Fringe in Full Swing

So my Capital Fringe Festival show, The Diary of a Dancer, is in rehearsal in NYC. Down here in DC I am starting the marketing. I started a Facebook group and Mary has her own Facebook page. You should add her by clicking here. There will be some fun updates I am sure.

Postcards just arrived! Thanks to my talented fellow Fringe producer, Anne Kohn. I wrote about her theatre company a while back, No Rules Theatre Company and now they are doing a Fringe show too.

The biggest challenge we face is our 1st show has a crappy timeslot (Saturday July, 11th at 11am). I am hoping we can sell out that first show maybe by giving something away??? Anyone have any ideas on how to make the first and earliest show sell out? Give me a shout or leave a comment.

The Oscars, Anything to Learn?

The Oscars are by far the Creme del la Crème of the awards shows. They, like the Tonys, have had declining viewership over the last several years. The Oscars took it head on and tried to figure what their problems were and how to fix them. First, they added more movies to the Best Picture category. They noticed that the Best Picture nominees were often leaving out some of the year’s biggest blockbuster movies. Should we add more Plays and Musicals to the Best Play and Musical categories respectively? I am not sure that would solve our problem. Usually our blockbusters do make it onto the nominee list.

Another thing the Oscars did was embrace social media. With their average viewership age at 49.5 they tried to use social media to accomplish a couple of things. The Oscars streamed the nominees live on the Facebook page bringing in 170,000 unique visitors. Then there was my favorite the Oscar iPhone application. You could pick your predictions then see how you faired. They also upgraded the site this year. The goals of all this was to of course get viewership up. But to also enhance the experience and hopefully make people continue the conversations after the awards show was over.

This was the best year for the Hollywood Box Office so let’s see how that relates to their new strategies and lets borrow what we can.

Twitter Lives On

This week if you “tweet” you have probably seen the LORT Twitter list that was posted by Yale MFA Student Devon Smith. Theatres that did well on the list are tweeting about how they did and I am sure the lower ranking ones are waking up and taking a real hard look at how they are doing not only with Twitter but social media in general. In the past month, four very smart people from the leaderships of various companies have come to me and said show me how to use twitter. I am not the best tweeter but I understand the basics and frankly once you practice it just isn’t that hard.

Number four on the “LORT Twitter Index” was Arena Stage. I think they are probably the best in the DC area about social media. They have a blog that is constantly updated and contains exciting stuff. They have YouTube channel that has great videos and is very well branded. They have a great Twitter account according to the list and most importantly they interact with their audience through these forms of media.

In a week they will be having a scavenger hunt that will be organized through Twitter and Facebook. It will take people on a journey through DC and I would imagine to the Lincoln Theatre where their production of The Fantasticks will be playing. The prize is actually a great one too, four tickets to opening night of The Fantasticks and a restaurant gift certificate for four.

Social media is more than just having a Twitter account and Facebook page but knowing how to take those tools and use them to interact with your audience.

Traveling and Seeing Friends

Yesterday I talked about seeing other theatres and setting up meetings. Today I also encourage you to see friends you wouldn’t normally see when you travel. Go through your Facebook and find that friend you never have time to see when you are in their city and make time and see them.

I have had two such meetings and it is not only great to see old friends but help keep your network expanded. You never know what great things could come from meeting up with old friends.

Yes, You Are A Brand

Everyone here is a brand. We may think of social media as a way to kill time at work, but with this new form of connection moving in all around us, we are actually building brands of ourselves for our peers. Ever since I started accepting my Missouri Thespian students as friends on Facebook, I started to edit my wall. I keep the sexual stuff and profanity off my Facebook. I don’t want that representing me. I am more careful about the pictures posted and things I post, too. My Facebook, Twitter and Blog all represent me.

Some people ask, "Why not just set the privacy to high?" Because that is not me. I want to be open and honest with the people that want to “follow” me. You may not know it, but you are building a brand of yourself with every post. People learn more and more about you. Their opinion is shaped by what they read and the information they can gather online.

I am not trying to scare you into not posting, but just trying to make you think about every post and making sure you represent yourself to the public. Everything you put online could end up on the front page of the NY Times. So just be more careful about what you are representing.

Twitter

I have talked about Facebook and the why I like it so much on this blog. Now it is time to talk about the other big social networking / media site Twitter. Twitter is new to me. I have had an account for 3 months. But I am just now learning how to use it. Lots of people use it as a Facebook wall and just write what they are doing throughout the day. But others are starting to really get a lot out of it.

The updates of your day are really boring unless you are a star or someone I am extremely interested in like Ken Davenport. A friend of mine said this weekend that Twitter won’t be around in a year. At which point we made a bet. If Twitter is more popular I win if it less popular then he wins. The hard part about this bet is that I can not find the number of Twitter users today.

When you start with Twitter it might take a while to find it useful. You might start to follow a lot of people that you really find useless. But stick with it. Un-follow them and work to build the right Twitter group to follow. Then you will find it useful.

Theatres are still figuring out how to use Twitter. Some just send out discounts and specials. (I un-follow those people fast.) Others are having important people in their company talk about what they are doing. Those I think are the most interesting. Who wouldn’t want an insight of the company they enjoy. Arena Stage just offered free tickets in Tweet. I think this was to test how many of the followers really read the tweets. I would be curious of the results. In my own experience the followers that act on tweets is very small but then again I am not giving away free tickets.

If you find Twitter useful please write a comment about how you use Twitter it could be to just get news or just follow friends. And don’t forget to follow me at @nderaj.

Building a Network

There is more to Facebook than meets the eye. When I first started using Facebook I was afraid that it would take up to much time to maintain and not be worth the extra time. Boy was I wrong! I think Facebook is one of the best tools to build a network and stay in touch with people and in some cases maybe even reach out to people you don’t know. My good friend Ed Reggi told me he had a goal of a certain number of Facebook friends everyday. I laughed because I thought it was so ridiculous. What good could come of having that many friends on Facebook? People you didn’t even know.

Well, it was only a couple of weeks later I started to set goals for myself. Granted I know most of the people but I do add people I don’t know, people that have similar interests. Why? Well Reggi, who is now close to 4,000 friends, has access to all those people. That is more than a lot of local theatres mailing lists.

When you have a large network like that you can do lots of things fast. Promote a show. Raise money. And the more active you are the better to keep your “audiences” attention. I use a couple of different methods of keeping my network. The first one I used was Facebook. Then I started to use Twitter. And now I use this blog to maybe reach more people. What are ways you could build your network and what would you use it for?

Are we friends on Facebook yet?

Surround Yourself with the Best

We are in a collaborative business. We work with lots of various people on one project. There are actors, directors, designers, stage managers, marketers, and many other people.

By surrounding yourself with the best you share knowledge and become even smarter. At a previous job I got the opportunity to hire someone that could, in part, assist me with budgeting. It was an obvious choice for me. I had an intern two years earlier who was a wiz with budgets and excel. By having her in my office things got done faster and there was more time to do other projects that I had been putting off.

Another example is Pride and Prejudice, a show I am helping produce. The lead producer wanted to know more about social media and how it could help spread the word and raise money for her show. Right away I knew two people that she should talk to. In a couple of emails a conference call was set and she got to listen to valuable information about what was going on in social media and how it could be used to help her. One of those people has a small empire of followers on Twitter and Facebook. The other has yet to make a website to reference, but he is a very smart grad student that is looking at how producers can fund a show with a lot of small investors as appose to a few large investors.

A friend once told me I was the most important person in his network. That was one of the best complements I could have gotten. We are good friends and I and I know we would be friends no matter what, but we both love to get together and brainstorm. Some exciting ideas come from those sessions that we both use.

So surround yourself with the smartest people and bring as many ideas to the table as you can get. Who knows what may come?