Ryan Anderson dot ca

For those of you who know me or who have read this site for any length of time, it’s no surprise that I spent the first part of my career working and studying theatre and arts marketing. It’s a vaguely fascinating pursuit for me, mostly because it’s incredibly challenging, it’s an industry surrounded by creativity (and from time to time, massive pretention) and because as a marketer, it forces you to think differently. Budgets are miniscule. Theatre is no longer part of the collective culture. It requires real, honest to goodness innovation.

I recently went out to lunch with the artistic director of the theatre company that we co-founded together seven years ago. At the time, it was essentially a community theatre company with dreams of professionalism. Now, it’s a professional theatre company with a lot of good will, but not a lot of money, and it needs to grow to the next step. I agreed to take on the task of consulting on marketing the company pro bono – and I’ll be writing about the progress along the way.

So, here’s the situation. You’ve got a small company with a small, hyperlocal customer base, located in a city with a practially desolate local arts scene. Awareness is hard to achieve, but inciting action is even more difficult. The company has extremely limited financial and human resources, a lack of technical savvy, but a healthy amount of good will from the community. Also, the product is only available three to five times per year, for a few weeks at a time.

Thing is, the theatre marketing model is old and broken, and mostly handed down from marketing manager to marketing manager. Most companies are more focused on printing posters than engaging community. Very few have blogs, but many have email lists. It’s about as marketing 1.0 as you can get.

But this whole conversation thing is a lot easier now than it was even a year ago. There are a ton of tools that enable it, and some of them even have best practices associated with them. More people are active in social networks and social media… in other words, now is the perfect time for theatre to change the way it markets itself, and in many ways, the entire experience of going to the theatre.

Obviously, our first goal will be to bring the company website into the social media realm. I have a list of changes that I want to make, but I’m interested in hearing your opinions as users and communications professionals. What would you ideally like to see from a theatre company (or other event-based company’s) website? We’ll provide a link to the site of everyone who lends their expertise when we launch the final product. I’ll also be reaching out to some fellow PR and social media bloggers as well as some people in the theatre world to see if I can get some deeper insight on what Theatre 2.0 could mean.

Of course, I’ll post all of the answers I receive on the site for all to see in the spirit of sharing, just as Shel has done in his SAP study. I’m excited as to where this could lead.

If you want to see where we’re at now, the current site is a static one that’s a few years old and now was designed and maintained by volunteers. The URL is http://www.thirdwall.com.