What is the biggest challenge you face in getting started online?
/ 27 November 2009 - 01:33 pm
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3 Comments
Just wanted to open the floor to those that are having difficulty in getting started online. What are the biggest challenges? Let us know and maybe we can help.
-Ben
Comments
Hi Ben
Before I got started online, my biggest challenge was that I had only X budget and was not always in a position to measure accurately which elements of my marketing were successful or not, therefore to have the confidence to drop elements of my existing marketing and replace them with online marketing tools. When I was working for companies that could live or die on the success of their latest show, (i.e. no financial reserves to test things out), the prospect of replacing an old, known marketing tool with a new, unproven one, was really scary.
Related to that, another barrier is the lack of detailed case studies and results available to know whether new tools actually do work. That's why case studies and benchmarking are so important for us as an industry.
Another barrier is the sheer cost of investment in doing things like integrating a website with a database, investing in an email managment system etc. That's where the freely available tools can be quite useful in creating an online profile without huge investment.
For marketing managers in the arts, just the sheer time and brain space required (and not readily available) to learn and apply a new way of working can be a barrier.
These are definitely common barriers that I have experienced and encountered frequently.
Vicki
Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com
For me, one of the challenges in launching into the digital networking avenues (Twitter and Facebook) is not knowing which segment of our audience is going to engage with it; and therefore what I should say. Keeping a website up-to-date and meaningful takes quite a lot of time resource and a regular commitment; so adding the networking sites on top of that would demand more time again, along with creating a different 'voice' for those particular channels of communication. I think I'd end up just repeating what's on our website already - which is what seems to happen on some Facebook pages I check out now and then.
What do you consider to be the pros and cons of both Twitter and Facebook?
How would you decide which of the two to start off with if you wanted to focus on one of them?
Hi Flossy :-)
Yes, resourcing is one of the most common issues.
Re Facebook and Twitter.
Twitter is a "mini blog" which enables you to post short regular updates, ideally driving people to more extensive content. In my opinion the pro with Twitter is that it reaches a lot of influential people who are bloggers, and who can reach large amounts of followers of the young, urban, early-technology-adopter variety. The cons with Twitter include that only early-adopters are on there so far in NZ, and you have to have a lot going on elsewhere online (e.g. your website, a blog or a Facebook page) with more rich content on to link people to, to give your one-liners meaning. You also really have to "get" Twitter and how the marketplace is using it, and that takes (I believe) some more advanced knowledge of social networking.
Facebook is usually a better one to start with in the arts. A Facebook fan page is probably the go, which you can set up for your organisation (or for yourself, if you are an artist or individual practitioner) and use for status updates, photo albums, discussions, invitations etc. You can also monitor statistics with a fan page. Facebook is good for building a fairly extensive online profile, and also, the Facebook demographic is broader because it is further on in its life cycle and adoption here. It is also more flexible in its use.
Vicki
Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com