The challenge of managing (or corralling) multiple voices into a consistent organizational voice or brand has always been a challenge for arts organizations, especially when those voices in the organization are expressive individuals. With the growth of on-line media, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, the challenge has grown more public and more global.
Further, the challenge isn’t just to decide what your organization should do, but discover what its many constituents are already doing. These systems tend to bridge the professional/personal divide without a blink — meaning that many of your staff will already have personal accounts to share their family photos and personal updates. On those accounts, they may also be sharing work-related thoughts, as well.
So, an emerging job for cultural managers is to embrace the many ways their organizations engage the world — personally and professionally, as individuals and as collectives — and somehow align those voices in some coherent way.
Beth Kanter offers some specific advice for one particular platform — how nonprofits can/should manage multiple Twitter accounts. The questions are many, but also increasingly important to ask out loud:
You’ll need to decide who is doing the Tweeting for your organization.
Will you set up one flagship account and have one or more staff members
tweet from that account? Or will you have an organizational account
but also encourage staff to Tweet as well?
In the early days of the web, arts organization web sites were often constructed by whoever on staff or among the volunteers had the skills to attempt it — often a lower-level staff member in tech support or administration. Eventually, the leadership realized the on-line voices of the web sites were too important to leave out of the strategic fold.
That same day is coming for the broader range of social media, if it hasn’t come already. Time to do a social media inventory, and construct some strategy to realign your on-line voice.
Time to construct some strategy to realign your on-line voice? Ok, what might such a strategy look like?
This post needs more development (not to mention proofing: “the on-line voices of the web site was…”).
Thanks dh,
I’ve corrected the grammar on the post, as well as the punctuation errors in your comment.
“Time to do a social media inventory, and construct some strategy to realign your on-line voice.”
I think you might better say “find someone in your organization who cares for what you’re doing and who can write and invite conversations about it all with a personal voice”.
I think that if an arts group is not already having conversations with their own performers and with their audiences in a receptive, honest way, marketing a managed presence on Facebook, Twitter or Youtube won’t help but might easily hinder their reputation locally. The thing about the originality and reality of Facebook and the others, is that they have allowed spontaneous conversations to happen around the world between individual people, out of real experience. They don’t reflect ad campaigns, and really, you know, real responses can’t be designed by marketing gurus. You have suggested that many arts managers want organizations to break down performance barriers and invite the public in to share the arts experience, get better educated, more involved? Isn’t Facebook, Youtube and Twitter a chance to *genuinely* talk about and even do these things in a personal voice? Can the arts tolerate any other voice?