Results tagged “Twitter” from Life's a Pitch

First, a story: Once upon a time, there lived a fair(ly) young princess who blogged about classical music PR from her Happily Ever Harlem tower. On one particular morning, she used a word to describe a Dragon of Industry that angered him. In retrospect, a less cavalier synonym would have conveyed her point, but it was too late: the Evil Wizard Internet had swept up the post and the Google Alert Fairy had delivered The Word to everyone who would read it. Now the Dragon protects his cave, because the Blog Princess cannot be trusted and may actually be a Poison-Apple-Wielding Blog Witch in disguise. They would all basically live happily ever after, but not together. The End.

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MySpace exploded on the scene when I first started working at IMG Artists. Each department got an intern, and while I was looking through Old Fashioned Resumes, a colleague of mine was clicking through MySpace pages. "We'll learn more from here than we will from those resumes," he advised. Onto MySpace I went, and lo and behold, there we had potential employees double-fisting 40s, girls kissing girls, and lots of...*exciting*...Halloween costumes. Not ideal for a publicity intern, although I guess that depends on how one defines "publicity." For those of you who don't know, unlike Facebook and like Twitter, MySpace pages are viewable by the public; that is, you don't have to be a member yourself to see what people have posted there. While Facebook is private, so many people have joined at this point (and can have secret accounts) that "private" is essentially public.

Around this time, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc. featured stories about how Facebook and MySpace were affecting job interviews and college admissions. Students would spend a lifetime building the perfect college application only to have their young life's work squandered by some choice language on a friend's Facebook wall. Similarly, artists, publicists and managers can spend their days putting forth the best possible image for themselves and their clients, but one Tweet about hating a venue, one blog post about a journalist, and everything we've all be working for can be spoiled. And as a publicist friend once e mailed to me, "I can make my client look good, get her on TV, protect her image, but I can't help her if she wants to Tweet about True Blood getting her all hot and being a metaphor for her life." True Blood, the Downfall of Us All. (Which reminds me: Eric the Vampire, c-a-l-l me.)

I follow Imogen Heap on Twitter because, while I don't love her music, I think she or someone on her team is a marketing genius. My fellow ArtsJournal blogger Andrew Taylor over at The Artful Manager writes about the success of her most recent album here. Consider yourself warned, Heap: I fully plan on stealing you Flickr album art competition at some point. Yesterday, though, Imogen Heap got my publicist hackles up when she Tweeted this:

Gonna see a doctor tmw morning. Feeling pretty shocking but my throat is having the most trouble. Not good I'm afraid. Not good at all :( x 3:49 AM Nov 8th from Tweetie

Maybe we in the classical music industry are just more (spoiler alert) conservative than other music industries, but I couldn't help but think of the ramifications if, say, soprano Danielle de Niese had posted this same thing on her Twitter feed. Her manager would have gotten twenty phone calls, probably within an hour. The Times writers who follow her on Twitter would probably have mentioned something to the Arts, Briefly editors. Her publicist would have had to do damage control for a week. Rumors that she was getting surgery would have started flying.

Imogen Heap did, in fact, cancel her concerts. She Tweets:

I'm so so sorry but I'm cancelling tonight's show. Just seen the doctor. Throat's not in good shape. More soon. Really gutted. Bad start :( about 19 hours ago from Tweetie

No...@therealahhmee, don't leave! I'm so sorry. I'm not gonna make it tonight. I feel awful to disappoint you and everyone else. X xabout 19 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to therealahhmee

Hoping to do tomorrow's show. Will sleeeeep lots. Santa barbara... Will let you know about rescheduling or refund. This is so crap!! Xxx about 19 hours ago from Tweetie

Well, this made me think: yes, she's revealing that she's sick and ultimately canceling her concerts, but maybe telling her 1,250,481 (!!!) followers herself lessens the blow. Would they rather read it from her "personally" with x's and o's, or get a formal e mail from a promoter telling them their tickets would be refunded? Who can stay mad at someone who says they're "Really gutted," after all?  And let's not forget how composer Nico Muhly said the New York Philharmonic's website looked like a Tampax ad in an interview with the Boston Globe and then reiterated the sentiment on his blog in September 2008. The epilogue to this story is, of course, that the New York Philharmonic paid for and will premiere a new work by Nico this spring. In both cases, no damage done, not damage control required.

So I, as a publicist, am torn: MySpace (at one point), Facebook, blogs, tumblr accounts and Twitter are all fantastic ways for artists to connect with current and potential audiences, and when used well can be a more powerful PR tool than a major newspaper feature. On the flip side, though, we all get lulled into a false sense of security with these things. This morning, for example, I almost Tweeted, "Do you think my neighbors can hear me singing 'Giants in the Sky' in the shower?" Backspace, backspace, backspace; you are a PR PROFESSIONAL, Ameer - you know better than to put anything about THE SHOWER on the Interweb! (Of course now I just did, so apparently I do not know better.) 

Incidentally, this goes both ways.  During the World Series, I noticed that one New York writer implied on Twitter that he would rather watch the next evening's baseball game than review the (presumably boring) concert he was assigned to. If it had been my client's concert and it was "in print" that the critic reviewing didn't really want to be there? I would be furious and dead-set on requesting another writer or none at all.

You get sucked in. You think no one's "actually" reading (they are) and you think no one "actually" cares (they do). As mentioned above, I've gotten myself into trouble with some folks in The Industry with this blog. Sure, some of my in-the-doghouse episodes come down to differences in opinion about a publicist having a blog, but some of them are squarely my fault. Would I say things I write here in an interview with a newspaper, blog, radio station or magazine? Mostly, but not entirely. Why not control the media we can actually control?

As you may (or may not) have read, I signed up for that coy mistress Twitter a couple weeks back. Here's me, tweeting my life ((career)) away. I joined for the sake of research for this blog, but am actually rather liking it as an information conduit. It's much easier to read than my current Bloglines sprawl, and since I'm fortunate enough to have smart, funny friends, I enjoy their updates throughout the day. In the interest of full disclosure, though, you should know that I've chosen to unfollow my die hard Phillies phan of an ex boyfriend for the remainder of the World Series. (Seriously.)

Poking around the 'sphere, I've noticed a lot of users don't like the news alert-esque tweets from arts organizations. The largest arts organization I follow is The Metropolitan Opera (@metopera), and, surprisingly, I am liking those same basic, personality-less informational tweets everyone seems to dislike so much. For example, I wouldn't have known about the free House of Dead lecture with Esa-Pekka Salonen, swoon, tomorrow were it not for following The Met on Twitter. The same information, of course, could be delivered to me if signed up for their e mail list, but I find tweets less intrusive, and as you've surely read, e mail is dead.

The reason I started following The Met in the first place, though, was because they responded to one my tweets about the donkey on stage in Barber of Seville.  They did not respond to my tweet about one of the leads looking like Cogsworth, but no matter. (That's right, donkeys and Disney: my Twitter feed is some high-brow stuff, friends.) It was a personal touch, then, that hooked me. They even said "LOL" in their response to my tweet! Did I actually make The Metropolitan Opera Laugh Out Loud? The Entire Metropolitan Opera? The building?

Obviously not. I (maybe) made the person running their Twitter feed laugh (and I'll take it), but who is that person? Who's running Carnegie's Twitter feed? The New York Phil's? I realize these accounts are meant to represent the organizations as wholes, so perhaps revealing the tweeter behind the keyboard is not in line with their broader "social media" marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, Wired magazine has figured out how to give their Twitter feed a voice---various voices, actually--while maintaining a branded company presence. I've only been following them on Twitter for a couple weeks, but it seems like they have a different reporter or editor run the account every week. They posted this tonight:

Wouldn't it be fantastic if arts organizations did this? Normally, I would advocate for a consistent voice in marketing materials, but with Twitter, blogs and Facebook, personality is the name of the game, and why not own up to the fact that your organization is made up of a lot of different personalities? Having more than one person at an arts organization tweet each week would give the public a sense of the people behind the scenes in a far more natural way than a Q&A or a special feature on the website. It would also, as I'm sure it does in Wired's case, drive followers to their employees' personal Twitter pages, and assuming they're pro-their organization, that can only raise awareness beyond the organization's normal reach. Most importantly, it would allow an organization to have their news curated in a different way each week; maybe what the marketing director views as news is different from what the artistic administrator views as news, so why not embrace that and the diversified followers that come with it?

Though many, many more music journalists are on Twitter, these are the people I noticed interacting with the publicists I interviewed the most. Oodles of thanks to  @nightafternight: Steve Smith, New York Times, Time Out New York;  @anastasiat: Anastasia Tsioulcas, Gramophone, Variety; @gsandow: Greg Sandow, Wall Street Journal, ArtsJournal; and @sethcolterwalls: Seth Colter Walls, Newsweek for their answers.

These interviews were conducted via Telex machine. Just kidding.

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How long have you been using Twitter?
@nightafternight: Since April 2009.

@anastasiat: I just went back & checked my profile--since Sept. 8, 2008. Huh. Had no idea it had been that long.

@sethcolterwalls: Since August 2008.

@gsandow: Six to nine months, can't remember exactly.


Where you motivated by personal or professional reasons?
@nightafternight: The two are largely inextricable in my experience, but personal was probably the initial catalyst.  The short answer is that I was frustrated by my inability to keep my blog updated on a reasonably regular basis, primarily as a result of the promotion and expanded workload I took on at Time Out last August.  I very badly missed having a personal, interactive outlet for thoughts and observations that didn't necessarily extend from either of my jobs, but wouldn't necessarily exclude them, either, since they're a large part of who I am. The long answer is here.

@sethcolterwalls: My last job strongly encouraged that I take the plunge right around the time I was becoming curious about what was happening on Twitter. So both.

@anastasiat: Both, honestly.

@gsandow: Motivated by curiosity, and then by professional interests.

Many thanks to @cjpr: Christina Jensen, Christina Jensen PR; @CarnegieMatt: Matt Carlson, Carnegie Hall; @dotdotdottweet: Steven Swartz, DotDotDot Music; @SarahBaird: Sarah Baird, Boosey and Hawkes; @BklsweetMedia: Amanda Sweet, Bucklesweet Media;  @glennpetry, @seanmgross, @PhilipWilder: Glenn Petry, Sean Gross and Philip Wilder, 21C Media Group; and @mlaffs: Maura Lafferty, New Century Chamber Orchestra for their help with this. Now stop Tweeting and answering blog questions and revise some bios!

These interviews were conducted via carrier pigeon, i.e. e mail.

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How long have you been using Twitter?
@cjpr: Since March 2009.

@CarnegieMatt: About seven months.

@dotdotdottweet: Since last winter - don't recall exactly when I started, but it was definitely BO (Before Oprah).  

@SarahBaird: I began listening in March 2008 but didn't join the conversation and start tweeting until March 2009.

@BklsweetMedia: One week!

@glennpetry: We began using Twitter last season 2008-2009.

@seanmgross: I signed up for Twitter over a year ago, but I didn't start actively using it until about six months ago.

@PhilipWilder: I began my life as a tweeter about 9 months ago.

@mlaffs: Since April or March?


Were you motivated by personal or professional reasons?
@cjpr: Professional.

@CarnegieMatt: I was initially motivated because Carnegie Hall was planning its own Twitter account (now launched @carnegiehall) as part of an expanded social media effort. So I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. That said, my feed is really meant to be a personal account - I comment on non-musical matters as well, and it's linked to my personal email account. If I could do it again, I suppose I wouldn't have picked @carnegiematt as my handle since it's not reflective of everything you read there.

@dotdotdottweet: Mostly personal - thought it might be fun. Its promotional potential wasn't immediately obvious to me.

@SarahBaird: I was curious about Twitter and I appreciated the ability to see trends and participate in conversations, share experiences. The major impetus for me to join was SXSW. I was heading to Austin and knew that I'd only be able to see about 20 of the thousands of showcasing bands, and meet about 20 of the thousands of interesting people. So Twitter was a way for me to tune into the larger conversation and tweet-up with people who were zipping around to different venues. I'd say it's personal-professional for me. I tweet as Sarah-Baird-Who-Works-for-Boosey-&-Hawkes. So a person who follows me isn't following a company megaphone, but the same person they'd see if they were my colleague, working in my office. None of my personal friends follow me on Twitter (who aren't involved in the industry).

@BklsweetMedia: Professional but just like most things in my life, those boundaries are blurred.  I actually sent out a tweet last week about DC Green Works and my great meeting with them about bayscaping in my yard.

@glennpetry: I would say we were motivated by both personal and professional reasons, which is why we maintain both "personal" and "professional" Twitter accounts.

@seanmgross: I use my own Twitter account mainly for personal reasons.  I let my friends and "followers" (although I don't like that word...it makes me sound creepy, like I'm trying to be David Koresh) know about a new restaurant that I discovered, an interesting article I read, or something unusual or funny that happened to me that day.  However, I don't share anything that is too personal, since my Tweets can also be seen by colleagues and clients. For our company, I oversee a separate 21C Media Group Twitter feed that is one of several ways that the press and public can elect to receive information on our clients (other ways include our website, news release emails, RSS feed, and Facebook page).  Each tweet includes a one-line news item and a link to a news release on our company's website.  It's not meant to be the most interactive Twitter feed.  We encourage our artists to Twitter on their own if they are interested and have the time to commit to it, as this is where the true power of Twitter lies.  Our feed is engineered to be more of news feed, like CNN's but with a much more singular focus.

@PhilipWilder: Since I travel tons for work, as well as my life as a "bi-coastal", it initially seemed to be a good way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues. Now, I have a good amount of followers - friends and strangers - and have many discussions with them over Twitter and through email when 140 characters isn't enough.   Of course, 21C posts daily Tweets on breaking news about our clients too. Mine are more of an inside view from Behind the scenes.

@mlaffs: Initially, I wanted to get to know the tool and the user base before even considering using it for my company, since I've seen a lot of arts organizations mis-use social media. Since then, the relationships that I have built have offered both personal and professional value.

About a week ago, I had coffee with an arts marketer from out of town. She mentioned going to the opera with a prominent critic, and having--a meal or a meeting, I don't remember--with a prominent New York presenter. She was by no means bragging about these things, just telling me what she had been up to during her trip. No judging, I started, but if you've never worked in the city, how do you know these people? "Through Twitter!" she said.

I've never joined Facebook, and I had no burning desire to join Twitter. It's Thursday at 11:40pm, and I'm watching the Phillies (hopefully) beat the Dodgers, answering e mails and writing this blog post. Point being I work a lot, so the thought of adding personal Facebook and Twitter updating to the mix makes me want to move to Tahiti and sell sunblock. But Twitter for work purposes got my attention (label me with whatever -aholic you must), and I started looking into which publicists and which journalists were active members of the twitterati. More importantly, which publicists and journalists interacted with each other on Twitter. Were stories being pitched? Introductions being made? Contacts being found?

What's that you say? You got carpal tunnel from playing the Dudamel game all afternoon on Friday? Well then, there's no point in doing any work today now is there? You should really let yourself mend.

If you're in New York, you can spend this afternoon chasing down two tickets to Carnegie Hall's opening night concert, which is this Thursday, October 1 and has a major harp component, woot. Carnegie has been Tweeting clues here all day, and if you can find their people from 5-7pm tonight, you can enter your name into a raffle for a pair of tickets. The most recent clue is, "Duke Ellington and Grateful Dead performed on this stage. Today, concerts here promote young composers and conductors."

This is Life's a Pitch: The Outward Bound Edition, as I'm in the lovely Berkshires. Other than the Biblical rain on Saturday night and the spider bite I seem to have acquired above my left eyebrow that has subsequently swollen and given me a not entirely unattractive kind of lazy-eyed Romulan-chic look, Tanglewood is fantastic.

Hearing - emphasis on the 'hearing' - three concerts at Tanglewood this weekend has made me think more about different outlets of experience, previously discussed here. I had written about live-blogging/live-Tweeting during concerts, unsure of which side to come down on, and my clients Hilary (Hahn) and David (Lang) weighed in with their artist perspectives. My conclusion after this weekend is this: it is not a presenter's job to mandate what an audience member's experience will be, but rather to offer as many different experience options as possible while both protecting the quality of each option they offer and maintaining artistic integrity.

On Friday night, my friends and I went to see Emanuel Ax rock out Beethoven 4. We sat on the lawn with snacks, wine and apparently not enough bug spray, and watched the concert on the big screens around the outside of the Shed. Three of us sat on lawn chairs and two of us lay down on the blanket. One of us got her face bitten off, four of us did not. Before the concert and during intermission, the screens flashed through upcoming performances and various Tanglewood initiatives, which was decidedly not-annoying and actually quite useful. I've often wondered why there aren't movie-type previews at performing arts centers, and at the very least highlighting upcoming listings on big screens seems like a good start. Again, you have a(n almost literally) captive audience; market to them.

Saturday, we had planned to watch Die Meistersinger from the lawn, but were scared off by the monsoon. I'm told the kind people at Tanglewood were able to squeeze most would-be lawn watchers into the Shed, but we didn't have the energy. So instead, we listened to the live broadcast on WAMC. The sound quality was great, and we actually started popped in the movie Grizzly Man halfway through. Totally weird, yes, but exactly what we wanted to do.

Sunday was What the Joshua Bell's concert at 2:30pm. We packed a picnic lunch and, while we were offered some box seats ("  "), opted for the lawn. It was a beautiful day, I had just purchased a floppy sun hat, and we were proud of our picnic fixins'. There are no screen projections during afternoon concerts, so we ate and lay in the sun, just listening. Well, listening, snacking, looking up Whatever Works movie times on phones, rolling our eyes about how boring the end of Dvorak 8 is. Actually, I think only I was eye-rolling, but you see my point. We weren't bothering anyone by looking up movie times, because we were in a space where that was acceptable. Would I have been playing with my phone had I taken the inside-seats? Of course not; the people inside expect a certain experience, an experience that does not involve my pink Blackberry. The people listening to a live radio broadcast expect one experience, and the people driving by Tanglewood with their windows down expect another, so on, so forth.  

To begin, I'm posting this entry from over 10,000 feet. If we're being completely honest with each other, I did start writing it at LaGuardia two days ago, but I finished it and am pressing 'Save' among the clouds. Raise your hand if you love living in 2009! The fact that $12.95 gets me internet in mid-air for my entire flight almost redeems Delta after having me land in Salt Lake City, de-board the plane for 35 minutes, get back on the same plane, sit in the same seat, and continue on to Boston. The one benefit, if we can call it that, of this aerial pit stop was seeing a man wearing two wedding rings on two separate fingers, to whom I gave the I-saw-Season-1-of-Big-Love-on-DVD-buddy stink eye.


I was sitting on the steps at the Bang on a Can Marathon last weekend, and near the end of the (or at least my) evening it occurred to me that I - ever a creature of habit - had plopped down at the exact steps-spot on which Greg Sandow and I sat last year.  Greg was out of town this time around, so I texted him at 8:42pm to tell him about my location. He texted right back, and our exchange continued until 9:35pm, on and off, including but not limited to subjects such as there being a pianist playing a drum (Greg has his own piece with a pianist playing a drum) and whether or not the concert was streaming live on WNYC (at which point I walked over and asked the marathon publicist Christina Jensen about this on his behalf). For a few select moments, I got the sense that the journalist who was sitting with my friend and me was throwing "what does she keep doing on that phone" looks my way. Was I being rude? I figure it's Bang on a Can: everyone's coming and going and texting and standing and talking and snacking. And besides, for those 53 minutes I was spreading valuable information about the marathon and the pieces being performed in real-time; one might call it "the A1A1 virus" marketing. So I clicked away to Greg, confident that I was doing everyone on stage a great justice and decidedly not being disrespectful to anyone or anything.

Reading the reviews of the marathon later, I had a few moments of "wait  - when was that piece?". It seems I had missed a few things whilst clicking. I did stop texting during Julia Wolfe's Thirst because that was the new work I was most looking forward to - wait, looking through my phone now it seems I did send one text to Greg to say it was fantastic - but the rest of that hour was kind of hazy. Whoops.

I ran into publicist and proud Twitterati member Steven Swartz at one point that Sunday. While not a usual participant or advocate in/of Tweeting during concerts, Steven had been recruited by the marathon administration to be part of a Bang on a Can Twitter Team, which ended up generating 9.5 hours of Tweets.  When I ran into him, Steven told me how much he enjoyed David Lang's new piece, For love is strong. "I even stopped Tweeting at the end!" he said, "It was so moving." Steven and others were charged with the task of live-Tweeting as a form of media coverage, but it seems that when he actually wanted to focus on the music, he stopped, watched and listened. My texting and Steven's Tweeting led me to wonder: there has been a lot of writing on this blog and others (see Greg on the topic here and here, Opera Chic here) about Tweeting, texting, taking photos, live-blogging - just about anything a person can do with their fingers - during classical music concerts. "People do these things at rock concerts all the time, and look how much more popular rock music is than classical music" is the overarching argument we make.  But are you really listening if you're thinking about spelling a composer's name correctly in your live-blog entry? When you're fiddling around with the zoom and color swap settings on your camera? And if you're commenting on something that just happened, wouldn't logic dictate that you're missing the thing that's just-happening next?

I thought I was paying attention while texting Greg, and Steven thought he was paying attention while Tweeting. Maybe we were, in a way. It seems, however, that the line between passive and active listeners is thin.  Is one audience member's viral marketing another's I'd-rather-be-elsewhere sentiment?  And who defines the difference between "rude" and "comfortable"?  Would it have made me more comfortable to not have food and wine and chocolate* at my apartment when some friends were coming over to watch the Tonys on Sunday? "Comfortable" in that it would have saved me two subway stops and some money, yes, but why invite people over at all if I was so concerned with the extra errands? I could have just watched the Tonys by myself in my underwear and messy, foodless apartment; Lord knows it's happened before. Additionally, when bloggers (including myself) and presenter marketing departments decide texting/Tweeting/painting their toenails during performances will Save Classical Music, do they think about or ask the artists? Are pieces and performances created and intended for audience members who are also doing something else? I agree that these initiatives can raise awareness about artists in great and organic ways, but has anyone asked the artists what they think?

Fortunately, I happen to know some artists, so I asked: how do you feel about audiences live-Tweeting/texting/blogging/photo-essaying during performances of your music, David Lang, and how do you feel about the above when you're on stage, Hilary Hahn?

David:

People texting or blogging during concerts doesn't bother me.  I think one of the best things about listening to music is that you get to decide how much attention you want to spend on it, while it is going on.  And I guess it is sweet to think that something live may be so exciting that a listener simply has to share it in real time.  But I wonder if the idea of connectedness is changing the the way people experience things now.  It could be that the ability to stay in constant touch may make listeners come to feel that they themselves are not having a valid experience unless they are letting someone know about it. And if the action of music is some kind of mystic direct communication between the person making it and the person receiving it that is a big loss.

Hilary:

I'm all for Tweeting and spreading the word, but not during performances. Between pieces, maybe, if you can stop when the music starts up again; while standing in line for the restroom, definitely; at intermission or on the train afterwards, definitely. The problem is that acoustic performers rely on the audience's attention and focus and can tell when the audience isn't mentally present. Your listening is part of our interpretive process. If you're not really listening, we're not getting the feedback of energy from the hall, and then we might as well be practicing for a bunch of people peering in the window. It's just not as interesting when the cycle of interpretation is broken.

If you are Tweeting, then you might as well check your emails, and then you might as well just turn on the camera and make a recording for YouTube, and then you might as well have a little chat online while you're at it, or play a game of Tetris or Scrabble, or write down ideas for that presentation you have to give next week. In that case, really, the question is, why are you here? Are you enjoying the beauty of the live concert experience, in which moments are fleeting and you have to get caught up in the flow because it will never be the same again?

There's also the distraction factor. The stage is a great vantage point and a prime spot of acoustical convergence. It may be possible for you to do multiple things at once, but the same may not be true of the performers and your fellow audience members. They may not be able to keep themselves from wondering what you're writing instead of just listening and concentrating on their own individual experiences. You may not be able to delve into your own listening experience if you're thinking about what other people should be thinking.

Finally, it seems to me that listeners make things difficult for themselves by observing themselves in the third person and putting their thoughts into a narrative before those thoughts can fully form. I feel that concerts can be a break from outside pressures and influences. For audience members, a concert should be like a vacation on a distant beach with a stack of good books. Comfortable seats. No one trying to call you. No one breaking into your trains of thought. No way to reach the outside world. Just a time to shut off and calm down and treat yourself to something truly wonderful. If we can't sit through a classical concert we pay decent money for, and we can't take two hours out of an evening to shut out everyone else's demands and opinions and thoughts, where does that leave us?

*I'm not going to pretend I don't always have chocolate in my apartment, guests or no guests. I just threw that in there for dramatic effect.