Ryan Anderson dot ca

As many of you know, I’ve always been involved with the local arts community.  Sadly, with the demands of a day job being what they are, I’ve not had as much time to devote as I would like – but the one piece of involvement that I have held onto is being on the board of the Ottawa Fringe Festival.

The Fringe, for the uninitiated, is a theatre festival where local, national and international performers converge, and over 10 days, put on over 300 performances (many, many more in some markets) and 100% of their box office takings go to the artists themselves.  The festival itself serves to organize venues, schedules and publicity, but the actual content of the shows is left completely up to the groups that are lucky enough to be selected.

Now, you may think that a not-for-profit theatre festival taking place in Ottawa where all of the box office proceeds go to the artists must be rolling around in thousand-dollar bills and diving into silos of gold boullion.  The reality, however, is that any charitable organization needs to squeeze every last cent they can out of a dollar, and reaching new audiences by buying full page newspaper ads is not even a consideration.

That’s why this year, the festival will be making a major change in focus to include a number of social media marketing initiatives to reach new communities, make new friends, and build the visibility of the festival both locally and on the international circuit.

Blogging. It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations don’t blog about what they’re doing.  We made the conscious decision this year to hire a community manager who would blog not only about what we’re doing, but about what our performers are doing, what our sponsors are doing, and what our audience thinks of the shows.  We have two community managers manning the blog this year, and no doubt other staff and volunteers will get involved as the festival kicks off.

Commenting & Feedback. We started allowing comments on individual show pages last year with some trepidation.  We were afraid of companies trying to sabotage one another, performers complaining about bad reviews… and there was not one issue.  This year, audience members are free to review shows directly on the site, for all the world to see.

Facebook. We’ve had a Facebook group and fan page for a while, but this year, thanks to Refresh Partners, we also have an application that allows users to search for shows they want to see, share it with their friends, and buy tickets directly.  When you select a show you want to see, it sends a notice to your newsfeed, letting friends know the shows you’re attending and when.

Flickr. When you’re dealing with an event that is fairly hard to explain in words, photos are a powerful way of conveying emotion.  As always, we have an official Fringe photographer, but this year, we’re lucky enough to have a photographer who is doubling as community manager and reaching out to local photography enthusiasts to set up a public photography contest for the Festival.  Every day, a winner is chosen from the public Flickr pool, their photo printed and posted at the Fringe tent, and linked online – and the photographer submitting the best photo of the festival, as chosen by our judges, is awarded a gift certificate for dinner at a local restaurant.

Video. A few years ago, wrestling with the idea of video was next to impossible.  Connection speeds, technology, processing tools and know-how was far out of reach, but now that it’s trivial to take a video on a cell phone and upload it to Youtube, there’s no reason for organizations NOT to integrate video into their web strategy.  This year, in addition to gonzo interviews from the festival we’re partnering with local startup Eventbots to place a speaker’s corner-style video booth at the Fringe Courtyard.  Videos are going to be posted on the Ottawa Fringe site, on Facebook and on Youtube to give people a first-hand account of what the Fringe is about.

Real Life – the ultimate social network. At the end of the day, the festival is about art and people – and that’s something that can ultimately only be experienced in person.  Our goal this year was to put ourselves out there, and make some friends.  To solidify those friendships, we’re holding a Social Media Wine and Cheese on the first Saturday of the festival (June 21), where we can meet with members of the community, discuss ways that we can better engage with local communities and improve visibility for the upcoming years.  If you’re an Ottawa blogger, and want to attend, just shoot me an email to ryan (at) ryananderson dot ca, and I’ll give you some more details.

In theatre terms, what we’re doing is a bit of a social media dress rehearsal.  Some parts have been sloppy, some have been surprisingly polished, but the organization has learned every step of the way and sometimes, that’s the way you have to do things.  At the end of this festival, we’re hoping to have a block of clay that we can shape into something that will last for years to come.

If you’re in Ottawa, I hope you’ll join us at the Festival, running June 19 – 21 in the heart of Downtown Ottawa.

Regardless of the field you work or live in, ignorance of what you do or the community you participate is maddening, depressing and disheartening.  It’s what causes rifts in organizations, and is why communicators don’t get along with lawyers, why creatives don’t get along with suits, and why engineers don’t get along with… well, anyone.

Even more infuriating than ignorance, however, is when that ignorance is coupled with opinion and backed up with insistence.  For some reason, I’ve been coming across this type of person more often recently.  Any rational argument I could respond to with examples or statistics, but the ignorant insister doesn’t deal in such sundry as data and proof.  This is the type of person whose line of argument is based on unsupported opinion and anecdote.

“Social media doesn’t work.”

This phrase is like nails on a blackboard to me, because it’s the first warning that I’m going to have to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about the thing that they want to argue about.

Usually, when I dig deeper as to the meaning behind this broad generalized statement, that lack of understanding comes out very quickly.  First of all, to say that social media “doesn’t work” shows that they’ve already missed the point, fully and completely.  Social media works by virtue of the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it – that I’m connected with like-minded people on Twitter and that I make plans with friends on Facebook.  What they mean to say, of course, is that social media isn’t an effective way of creating value for a company, and once I can guide them to this much more rational thought, it’s much easier to point out why they’re wrong.

More often than not, their reasoning is based on one of two things.  Either a) they don’t use social media, and therefore believe that no one else does, or b) they’ve heard people complain about being spammed on Facebook or something of the like, and have extrapolated that to mean that everyone hates every kind of social media campaign through any technology.

As social media “early adopters,” it is, of course, our duty to educate others on community, technology and the culture that pervades it, but sometimes, when faced with a case like the ones I’m describing, it’s best just to walk away.  Sadly, I lack whatever gene it is that would allow me to walk away from a baseless argument, and it causes me to engage in more angering conversations than I care to admit.  Call it a character flaw.

In many way, these arguments are like someone who walked through Chinatown in the summer on garbage day and then spent the rest of his life convinced that the Chinese are “a smelly people.”  As human beings, it’s in our nature to make snap judgements based on little information.  If cro-magnon man spent too much time wondering if the sabre tooth tiger was an enemy or a friendly kitty we probably wouldn’t have made the cut for natural selection.

Of course, it goes both ways.  Assuming that a social approach is key for every business because of your own personal success or affinity for blogging is of equal ignorance.  The wise man knows what he does not know.  The people I have the most respect for are those who admit their lack of knowledge and approach social media from a neutral standpoint and a desire to learn.  They will be successful because they don’t come into something they don’t understand with preconceived notions, and can therefore be objective about how to integrate social media into their business practices, if they do at all.

Both obstinance and zealotry are dangerous traits, and both are derived from ignorance.  Be wary of both, in yourself and others, and you’ll have a better chance of arriving at “understanding” with whatever you do.

I’ve got a lot of geeky friends. In fact, most of my friends are a geek in some way, shape or form. They’re programmers and designers, but they’re also music geeks, theatre geeks, language geeks, running geeks, media geeks and so on, and for the most part, it’s a big part of why I enjoy being around them. They go out of their way to make themselves into experts in something, whether it’s completely esoteric or utterly practical. It will come as no shock to anyone who has ever met me that I’m a geek too – and it makes me a much better PR guy.

Being good at PR or marketing requires a thirst for knowledge that I would consider above the average. It means more than just knowing how to do your job – it means knowing about technology, about history, about the media, about sociology and a million other tiny little pieces before you can really create anything that comes close to resembling a “strategy.”

Consider the game of chess. A very simple game, but one that requires an intimate knowledge of not only the rules, but the intricacies of the pieces. To be any good at chess means a lot more that just knowing that bishops move diagonally and pawns only move forward – it takes knowing how each of the pieces relates to one another, and how all of the individual pieces comes together to make something much stronger than they are individually.

It’s said quite often that public relations, marketing or advertising is “not about the tools.” That’s a fair statement, but at a much higher level, the profession requires such an intense mastery of the tools – especially when it comes to social media – that it’s not sufficient just to have a textbook understanding of the tools. In order to be a grandmaster, you have to experience them on a level that cannot be read or explained. That’s where being a geek comes in, and that thirst for knowledge and personal depth – no matter how obscure interacting on Twitter or maintaining a podcast may seem to friends outside the industry – becomes a point of differentiation between “practitioner” and “expert.”

For those who are new to the industry, or trying to break in – your best investment in yourself, and ultimately your future tax bracket, is to be a geek. Dedicate yourself to learning about the whole, but spend the extra time understanding each of those moving parts. Your friends might think you’re a bit odd, but the benefit you provide to a future employer will be well worth it.