Yesterday I talked about a couple of ways to use Twitter. Now let’s focus on Twitter and Broadway. There are four specific examples of Twitter on Broadway that I know of and I am sure there are more.1) ROCK OF AGES – An Off-Broadway musical that moved to Broadway and now is nominated for the Best Musical Tony Award. They use Twitter to show off ads and discounts. Nothing was of interest to me. I “un-followed” them pretty fast. Maybe if you live in NYC and love the show you would be interested in following them but I found the information useless.
2) NEXT TO NORMAL – Again a Best Musical nominee that started Off-Broadway then came to Washington to return to the Great White Way. They have used Twitter in a whole new way. They have the characters Tweeting their inner thoughts in order of the show and it is lasting several weeks. I think this is an interesting way to use Twitter but I really don’t get much out of it. It is being drug out so long that I am not sure where we left off and would have to go their site to see the whole story. I personally would rather just listen to the CD.
3) TONY AWARDS – This I find be a better use of Social Media. I think I like it more because it covers all the Broadway shows with focusing on the Tony Awards. I think it could go a step further with talking about when shows are going to be on TV. Like the Next to Normal cast being on the View.
4) KEN DAVENPORT – I saved the best for last. I love his tweets. He uses Twitter to talk about his day. Meetings he goes to and thoughts he has about certain issues with theatre and he posts articles. The brilliant part is he slips in things about his shows. So you don’t even realize you are getting ads sometimes. He doesn’t just send you ad after ad but slips them so you don’t even notice.
How could you use Twitter to best promote yourself or your show. Why would people want to follow you and I mean REALLY follow you. Make it interesting.
I haven't been following Rock of Ages so I can't speak to it...
ReplyDeleteHowever, I feel that the way Next to Normal is tweeting is ineffective in its approach. One of the best features Twitter has is the ability for accounts to interact... and that is completely lost by having one account for 5+ characters. The blog "Auto Straddle" has been tweeting as the L Word characters since the beginning of the 6th season of the show and by having each character as a different account they can each tweet without having to worry about slamming twitter with multiple tweets from the same account and can tweet at each other via the @ symbol.
Not to mention having to identify the character at the beginning of each tweet immediately wastes a significant amount of characters!
Great comments!
ReplyDeleteWe've been using Twitter several different ways...
ReplyDelete1. Promotion, pure and simple. We've got one feed for our theatre company itself, and depending on the show, we've been doing show-specific accounts. Right now, we've got one for our upcoming DC production, @rg2underworld. Now that we're about a month away from opening, it should start coming to life a little more...
2. Sponsorships. We've started a new level of sponsor support, a Twitter level, which doesn't cost the sponsor anything. It's a way to open a relationship with a business that either might not want to or can't afford to buy actual program ads or production sponsorships. What we do is, we trade tweets. They tweet about our production, we tweet about their business. We're each reaching new people this way, it's all virtual and essentially free. We then provide a link and logo on our site to their site and Twitter feed. If they like the response, they might be convinced to buy actual advertising later.
3. Bonus features. Last December, we produced a new script set at Christmas, and because the production schedule worked out, we were able to have two characters--with their own accounts--tweeting a conversation back and forth in real time relative to the timeframe of the play itself. It gave some extra exposition ahead of time, some hints to where the story might go afterwards. We didn't advertise it much, we left it for audiences to discover, and those that did just loved it. We plan to do that again in the future.
Of course, Twitter has also allowed us to network and meet people at theatres around the country and around the world. We're making connections and opening conversations we never would have been able to before. If it allows us to send shows to other theatres and vice versa, that would be a wonderful thing...
David. Great ideas. I love the trading Tweets! The is brilliant. Thanks for reading the blog.
ReplyDelete