The Final Act: The Time Commitment of Social Media

What are you thinking? Diane (Antoinette LaVecchia) tries to keep it together as her client Mitchell (Brik Berkes) threatens to flush his career (and her commission) down the toilet over a crazy little thing called love in The Little Dog Laughed, playing in the Portland Center Stage Studio through June 15. Behind the scenes blogs, information and tickets are available online at http://www.pcs.org/.

This blog post concludes our discussion with Trisha Pancio, publications and public relations manager for Portland Center Stage.

Some employers are concerned about the time required to engage in social media. What is your response to this concern?
Well, yes, if you’re just blogging about your belly button lint or what you had for breakfast, then that would be a huge waste of time, of course. But if you are creating content that is of direct relevance to your customers, sharing and reinforcing the brand message, and developing relationships with potential lifetime patrons, I can’t think of any time that could be better spent, especially in service and relationship-based industries (like entertainment or real estate or law or insurance or whatever.) Let’s say it was an hour a day three times a week that key members of your company committed to blogging. And each time you sat down to blog, you framed the question, “What could our patrons most benefit from knowing about us right now?” And you answered that question in three sentences or 30, whatever came to mind. I guarantee it would be time better spent than your coffee break, rearranging your files, checking the news headlines, whatever else it is that you waste three hours a week of your work life doing.

Let’s give an example. My future mother-in-law is trying to build a practice as a parenting coach. She has some contracts with the state for court-mandated kind of things, but she would also like to build her practice with clients who are choosing her services to help them with tricky transitions in their children’s lives. She can afford some advertising, but she’s having a hard time getting people to trust that she’s a qualified professional (because she’s new to the market). I told her, “Create a blog. Have a parenting tip of the day. Share your successes and failures from your court-mandated work. And then join sites like Café Mama and other places where parents meet seeking advice. Become a trusted voice (and a useful and entertaining one.) It’s cheaper than all the alternatives and allows people to sample, in a less intimidating way, how they might be able to benefit from her services.” I don’t know any businesses that couldn’t benefit from establishing themselves as a trusted voice in their industry.

The caveat: Building your blog readership is just as important as creating content. Yes, you need good content, but if nobody’s reading it then you are wasting your time. So maybe half an hour of that three hours a week should be spent finding out how you can build invitations to your blog into your other business practices (and on other social media). Is it on your business card? In your email signature? Are you “adding” friends to your MySpace account regularly (friends of your current friends is always a good starting place that doesn’t feel “spammy.”) Do you participate in the websites, blogs and listservs that are relevant to your industry? Somebody in the company’s got to be officially tasked with doing that. Are you requesting reciprocal links? And most importantly, does your blog site also contain an easy path for people to go from avid reader to avid consumer of your service? That’s the crux of the issue. In my experience, people are really good at either one or the other but not always both.

If you got great content, but you’re not routinely reminding people of how the content relates to what you do and inviting them to become a customer, you are diminishing the power of your work. It can be very subtle — a standard series of links at the bottom of each blog where people can find out more about you and your business. But it needs to be there.

Right now I’m working on the “increasing viewership” problem on our MySpace, Flickr and YouTube pages. We have great content there, but we haven’t invited enough people to participate in it yet. So that will be a summer project – whom do we approach and how do we invite their participation on our channel/photostream/page in a way that is honest and authentic (and most importantly, entertaining from the word “go.”)

Trisha, thank you for taking the time to share your insights with the readers of The PR Post!

Readers, do you have any questions for Trisha? Are there any suggestions you would like to make for improving Portland Center Stage’s social media? Do you have compliments to pass along?

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Act III of IV: The Benefits of “Showing Your Warts”

This blog post continues our discussion with Trisha Pancio, publications and public relations manager for Portland Center Stage.

People have left many comments on your blogs — both good and critical. I was particularly impressed to see that you did not remove critical posts; in fact, you responded to them and when possible, you made changes. Your commenting policy and responses to comments reflects best practices in blogging. Did you encounter organizational resistance to being so transparent? Do you have advice for overcoming the fear of public criticism?
Transparency was a huge reason for the shift to a blog-based site actually. Chris is very committed to the organization having no “man behind the curtain.” From my point of view, I think the criticism and the way we handle it publicly says more about who we are as a company than any carefully orchestrated press release ever could. It makes us authentic and makes the good commentary we receive more trustworthy, because it is not “handpicked.”

Not everybody likes everything. And sometimes we get it wrong. Owning up to it is the most important thing we could do. You know, it’s the “show your warts” principle.

Having said that, an interesting side benefit of allowing some of the more virulent commentary to stay on our site is that it REALLY energizes people who passionately liked the show but maybe didn’t feel the need to speak up. You may have noticed that there was a comment on the page for our production of “Sometimes a Great Notion” where the commenter said, “Less than 2% of people will like this play.” Within a few days of that post, we had several people posting impassioned rave reviews directly countering his comment. I seriously doubt as many people would have taken the time to write (even if they really liked the show) if they hadn’t had the prick of that one bad comment. In the end, we ended up with more positive patron reviews for “Sometimes a Great Notion” than for any other show we’ve done.

Readers, feel free to share your questions and comments with Trisha this week.

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Act II of IV: Interview with Trisha Pancio of Portland Center Stage

[Photo and caption from the Portland Center Stage blog: Brent Harris and Darius Pierce both received Drammy Awards for their outstanding performances in The Beard of Avon.]

You have two blogs: a general Portland Center Stage blog and Chris’ Blog, which is by your artistic director, Chris Coleman. Who are the audiences for your blogs? Why did you decide to keep the blogs separate?
Technically they are the same blog (the “Chris’ blog” content rolls in the PCS blog content). There are a couple of reasons for having a place to pull out just Chris’ posts though. First, he is the face of the organization and the chief personality that people feel they “know” from PCS. So where some people may not want to read every post from PR or Development or the costume shop, most want to know what’s going on inside the head of our fearless leader. Plus, Chris loves telling everyone he knows to “read my blog!” (he even has it in his email signature), so having his posts pull out as a separate subset that people can subscribe to directly makes it easier for the people he connects with in the community to find the blog and get to know him better.

When did you launch the PCS blog? Do you think many theatre organizations are using social media?
That’s a really good question. Theatre Vertigo has been pretty technology forward in how they handle their site — they had a pretty well trafficked bulletin board style site for a few years before we got in the game. But they are a small avant-garde ensemble with a couple of web-guru ensemble members, with a small but highly loyal “edge-seeking” audience. Artists Rep dabbled a bit in blogging on their MySpace page for a while before I left that organization but never on the main website. I believe next season they are planning to launch a semi-weekly email from their artistic director, which will have blog style content (though in the more old-school e-newsletter style format).

But I think it is fair to say that we are the first arts institution to completely reframe our website as a blog, and we are certainly making the most prolific use of the blogging and social media technology at this point.

We re-launched our site with the blogging focus in October of 2007. So it is really still under a year old. Fun fact though: Our average number of unique visitors per day has almost tripled over the numbers the traditional website was getting, and the average visitor views 3.2 pages, which I take to be a good sign.

Readers, feel free to share your questions and comments with Trisha this week.

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Portland Center Stage Blazes the Path for Theatre Organizations

Portland Center Stage not only won several Drammy awards last night (see Oregon Live’s coverage), but it is also a social media pioneer for theatre organizations. It has two blogs, a MySpace page, a Flickr page, and a YouTube channel.

Trisha Pancio, publications and public relations manager for Portland Center Stage, agreed to share her experiences with us. She will also be a guest speaker this summer for an advanced writing class at our Turnbull Center in Portland.

Due to the length of the interview, I’m releasing the answers to her interview questions as a four-part series, which will unfold daily.

How is Portland Center Stage’s use of social media changing the way theatres connect with their patrons and community?

The biggest change has been how PCS artists and staff think about their role in the theater. Before, backstage crew and admin staff had a sort of “ivory tower” mentality, that what they did was invisible to the customer. The only people who routinely connected directly with the audience were the box office and the actors.

Now, we have the costume designer posting sketches and requesting ideas for where to find stuff, we have directors posting daily rehearsal blogs, and the different departments (literary, development) can update their own pages and distribute information to the public in real time (and in their own authentic voice, rather than in a sanitized “corporate” voice).

As a result, we’ve had patrons commenting with their reviews of shows (of course), but we’ve also had comments requesting information about where to find a particularly yummy pair of shoes that an actor wore or commenting on our MySpace with personal experiences they had after a performance. This humanizes the art-making process in a really interesting way.

One of the things I like about our forays into social media is our ability to get new information and special opportunities out FAST. If we’ve just had the chance to get a great speaker to come in after a show and talk about the themes of the play, let’s say, but it can only happen tomorrow night, I can put it out on our blog and on our MySpace page and know that we’ll reach a good segment of our audience right away and in a space where they are thinking about “where to go and what to do.”

We’ve also been focusing on how to make the Portland Center Stage experience entertaining from the very first minute that we touch a potential patron (rather than saying, “Trust us, it will be entertaining when you get here”). The casual tone and viral nature of social media has let us play with creating content that relates to the plays but is entertaining in its own right.

Thank you, Trisha! I want to thank PCS’ sponsors for their support of the arts: Key Private Bank, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Work for Art, The Mark Spencer Hotel, American Express, KATU Channel 2 (where I once interned), 101.9 Kink FM, and Oregon Live (my home page). Readers, feel free to post comments to Trisha anytime this week.

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