42nd Street Moon conducted a social media listening experiment to increase online engagement and ticket sales. They monitored conversations around key terms related to their organization and productions. This led to discovering unprompted discussions on Twitter and identifying marketing opportunities. As a result, they increased Facebook fans by 16% and Twitter followers tripled. Website traffic, email signups, and ticket sales exceeded projections, allowing an 11% reduction in marketing costs. The experiment provided insights into engaging patrons online and identifying influential bloggers.

1. 42nd Street Moon Social Media Listening Experiment<br />Setup<br />Two sets of key words: Institutional and Programmatic<br />Institutional includes variations on our name, key personnel names, and the theatre’s name<br />Programmatic includes all show titles, authors, some “stars”, and some creative crew.<br />Used Google Reader with social Mention, Google Alerts, Baktype (which stopped working, Tweetdeck, and Facebook.<br />Objectives<br />Increase online community by 15%-20%.<br />Increase online marketing potential (decrease traditional).<br />Increase online ticket sales.<br />Listening experiment allowed us to identify:<br />Keywords to use in other online and social media marketing objectives<br />Plethora of marketing opportunties through “comments”, discussions with bloggers, etc…<br />* The listening post lead to the discovery that we were being talked about on twitter - leading to increase twitter activity.<br />Outcomes<br />Increase in Facebook fans of 16% since the experiment started.<br />Almost triple-fold followers on Twitter (under 50 to 134)<br />Significant increase on website hits, email sign ups, online ticket sales - feed by social networking sites, especially Facebook<br />Reduction in marketing budget by 11%, yet ticket sales passed projections by as much as 10% in the same time period.<br />Doing the experiment again<br />Try to find some more “influencers”<br />Ah ha moment #1: Realizing how much being part of the online community means to our patrons.<br />Request for online reviewers (4 people) lead to two new donors and a new subscriber.<br />Ah ha moment #2: Bloggers seem much more balancd than “board community members”<br />Post: Very Warm for May on IMDB “And this business of color-blind casting is just sooooo irritating and distracting. The her (Bobby I think his name was) speaks as American as the next person but because he is Indian (Asian Indian) and is brother to May, doesn’t contribute to the make-believe of the evening.”<br />Next Steps: Continue to increase our online community and continue to find new ways to engage them and not just market to them.<br />