later than your usual time. This will discourage some regular members from coming and send a message that this is “different.”
10. You may just annoy some of your regulars—older—audience, but you also may start to build a new audience.

Here are a few thoughts I have as someone who works in the arts.

Steve Jobs was such a strong leader and personality. I think Apple will suffer greatly without him. The magic has left the building and things will not be the same.

In small arts organizations this can happen when a dominant leader leaves and perhaps you will differ with me on this, but I think it’s fine for a person to be highly attached to an organization. It’s as it should be.

Of all the advertising Apple ever did, it’s the “Here’s to the crazy ones” ad that sticks with me. It came out at a time when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in the late 1990s and had to turn the company around (scrape it off the floor).

This video shows him talking about the thinking about branding. All arts organizations and even artists should watch this and think about how you could apply it to what your values are in your organization.

There are some who dislike Apple and its products. Not me. In general, I have enjoyed using them even when they are seen as shiny objects/gadgets. To me, it’s the closest we’ve come to beauty worked into industrial objects. It’s art being brought into the very thing we touch and work with. It’s what all our businesses should strive for, especially those of us working in the arts.

So, it’s easy to be cynical and say it was all some shiny marketing company, but deep down, I think Steve genuinely mixed art and technology within the company. For us, it means placing art within our arts businesses.

It’s too easy to forget why we are doing what we’re doing.

Here’s to the crazy ones. May they be you and me and you and you and you.

Despite rumors to the contrary, print media is not dead and here are two performing arts brochure samples that Full Bleed has worked on in the last two weeks.

The first is for the Capitol Theatre in Nelson, BC. These are some page spreads from their 24-page season brochure.

The second is for a small, volunteer-run non-profit presenter in the town of Terrace called the Terrace Concert Society.

Do you still use print media to promote?

Do you present performing arts in a small community? You could learn a lot from two dynamic (dynamos, more like it) volunteer presenters from the little town of Burns Lake (population about 2,800) in Northern British Columbia, Canada.

I had the pleasure of speaking with John and Sandra Barth who head up Lakes District Arts Council, a young arts presenting organization that puts on about seven performances each season.

What the Barths have accomplished in a few short years is quite simply remarkable and they’ve done it by being just that, remarkable.

STATS

• Market size: 2,800 local plus another 4–5,000 in region
• Average audience: 220 (50% local / 50% region)
• Most common age range of audience: 45+
• Annual Budget: Less than $60,000
• Amount spent on artist fees and artist travel per season: about $30,000
• Amount spent on Marketing: $1,500 for promo/advertising / $2,450 programs and materials

The Lakes District Arts Council has gone from zero to 220 audience members in just a few short years. The town of Burns Lake had no performing arts presenter in 2005. Along came John, a retired school district administrator and Sandra, a retired school principal with a truckload full of enthusiasm and spark.

They treat their roles as volunteer president and treasurer as though they were running a small for-profit company. Getting about 220 people to each performance in a community this small is nothing short of stunning.

But how do they do it?

They stressed—very emphatically—that it all starts with booking only the highest quality artists they can afford. Without that, you may as well not even bother. But once booked you then need to market them.

Everywhere they go in town and whoever they meet, they will discuss the upcoming season or an upcoming show and share their enthusiasm for how great it is going to be. Some people say to them “but you always say they’ll be great” to which they ask back “but they always are, are they not?” and the other person usually agrees.

They take part in local community events such as Canada Day celebrations where they hand out over 500 flyers announcing the next season or by attending the Rotary Club lunch with a young student who is there to share the impact that the service organization’s sponsorship program of the arts council’s shows has on him and his family.

The connections happen all the time. 

Sandra and John will send handwritten notes to sponsors following the performances, thanking them for their support and providing them with the positive feedback they’ve received from audiences and artists alike. They stand outside greeting and saying goodbye to audience members, as they enter and leave the performance space.

They are “marketing” all the time but whereas you may think this could become fake or perceived as phony, think again. It is always genuine because they both believe deeply in what they are doing and are incredibly passionate about it, to their core. They are so passionate and convinced of the great product they have to sell that one of their regular audience members jokes that when she sees them coming, it’s like they are promoting a religion.

Along with all the personal, one-on-one marketing activities, they also employ other more traditional methods. With print, they put out about 100 posters around town in businesses and schools and they create a season brochure which gets placed in key areas as well as always being in John and Sandra’s hands for when they run into people.

They advertise regularly in the local weekly newspaper. They have a very good relationship with the paper, which often covers stories of the concerts and prints excerpts from their contributed e-mail newsletter, promoting Arts Council and other community arts and cultural events. The follow-up stories are just one more way of building the awareness. They also advertise in other organization’s publications.

In the digital realm, they use their website for listing the upcoming season. It’s very simple, but it works for them. Their biggest tool is their email list. This is used extensively to stay in touch with members throughout the year.

At the end of every season, they start promoting next year’s season. To do this, they need to be organized enough by having the next season booked. This is common with large presenters but for small, volunteer-based presenters it can be a challenge. John and Sandra are always on the lookout for artists that would appeal to their audience. They book them well in advance of their current season ending so they can create some expectation for the next year.

Connecting the dots. It’s about personal connection. It’s connecting all the dots. It’s about recognizing the dots can connect. So many arts presenters don’t see how everything they do can connect in some way with their community. John and Sandra get this and they live it and breathe it and the results are remarkable.

Do you have any tactics you can share that work in your community?

Need some inspiration? Are you bored with your art or your job so that you’re just rehashing the same old, same old? Are you trying to market boring work? You know the answer to that.

Listen to this short talk by comedian Louis CK about what he learned from George Carlin.

Think how much better our world would be if we all were willing to move on each time, from scratch and freshness instead of the stale crap we often end up regurgitating and spewing forth.