The “Tell a Friend” feature is a common occurrence these days on any thoughtful website that wants to encourage and facilitate referrals. The scripts and the technology are essentially free, and well within the reach of even nonprofit arts organizations. But, of course, the big-league web players are already a dozen steps ahead of this basic referral feature, allowing a more dynamic interaction among friends.
A great example is the ”friends” functions of Netflix, the DVD subscription service that’s giving Blockbuster conniptions.
Netflix was already a web-centric service from its beginnings. Customers search for DVDs, rank their favorite movies, receive recommendations, and make their reservations for films on-line. The result is a web-based queue of DVDs they’d like to see (as soon as they mail one back, the next available DVD in their queue is mailed to them). Netflix has coded the site and the system so that customers can share their queues on their weblogs, and otherwise share their film preferences with the world. The ”friends” function takes those lists to the next level.
Following a cluster of web innovators that are integrating social networking functions (Amazon, MySpace, etc.), Netflix Friends allows you to invite friends to share their queues and preferences with you, to see what movies they liked or didn’t like, to pass along short “two-cent reviews,” and to essentially tap the experiences and insights of a wide social network to make better entertainment choices.
It’s a system that would be almost impossible for any individual arts organization to implement (not enough content, not enough variety, and certainly not enough money). But a regional cluster of arts organizations could certainly give this a go. The emerging community cultural information system of Artsopolis seems perfect for the challenge. Ticketmaster would be doing this if they decided to be innovative.
As arts journalism falters in most markets, and as cynical consumers grow numb to the marketing of organizations, referrals by friends and social networks are the next big hope for cultural institutions. We’ve always been a “word of mouth” business. But these new tools could help us reclaim that ground.
Of course, San Francisco has San Francisco Classical Voice (www.sfcv.org), a review, event listing and editorial site devoted to classical music performances in the Bay Area. Reviews are by professional musicians. Here, as in Netflix, anyone is encouraged to review an event. Part of the democratization of arts reviewing that the Internet has spawned.