A colleague of mine describes the role of the arts marketing and communications as ”managing evidence.” Since constituents invariably form their own decision about your work and your organization (why should they believe words that come directly from you?), the best strategy is to find out where they look and who they trust, and be sure they will find positive things about you there.
It’s a concept as old as PR and politics, but its relevance is greater today than ever before. Google and other modern media tools have given our constituents (donors, ticket buyers, volunteers, board members, policy-makers) a thousand points of contact to our work and what people say about us. Blogger chatter, on-line reviews, customer comments, web-based discussion forums, all define the public image of our organizations. Managing that evidence has become job one for those who are paying attention.
So, it should come as no surprise that powerful interests are cutting right to the source. This article in Wired explores edits and deletions to the on-line Wikipedia encyclopedia, apparently done by corporations hoping to shine their image. Says the article:
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company’s IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry’s concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company’s CEO’s fund-raising for President Bush.
In response to this trend, a Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student has built a data-mining system that connects Wikipedia edits to the corporations that make them. But the Wikipedia edits are probably only the tip of the iceburg.
While many arts organizations would love to edit the on-line comments and reviews posted about them, the best we can manage is to ensure that the good stuff is highlighted (on our web sites, among our friends, in our e-mail bursts) and the bad stuff is at least part of our feedback.
And when we feel overwhelmed at the prospect, we can always look for a laugh on the subject, as provided by The Onion;/i>: ”Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not”.
The fact that the web page continually reverts to a ”normal” state, observers say, is either evidence that ongoing vandalization is being deleted through vigilant updating, or a deliberate statement on the impermanence of superficial petit-bourgeois culture in the age of modernity.
