Paying attention to (and changing up) the man behind the curtain

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?