How social media will change the way the arts present themselves

August 21, 2009 by William Shaw
Filed under: William Shaw 

I have an article in this fortnight’s Arts Professional arguing that the arts need to get to grips with the idea that a mother of a change is a’coming, and about how the arts have a chance to build a strong, resilient network in the face of coming cuts by adopting a new, generous approach:

… we have reached a tipping point. The gap between what new and old media deliver us yawning. This changes how opinions are formed and how audiences are reached. It also raises interesting questions about where high quality criticism is going to come from in the future.

On the surface there’s a simple conclusion to be reached from the arrival of the Twitterati. Arts organisations need to think more about social media. The Barbican website already has a social media networks button on its front page. Fine idea. Twitter can fill empty seats within a couple of  hours of a performace. But at the moment that’s where most people’s thinking stops. This is a mistake because the change is fundamental. Arts organisations, if big enough, used to hire press officers on the strength of their contacts book, but what does that mean now? It’s not just the dipping circulations – accelerated by the recession, newspaper advertising revenues are expected to fall by as much as 21% across the board this year. This means cuts. Emails to old contacts suddenly bounce; they’ve gone freelance. Talent is leaching away from old media. The money spent trying to get column inches is increasingly money less well spent[...] but that’s just the half of it.

Conventional arts websites have become good at doing two things. They list events coming up and sell you tickets to them. If you’re lucky there’s a blog, but it’s often pretty thin fare. These sites exist within a fast-changing internet filled with people sharing news, wit, opinion, photographs, films and music. In comparison arts websites often look staid and monumental [...] The key word is “sharing”. If arts websites want to move from the vertical model – telling people what’s good for them – to the horizontal model of using the energy of social networks, then it’s about giving stuff away. As any sociologist will tell you, the basis of any social network, real or virtual, is reciprocity.

Read the whole article on the Arts Professional website (subscription required).

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13 Comments on How social media will change the way the arts present themselves

  1. Laurence Hill on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 9:42 am

    2. Hello,

    This seems to me absolutely fundamental to the future of the arts. The change is happening and it will accelerate as the digital natives (those in their late teens and under) become the primary arts audience. Failing to engage now and developing a sound but flexible (because things change so rapidly) digital strategy, that isn’t just about push marketing, that is about dialogue and driving creative participation, means that arts organisation will become less and less relevant.

    I think that this all seems overwhelming to organisations that are frequently cash and time poor but now is the time to start this work. It’s a time to play in fact because there is no right or wrong way of doing things in the digital world, it’s all too new. Doing nothing is the only wrong thing.

    There is a new world to explore and a new way of engaging with our audience. I find that incredibly exciting.

    Laurence
    Development Manager
    Fabrica

  2. David Dodd on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 9:45 am

    3. Great, succinct post which nails the subject in my opinion. Continued engagement is going to come from providing more (and richer) content. Ticket purchase and event info will be more of a by-product, which is fine if you manage to increase hits and dwell time accordingly. But there will inevitably be some losers here…

    I work closely with many arts orgs and do actually feel that this leap in thinking, towards using their sites to offer free content (and the dissemination of said content via the social web) is moving at pace.

    Expect to see lots more arts organisations develop their online offering in such directions in the next 12 months.

    Exciting times…

    Follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daviddodd

  3. William Shaw on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 9:57 am

    4. Hi Lawrence… yes, you’ve nailed it. The thing that is both scary and liberating is the question now in people’s minds – “what do we need art insitutions for now?” There is an answer to that question, but the future for them is going to be very different.

    I’m a big fan of Fabrica…

  4. William Shaw on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 10:01 am

    5. Thanks David. That’s very good to hear. I think performance and exhibition – and therefore ticket sales – must be at the heart of what arts organisations do, but they also need to think of their social media engagement not as a marketing excercise, but as something that is just as fundamental to their artistic endeavour. This blurs the boundaries between what organisations do and how they talk about it.

  5. Michael Hooper on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 2:35 pm

    6. In work in several fields within the arts and I absolutely agree that the free economy has had an impact on the way the arts work.
    Partly, the difficulty is funding the change from one way of working to another. There are several components to this difficulty (and I speak here as a music promotor):
    One is finding the funds within budgets.
    The second is maintaining the funds in the face of scant interest from some audiences. Sound and Music is a fine example. http://www.soundandmusic.org/ Having setup a new website that facilitates the kinds of interactions of which you write, there remains a real question about the willingness of audiences to participate in this kind of social media. The arts aren’t the same as other aspects of life and I wouldn’t expect audiences to engage with each other in the same way. I don’t think it’s a matter of conservatism, since I know many within the industry that are anything but, and who are active on facebook and twitter about all aspects of their life except their artistic endeavours.
    Partly, there is a difficulty in changing the way that people react to the arts, since that experience has in the past scarcely included written thoughts (aside from those whose profession is writing about the arts), which sets it aside from the fields that have most benefited from the free economy.

    My own research is partly published on my blog (click my name, above). It’s academically rigorous, fully cited, and presents real and original research. It’s also research for which I am entirely unpaid and which costs me money. I continue to publish other research in more traditional fora (journals etc…), but absolutely see engaging with new media is a way of defining the objects of inquiry in a way that opens new frameworks for research. I do the research because it documents music that I believe sounds exciting, engaging and thrilling.
    And here’s the point: arts organizations are always going to have a hard time with social media, since at it’s best it is still content driven, and it simply isn’t possible to translate the content of a painted painting, less still a musical performance into words, digital images or audio files.

    Of course, having devoted thousands of hours and over a decade of full time tertiary student to honing my technique (as a performer, as a researcher) it’s hard to change to a new way of working when there is so little incentive to do so. I do mean monetary incentive to the extent that to engage fully with society one needs a level of income. I also mean incentive in terms of an investment in terms of time, energy and thoughts into the work that practicing artists undertake (in my case a blurring of performance/research).

    To a significant extent I would welcome the opportunity to deploy my skills more widely and in collaboration with organizations and corporations outside the traditional arts realm.
    It is more important than ever that those with resources (financial and otherwise) become more active in connecting with the arts, particularly those arts which do not seek to provide comfort, consolation and distraction, but which present challenging, engaging, confronting, life-altering experiences.

    My bias is towards the kind of music that has traditionally carried significant cultural capital. There is not particular reason for this, it’s simply what I enjoy. I do feel the need to caution that my response doesn’t fit the model the is used by many artists who engage in, say, advertising, film, fashion, graphic design and so forth.

    Finally, the RSA is to be commended for its willingness to host fora such as this one, which are typically filled with engaging, interesting posts and comments.

  6. phil korbel on Sun, 23rd Aug 2009 8:42 pm

    7. All good stimulating stuff one and all – but let’s try to pull the circle round. Surely a full embracing of social media by arts orgs means a dialogue between artist/producer and audience that moves way beyond performance/product. If we then inject ‘ecology’ into that mix the potential for moving minds and magnifiying impacts/changes on that front has to excite – and then some.

    Back on a generic ‘arts’ [sans ecology] front – part of the trck has to be to get the arts organisers to become reporters of their own work, in a way appropriate to social media. Interviews with artists, vox pops of audiences, behind the scenes reportage – all of this must become second nature.

  7. William Shaw on Mon, 24th Aug 2009 8:07 am

    8. Yep. I agree very strongly with that, Phil.

  8. William Shaw on Mon, 24th Aug 2009 8:27 am

    9. Hi Michael: “Having setup a new website that facilitates the kinds of interactions of which you write, there remains a real question about the willingness of audiences to participate in this kind of social media.”

    This is an interesting comment… suggesting it’s not so simple as the social media evangelists suggest. Do you think this stumbling block applies to any forms in particular? Is it a question of the discipline people are coming from? In the fields of media arts there seems to be a more profound level of participation, but yes, I think there is generally a long way to go to build an audience’s levels of expectation about what social media means to artforms too.

    http://www.soundandmusic.org looks excellent.

  9. Michael Hooper on Mon, 24th Aug 2009 10:18 am

    10. Certainly I am keen to participate and I have posted reviews, comments and articles on various music-related websites. The difficulty is that there isn’t enough participation to make it work, and participation isn’t something that can be imposed (practically difficult and hardly the point), which means that a review posted on soundandmusic gets buried, but one published in more traditional media gets read. Sound and music’s interesting, since clearly there is understanding that social media is the way (has been for some time…), and clearly significant resources have been devoted to realizing the website. My impression as a visitor there is that fewer resources have been devoted to dissolving the lines between the website and the organization’s activities.
    I am also not sure how much people want the staff of such organizations to express opinions about the music with which it connects. Nor that the staff are hired with the capacity to contribute in that way (which is not to say that there expertise aren’t considerable).
    I think in areas where there is a risk that a comment will marginalize those who hold the pursestrings is one that prevents participation. Also any area that is in the business of selling ‘personal experience’, as many of the arts are. I think that much of the training in the arts is towards excellence in practice rather than in writing about practice (and I am not sure I want my painters spending time to become hyper-articulate in other media, since many of them are extraordinarily communicative in their chosen medium).
    So, is the question here about artists? or about arts administrators?
    How many artists want those doing the admin to be representing their art in writing? (itself a privileged medium, if only because google searches words)
    How many people who are excellent at administration are good practising artists?

  10. Laurence Hill on Mon, 24th Aug 2009 10:24 am

    11. It’s really interesting to read a discussion on this.

    Two things that I wanted to pick up on-

    Engaging the audience and getting them to participate is a challenge I think. What I’ve done at Fabrica is find a core group of people who, through Twitter mostly, I’ve identified as the people who are engaged, who retweet us, who ask questions, who are demonstrably fans though none of them work in the arts. I arranged a meet with them (they all jumped at the opportunity) in which we discussed that very issue and they were full of ideas, which I won’t go into here but really inspired me. The group will meet again, I’m planning that it’ll be a regular thing and I think that the question of engaging the audience will be the focus. A sense of playfulness is key, its certainly what came over from them. To that end we are organising a couple of social media based games which will take place during our autumn show. They’re very simple games but I believe they’ll deliver a lot in terms of encouraging dialogue with us but also contact between our followers that may not be aware of each other.

    The second was Phil’s point about arts organisations becoming reporters of their own work. I believe that’s absolutely key. What’s become more and more clear to me recently is that our audience are interested in process. They want to know what happens behind the scenes. That’s what I’ve tried to make the focus of our Twitter stream, especially during installation periods. I’ve also been using Audioboo to deliver short behind the scenes chats with the artist, project manager, director and others who’ve been working on our current show trying to build up a picture of how an exhibition comes together. All of these things work on so many levels making the organisation more outward facing, audience development and, almost as a by-product, marketing.

    I’m documenting all of this on a blog – the link on my name will lead you to it. I’m not an academic or a writer and the blog is really about discovery, thought and process.

    If you’re interested you can also follow Fabrica on Twitter @FabricaGallery or me @laurencehill

  11. phil korbel on Mon, 24th Aug 2009 9:30 pm

    12. damn you Lawrence ;) – now I’ll realy have to get an i-phone just to do audioboo.

    More seriously though, as a [former] arts broadcaster now in the thick of community media, the trick for the arts orgs in doing their own reporting is going to be credibility. One hint of old style PR spin and the audience will be lost… As close a proximation of gritty objectivity [and knowing the audience] will be central to success in this.

    [and now to go look up Fabrica]

  12. William Shaw on Tue, 25th Aug 2009 8:39 am

    13. @Lawrence:

    “The second was Phil’s point about arts organisations becoming reporters of their own work. I believe that’s absolutely key”

    My point is that they have to go even further than that. As the old media loses its power they have to start being generous about becoming reporters for not only their own work, but the work of other organisations too in order to become a robust network, and in order to create a new standard for arts criticism online.

    The decline in funding that starts from next year will mean that arts organisations will need to find new types of resourcefulness; being strongly networked through this generosity will help them survive and prosper.

  13. Laurence Hill on Tue, 25th Aug 2009 9:58 am

    14. @ phil LOL – did you really need an excuse to get an iphone? If so I’m happy to have provided one.

    @ William I absolutely agree that arts organisation will need to be strongly networked and I want to make Fabrica central to that process. In fact I’m supposed to be writing a funding bid right now with that as one of its central themes. Better get on with it.

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