WSO: making the symphony cool

Attracting young people to the symphony isn’t as easy as attracting young people to, say, Guitar Hero. Or is it?

The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra realizes that the key to appealing to new audiences is not in the packaging, it’s in the product.

For years, symphony orchestras worldwide have been dealing with the challenge of bringing in new audiences – not the easiest task, when you’re trying to attract young people to what they perceive as evenings of classical music with their grandparents. Do you bring classical music to the shopping malls and show kids how Mozart really is cool, after all? Do you give students free tickets to Handel’s Messiah and hope they’ll come?

Not if you’re the WSO and a number of other world-class orchestras. They’re taking the opposite approach, changing their product to appeal to a new audience, rather than trying to convince that audience to buy a product that really isn’t geared to their taste.

Next month, for the second consecutive year, the WSO is hosting Video Games Live, described on the WSO website as “a groundbreaking live event celebrating the music of video games, from Mario to Warcraft. Experience the WSO and choir, accompanied by synchronized video, lighting, special effects, audience participation segments and live action.”

And while last year’s event was a hit, they’re taking it a step further this summer, adding a Guitar Hero competition whose winner, according to the Winnipeg Free Press, will get to play Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” on stage with the WSO during the July 8th performance.

Talk about user-generated content.

This has all the ingredients for success:

- it changes the product to appeal to the audience’s tastes
- it encourages young people to dip a toe in the pool (once the new audience has enjoyed the symphony in this format, they may be more apt to try its more traditional format as well)
- it gives the audience an opportunity to get personally involved and be part of the performance, enhancing personal buy-in
- it has tremendous YouTube-ability, with the potential for the winning performance to go viral, bringing lots more attention to the event and the WSO

The YouTube generation loves to get involved, and loves “fame” – this event offers the potential for both.

Another thing an event like this offers is great opportunities for marketing through social media. I wasn’t able to find an “official” Facebook page for the Winnipeg event, but the creators/producers of Video Games Live have a page, as do a number of local fans who are using the site to encourage people to support the show. The Video Games Live promotional trailer is also on YouTube (and on the WSO website).



I don’t have any further info on how WSO is promoting Video Games Live 2009 to Winnipeg’s youth; if you do, please add a comment below and let me know!

For want of a nail…

Remember the rhyme about how little things can have big consequences?

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Source: Wikipedia

Well, I got a great example of that in the mail this week.

My sister and I have tickets to the Rogers Cup ATP tennis tournament in Montreal in August – we’ll be haunting the grounds of Stade Uniprix (formerly Jarry Park Stadium) for two days of the tournament, like we did centuries ago when we were ballgirls for the Canadian nationals at the Rideau Tennis Club in Ottawa.

We ordered our tickets online, and they came in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Then this week, I got another, totally unexpected envelope from Rogers Cup in the mail: metro tickets to get us to and from our matches.

“Great PR,” I thought – “a freebie, great involvement of a government sponsor, opportunity for the tournament to promote its sustainability initiatives – everyone looks good and the customer is delighted. Must blog about it.” I filed the metro tickets away with the event tickets.

Then this week, I saw a tweet about someone having gotten metro tickets from the Rogers Cup… but for the wrong days. So I checked mine and… lo and behold… mine aren’t right either!

I can only imagine what a logistical nightmare this is going to be for the organizers. They can just re-issue metro tickets for the right days (which could double the cost); or they can do a big internal communication initiative to ensure Société de transport de Montréal employees accept the tickets for any day of the tournament, with an external communication initiative to ensure everyone knows they can use the tickets for any day. Or they might come up with some other solution (though they wouldn’t be well-advised to ask customers to send the original metro tickets back). No matter how you slice it, it’s going to be expensive, both in time and money – likely both for Tennis Canada and the Société de transport de Montréal.

Of course, this will have no effect on how much my sister and I enjoy cheering Roger and Rafa on (Nadal’s injuries and Federer’s impending fatherhood permitting), but it does make what should have been a great gesture somewhat of a pain for the customer, and an enormous hassle for organizers (not to mention that it reflects poorly on the organization overall).

In event planning, you do your best to check, double-check and triple-check everything. Unfortunately, every once in a while, some little detail like this gets by you… and to paraphrase Vincent Gardenia’s character in Moonstruck, that is a long, bad, expensive day.



UPDATE - HOW THEY HANDLED IT:

I left a voice mail with tournament organizers on Saturday, and got a call back today (within one business day). The fellow said they'd had "big problems" with the metro ticket initiative, but that they would just send out new tickets for the right dates. Potentially an expensive, but definitely the most customer-friendly way to manage it. Nice job.

New media + PR fundamentals = first-ever Cannes Grand Prix for PR

For 56 years, the world’s best advertisers have been celebrated at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. This week, the festival awarded its first-ever awards for PR campaigns, and the PR “Grand Prix” went to Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign. Developed by Australian firm CumminsNitro, the campaign reportedly earned millions of dollars’ worth of media coverage and tremendous worldwide participation with an unusual want-ad.



The campaign used this video and traditional-looking job ads in publications around the world to invite people to make the case for why they should get the job – a real job created specifically for this campaign – in a one-minute video. Thanks to video sharing sites like YouTube, interest in the campaign was quickly ignited, with many among the thousands of applicant videos going viral.

Here’s one of the multiple Canadian entries I found on YouTube:



In the midst of a sea-change in the way organizations communicate with their audiences, this campaign shows how new technologies can augment the effectiveness of traditional communications. The key: recognizing that the most effective use of new media is based on PR fundamentals.

1. The concept was simple and easy to understand (“there’s an amazing job available in a beautiful place, and you can apply for it”).
2. It was supported by an extensive and well-integrated mainstream media strategy.
3. It made smart use of new technology, online communities and social media tools to get people participating – and talking to each other about their participation.
4. At a time when a large majority of marketing messages are received passively, this campaign encouraged people to buy in and get mentally involved: to see themselves interacting with the product, to build a desire to experience the product. It caused people to think and talk about Australia, to picture themselves spending time in Australia, and then, to make the case for why they should be chosen to go to Australia. It’s not that great a leap to think people might now be motivated to plan a visit to Australia which they mightn’t otherwise have even considered.

As the concept built up steam, mainstream media interest in the campaign phenomenon fanned the flames. Its success drove further success.

In the end, CumminsNitro reported more than US$100 million in media coverage (from a media budget of $1.2 million), more than 6.8 million visitors to the campaign website in 56 days, and more than 34,600 entries from 201 countries – all because of a simple concept that motivated its audience to get involved. Check out CumminsNitro’s video summary of the campaign here (click “view movie”).

And it's not over: the next phase of the campaign, in which the winner explores Hamilton Island and documents his adventures on a blog, will likely garner more online and mainstream media attention, at least at first. It's publicity that yields more publicity – what more could a PR guy ask?

With that said, it’ll be interesting to watch for the campaign’s actual impact on Queensland Tourism – the true test of the campaign's effectiveness.

The winner of the contest, Britain’s Ben Southall, will have his first day in “the best job in the world” on July 1st. In the meantime, here’s another Canadian entry... just because I think it’s fun.

News or no news?

Politician has an extra-marital affair of which his wife is aware:
no (well, likely not much) news.

Politician mysteriously goes missing for days,
Wife says she doesn’t know where he is,
Staff say he’s taking a short vacation and decline to provide further details,
Staff later say he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail,
Media find the vehicle he drives parked in airport parking lot,
Met by reporter as he arrives in Atlanta on flight from Buenos Aires,
Claims to have decided last-minute to go to Argentina because it’s “exotic”,
THEN holds news conference explaining trip with admission of extra-marital affair of which his wife is aware:
big news.

In PR, the cover-up often does more damage than the original offense.

Here’s the video of South Carolina Governor Sanford’s widely-covered news conference this afternoon.

Socrates! Blogs and tweets are public!

Steve Martin did a bit in 1980 in which Socrates complains that, despite all the time he and his students spent together, no-one ever mentioned that hemlock is poisonous [note: the part related to this topic is over by the 2 ½-minute mark].



Conservative Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is finding out this week that sometimes, what seems obvious (or at least, common knowledge) isn’t so obvious to everyone. He and his party are doing a little damage control after Edmonton-Calder MLA Doug Elniski posted some ill-considered “advice” to high-school girls on his blog [another note: this clip is preceded by a 30-second commercial, and followed immediately by other news stories].

Mr. Elniski reportedly has also had to apologize for comments he made on Twitter.

Everywhere we look these days, there’s discussion of how social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are revolutionizing communications by allowing organizations and people in power to converse directly with their customers or constituents online. With that free access to “the people”, though, must come the recognition that what you say using these tools is “out there.” Sometimes, it can feel like a tweet is just a short-lived, offhand comment to your friends – but when you have a public reputation you care about, you need to make sure your tweets (or blog posts, or Facebook status updates) reflect who you are professionally.

We give this same advice to our CreComm students at Red River College. What you post online contributes to how the world – including future employers – sees you; so resist the temptation to post things that will reflect poorly on your “personal brand”. Once you post them, they're “out there”, for far more than your close friends to see. People who don’t know you will make judgments based on what you post – and that may not tell the whole (or even an accurate) story.

OK, gotcha. Watch what I say using social media, check. Case closed?

Not quite.

In an article in The Globe and Mail online, Elniski says he will continue to use online communications – “but he may have his comments vetted, possibly by government officials, before they appear;” for his part, Stelmach’s chief of staff says he’s going to “send a letter to Tory MLAs in the coming days about the dos and don'ts of using social networking websites.” Certainly, that might help reduce the number of similar embarrassments to the party in future – but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue of the MLA’s personal views and judgment. [For the record, Elniski has publicly regretted and apologized for the comments, and Premier Stelmach has clearly stated that the comments don't reflect "my values, they don't reflect the values of our government, they don't reflect the values of the caucus nor of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party."]

Historically, many Canadians have voted for candidates without ever having had direct contact with them; they voted for the ideas and ideals attributed to the candidates, but didn’t have much opportunity to get to know them personally. Now, social media tools like blogs and Twitter allow politicians more opportunities to speak directly to their constituencies without the filters of the mainstream media (or even, apparently, party brass); they allow people to get to know their representatives a little better on a personal level, for better or for worse. Today, if your candidate has a less-than-politics-friendly sense of humour, people are going to notice it.

Vetting politicians' blog posts and tweets may reduce the potential for online embarrassments, but if they really represent their views, they're just as likely to express them in other forums. New media and traditional PR tactics aside, the most important ingredient in any successful PR campaign is your product: if there are characteristics of your product your customers won’t like, the best PR strategy for the long term is to address them.

Everyone should be a consultant

…at least for a little while.

Today’s national news features lots of coverage of the city workers’ strike in Toronto – and specifically, the contentious issue of sick-leave banking.

Members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (“CUPE”) who work for the City of Toronto are (currently, at least) able to “bank” a certain number of unused sick days every year, which they can then “cash out” on retirement. According to a CBC story today, that can add up to six months’ pay – a nice little retirement gift.

The City of Toronto isn’t the only employer to offer this, though by all accounts, the ranks of employers offering sick leave banking – or vesting, as it’s sometimes called – are thinning. The idea behind this practice is that employees who know they’ll get paid out for unused sick time won’t take sick days when they’re not sick.

Wha?

My first job in PR was in a small consulting firm in Ottawa. It was an excellent firm led by excellent communicators, and I learned a tremendous amount about PR working there. But I only came to really appreciate one of the most important lessons of that early consulting role later in life: I learned the real value of my work.

In the years since, I’ve had the opportunity to work in a range of different environments – as an employee and as a contractor, as a union employee and as a non-union employee – and have been interested by how differently people perceive their relationship with their employer.

In my little Ottawa consulting firm, I couldn’t help but notice that every penny I was paid came directly out of the pockets of the firm’s two partners. What they paid me, they didn’t have to spend on things they enjoyed, like traveling abroad. Or concerts. Or even house renovations. I realized that every day, I had to put in a performance that they felt was worth what they were paying me – otherwise, why would they spend the money?

As a consultant in recent years, I’ve seen this even more acutely. My clients have to like my work enough to want to pay me – and then, even more importantly, to pay me to do something else for them down the line. In the consulting world, every day’s performance counts. You always have to be “on”, and you always have to deliver quality. There’s no “entitlement” – and you certainly aren’t paid for not not coming to work. If you don’t deliver – sick or not – you aren’t paid. Period.

I’ve heard employees of many different organizations grouse about being expected to work a full day every day in exchange for their regular paycheque. They don’t put it in those terms, of course; sometimes it sounds like a complaint about a boss being too “nosy” about how much time they spend on eBay at work (and by this, I'm not talking about people who do a great job, but do some personal things on work time and lots of work things on personal time), sometimes it sounds like outrage at being expected only to take sick days when they’re sick.

What I think these employees really need is to spend some time actually having to produce something that someone else wants to buy – that is, to pay them for – every single day. Then, they might begin to see what their employer “owes” them a little differently.

Hyatt: anticipated surprises and relationship-building

In The New York Times yesterday, Rob Walker wrote about a new marketing program at Hyatt Hotels, which the hotel chain is calling “random acts of generosity.” According to Hyatt’s CEO, Mark Hoplamazian, the hotel chain will be randomly “surprising” customers with breaks on certain services – he tells potential guests not to be surprised if a Hyatt hotel “picks up your bar tab, comps your massage or treats your family to breakfast.”

The marketing objective behind this program is to encourage customer loyalty, with the underlying theory that customers who receive things for free will be more apt to come back. Walker’s article discusses a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Marketing, which examines this theory.

More interesting to me from a PR perspective, though, is Hyatt’s choice to proactively “announce” the program publicly in a USA Today business travel blog. From my perspective, this initiative could have been more effective in building customer loyalty had the company just rolled it out, without telling its customers to expect it.

I'm not an expert in the hospitality business, but I'd wager that few people would make their decision on where to stay based on the possibility of a free breakfast. To me, the true value of a random gift program like this one is in its relationship-building potential.

At some levels, people respond to relationships with companies in the same ways they do with people. When someone does something nice for you out of the blue, it makes you feel good about your relationship. But if you feel there’s an ulterior motive, you are less apt to be impressed – and may even feel manipulated, which could be worse for your relationship than not having received the favour or gift in the first place.

Of course, today’s consumer is sophisticated, and most likely understand that freebies are generally given to encourage return business. But when you come right out and announce a random giveaway program, you turn what could have been a “gee, the people at Hyatt made me feel special” experience into an “I guess I got lucky this time, maybe I should go out and buy a lotto ticket” experience. The latter doesn’t deliver the same ‘warm and fuzzy’ factor, which can help significantly in building loyalty.

And worse, because customers know about the program from having read the publicity, you also create the "I guess someone else is getting my freebie" experience for everyone who doesn't get chosen. That's (I'm assuming) the majority of customers, walking away with a disappointment they didn't need to have in your hotel.

Hyatt’s “random acts of generosity” plan could indeed be a great way to make customers feel good about doing business with the hotel chain; everyone loves a freebie, and random giveaway contests are run regularly in all kinds of businesses. But for real loyalty-building, I think it could have been even stronger had they kept it quiet and allowed the resulting customer experiences to be true surprises – with all the warm and fuzzy relationship-building feelings that would come along with them.