Good ideas on growing your audience in the new world.

Doug McLennan has a fine article about audience-building in the digital age here: http://tinyurl.com/ksv9xs. Defnitely worth checking it out.

This is his summary of advice. Pay attention to No. 8, re video. This is significant for SOFA, because our members have video skills that most arts groups don't have but desperately need. Which suggests all kinds of opportunities. Stay tuned for more on this topic.

10 Things:

1. The kind of audience you build matters as much as the size of the audience does.
2. Social networks show that community hierarchy is not only powerful, it drives loyalty.
3. An underrated aspect of social networking is that you're asking people to invest in a relationship. It costs them something - time, attention, their ideas, thoughts, feelings, even clicking their mice. You have to constantly reward them for participating or they'll go away.
4. Give away as much as you can and be as generous as you can to show your best to members of your community. Upgrade as often as possible; it's a powerful reward.
5. There's no such thing as free for an arts organization. If someone participates in your community, you should reward them. If they buy lots of tickets, give them a chance to get more tickets if you haven't sold them. If they're out talking you up and selling your product, give them upgrades, free downloads, special access, souvenirs. If the incentives are right, they'll work for you.
6. An empty seat is a wasted resource. Selling the ticket is great, but there should be many other ways people can "buy" their seats by participating in your community.
7. Drive-by clicks are seductive and traffic is always nice, but the drive-bys are fickle and low-yield and have no loyalty to you and yours. Don't spend a lot of time chasing them unless it's easy.
8. Outside of your primary artistic role, don't get into the content-producing business. Video is hard. Magazines are hard (and expensive) to produce and sustain.
9. You say you listen to your audience? Prove it. Don't do fake interactive. People hate being managed. And increasingly they're wary of institutional voices. Mass TV is generic; arts organizations shouldn't be.
10. It takes work to build a community, much more work than to build an audience. But increasingly audiences are becoming communities because of the ability of social networking tools to link them. You can say you can't afford to invest in building a community, but unless you do, it will be increasingly difficult to draw a crowd.