Sydney Fringe Festival - Social Media Strategy 2010

daniellewarby.com

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Danielle Warby

March 2010

Author: Danielle Warby [email protected]

Date: March 2010

1

Executive Summary

Overview The Sydney Fringe is a multidiscipline cultural showcase that offers our audience and your customers the thrill of discovery and the opportunity to experience independent new works that are tangible and authentic.

The focus of the social media strategy is on developing dialogue and conversation with our key audiences and to provide them with several ways to engage with us, and each other, around the Festival.

The strategy will assist in the long-term goal of presenting repeat festivals. An effective social media strategy will mean the Fringe does not have to initiate momentum in the lead up to the next Festival as there will already be an established and engaged audience.

Achieving success with social media will take time and dedicated resources on a daily basis.

What is the Sydney Fringe? The Fringe will take place for 16 days starting 10 September 2010 in more than twenty venues in an intense Newtown/Marrickville/Enmore precinct, all stuffed full of creative goodness.

What manner of creative goodness? We'll range from edgy, alternative theatre to major concerts, from visual arts openings to brief encounters in surprising places. There'll be free one-off events, all night parties, and performances of all scales in disciplines as far-ranging as:

• visual arts

• sports and games

• film

• digital arts

• comedy

• music

• theatre

• musical theatre

• circus / physical theatre

• dance

• cabaret

• children's and family programming

• and special events

Brand values • Thrilling

• Eclectic

• Authentic

• Independent

• Creative

• Local


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Social Media Priorities It’s proposed we take a staggered approach to implementing the social media strategy in order to best utilise our limited resources and focus on the areas that will give us the greatest return on our time.

Our social media communications are divided up into three stages and five parts:

Pre Festival:

1. artist submissions (to 1st April)

2. audience awareness (to August)

Immediate lead-up and During:

3. audience engagement (August and September)

Post / Long term:

4. partner support (venues / sponsors / staff / volunteers)

5. continued engagement with artists and audiences

Below is an outline of activities. More detailed information can be found in later sections under each social media tool.

Stage 1 (Part 1) Now to 1st April

• Review and approve social media strategy

• Allocate resources and roles within Fringe staff and external bloggers

• Provide DW with Fringe email address to set up social media accounts

• Approach Foursquare to discuss the possibility of a partnership (DW)

• Set up blog

• Complete and distribute necessary Guidelines (DW)

• Set up Facebook Page and notify Group users (DW)

• Update Twitter design (DW)

• Promote new social media assets on website and email

• Continue to advise artists of submission deadline

Stage 1 (Part 2) 1st April - August

The focus of this stage is to set up new social media accounts and continue building the number of fans and level of engagement from existing assets while planning for the intensive period of the campaign (Aug - Sept).

• Set up other social media accounts: Delicious, Flickr, Vimeo, MySpace, Google Maps

• Add friends, contacts, etc to social media accounts using Fringe contact lists and search

• Complete design of Fan Page

• Promote Fan Page

• Plan Twitter competition

• Finalise Twitter lists for Festival partners

• Build community links

• Finalise bloggers and blogging timeline, match with interviewees

• Finalise Video timeline, match with interviewees

• Begin commenting on blogs

• Communicate to artists the Facebook Event guidelines and begin creating Event listings

• Work on Foursquare partnership. Finalise by July

• Complete website integration with social media assets

• Input venues and events into Google Maps

• Set up Online Advertising


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Stage 2 (Part 3) August – September

At this point, most social media activities will need to be performed daily and often.

• Execute the planning outlined in the previous stages

• Seek permission and redistribute any user generated content

Stage 3 (Part 4 & 5) October – November

• Wind down most communications

• Thank relevant people

• Seek feedback from participating artists and fans

• Decide which assets to keep running and update website with social media integration

Assumptions I’ve made the following assumptions in creating this document due to time constraints and other factors:

• I assume we WANT to use social media so I’ve just picked what I think which tools fit best without explanation

• As I’ll be coordinating and implementing most of this myself, I’ve not provided much instruction. However, if anyone needs me to explain anything further or provide any assistance, I’m more than happy to help in person or I can provide guideline and best practice documentation

• I’ve not explained how social media marketing differs from traditional marketing or the differences in tone and language. I assume all of you are aware of this through your own use of Facebook (and other tools). If we stick to the Fringe brand values as a guideline, we’re on the right track.


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Our Community

This section of a strategy would normally consist of an analysis of competitors and the best way to counter their offerings. In the world of social media, which centers around conversation and community, this approach is considered somewhat outdated.

The Sydney Fringe should not consider itself to be in competition with other arts / entertainment providers, instead, we should look at ways to work together with others in the arts industries to promote not only the Fringe, but other festivals, venues and artists not necessarily directly involved with the Fringe.

The aim of this approach is to:

• Set up the Fringe as a resource for the community so in our off season, there is some interaction with our website and social media assets

• Increase the audience for the arts as a whole

The arts community is a strong, vibrant community with existing networks and communications channels. These existing channels are to be leveraged and expanded to include the wider community with an interest in the arts and residents of the inner west.

Members of the arts community who already have a strong online presence are to be engaged in conversation which will hopefully lead to assisting with the spread of information about the Fringe online through their websites, forums, blogs and social media.

Below are some examples of places to start and this list refers to those NOT related to the Fringe, as they will be covered in a later section. It’s expected this list of contacts will continue to grow.

Festivals We will focus primarily Australian Festivals but also include international festivals, particularly those heavily involved in social media with large numbers of engaged followers.

Websites Large International Festivals:

• http://sxsw.com (our benchmark with respect to social media usage)

• Further search to be conducted, suggestions welcome

Festivals the Fringe is modeled on:

• Kris to provide details

Twitter • http://twitter.com/DanielleWarby/australian-festivals

• http://twitter.com/DanielleWarby/festivals (over 1,000 followers)

Both these lists are to be duplicated on the Sydney Fringe account.

Facebook Australian Festivals:

• http://www.facebook.com/AustralianFilmFestival

• Search to be conducted: 78 from facebook.com for intitle:festival intext:"location * australia" (use google)

These lists should be built and maintained on delicious (see section on delicious below)

MySpace • 186 results for festival in Australia (use MySpace search)

Flickr Search for Festivals by name. E.g.:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sydney_festival

Venues The above is to be repeated for Australian venues and their websites added to Delicious.


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Artists For artists using social media I’ll be relying on Fringe staff and their networks to pass on details or to add their links to the Delicious account, follow on Twitter, Facebook or MySpace as appropriate.

Media Included in this section are event listings websites, blogs, online magazines, journalists etc.

Below are a list of media to be added to Delicious, expanded upon and their sites checked for artists and other connections:

• http://www.throwshapes.com.au/

• http://www.twothousand.com.au/

• http://www.thescavenger.net/

• http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/

• http://www.artfiles.com.au

• http://www.onyamagazine.com/

• http://www.sidestreetsydney.com.au

Twitter • http://twitter.com/sydneyfringe/arts-publications

Arts Organisations

Twitter • http://twitter.com/sydneyfringe/arts-organisations

Sponsors I’ll be relying on Fringe staff to pass on details so I can add their links to the Delicious account and search our social media assets.

Funding Bodies As above.


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Our Audiences Our audiences are quite varied and include:

• Initially: partners

o Artists

o Venues

o Sponsor prospects

o Funding bodies

• Then: public

o Arts lovers (willing to travel)

o Popular culture lovers (willing to travel)

o Locals (will to try something new)

o Heavy social media users, local and with some interest in the arts (to spread the word)

Pitch to artists • Be part of something new & exciting & concentrated & big

• Get your work in front of respected industry figures

• Incubator for Sydney Festival

• We take care of much of the hassle

Public Demographics From all over: patrons flock to Newtown arts and entertainment venues from the south (20%), the north (18%), the east (13%) and other parts of Sydney with only 6% of attendees local to Newtown.

Well off: 28% have incomes greater than $80K pa, and 48% greater than $60K pa

Young: 40% are aged between 25 and 34, and another 27% between 35 and 44.

Role of the Social Media program • Attracting artists missed by other communication methods

• Adding extra channels of communication between artist and the Fringe

• Directing artists towards resources

• Connecting artists with each other

• Showing all partners we are ‘with it’

• Promote all partners to our personal networks as appropriate

• Send out sponsor messages as appropriate

• Listen, measure and respond (where appropriate) to buzz surrounding the Fringe

• Raise awareness of the Fringe amongst our publics

• Identify user generated content for redistribution


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Objectives Below is a list of key objectives for both the Fringe as a whole and the Social Media Program specifically. Setting objectives like number of followers or fans is problematic as there are many (some dodgy) ways to build these up and proclaim, ‘success!’. The real measure of success is engagement but understandably, this is harder to measure. Having said that, I have provided some numbers and provided these followers and fans are obtained by legitimate methods (through our existing networks), we should see these numbers translate into engagement. Essentially, we would like to see these engagement figures rise steadily in the lead up to the Festival opening.

The key objectives for the festival:

• To receive 100 - 200 artist submissions

• 50,000 festival attendees

Key objectives of the Social Media Strategy:

• 2,000 Facebook Fans by Festival Opening

• 1,000 Twitter followers by Festival Opening

• Steadily increasing number of Social Media mentions

• Deepen engagement (refer to ‘Measurement’ at the end of this document)

Current Online Communication Activities Website: http://thesydneyfringe.com.au/

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=212713897783&ref=mf

Twitter: http://twitter.com/sydneyfringe


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Social Media Marketing Communications Plan The following activities are proposed:

• Listening

• Blogging

o Blog Commenting

• Facebook

o Page

o Group

o Events

o Facebook Commenting

• Twitter

o Twitter Lists

• Foursquare

• MySpace

• Flickr

• Delicious

• Google Maps

• Video

• Additional Activities

o Online Advertising

o Email

o Mobile

• Website

o SEO

Listening The single most important thing for us to do in the social media space is listen, monitor what is said about us and respond where appropriate.

Current listening tools:

• Social media mentions: http://socialmention.com/search?q=%22sydney+fringe%22+festival&f=rss

• Twitter search: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22Sydney+Fringe%22

• Monitoring Twitter conversations to and from The Sydney Festival: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=from%3Asydney_festival+OR+to%3Asydney_festival

• Google Alerts: “Sydney Fringe”

Blogging The blogging program is to be coordinated by Maeve Marsden and myself. Whilst it is anticipated that Maeve will author a large proportion of the posts, she will not be available until June and in the lead-up to and during the Festival, it’s also unrealistic for her to be able to manage the 1 post a day workload for our peak period.

We propose relying on Fringe staff and members of the arts community to fill the gaps and assist with the blogging program. Maeve has provided me with a list of contacts that I will be approaching.

I’d also suggest approaching bloggers the Fringe staff already have contact with and asking them to guest post on our blog.


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Suggested Blog Content

1 Frequency: Once a week

Tips on submitting

Who we’ve got submissions from, links to their sites

Who are our venues. What venues are still available. How to source your own venue.

2 Frequency: Once a week to daily (August & September)

Profile of artists

Profile of staff

Profile venues, including what’s currently on there

3 Frequency: Daily - Look for user generated content

Review of shows (look for blogs / tweets of attendees and ask them to review)

Photos from shows - Flickr feed, link to public Facebook albums

4 Frequency: as needed

Wind down blog

Thank you messages: sponsors, artists, volunteers etc

Promote next shows at key venues

5 No Action

Blog Schedule • March: Every Friday

• April: Every Friday

• May: Every Friday

• June: Every Friday

• July: Every Friday and Tuesday

• August: Daily

• September: Daily

• Post Festival: As Required

Commenting on other blogs Commenting on blogs written by artists, venues, entertainment guides, etc helps to raise awareness for the Festival and provides us with valuable inbound links which generates traffic to our website and assist with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Please refer to the ‘Guidelines for Commenting on Blogs’.

Myself and Maeve will be able to do a little of this and I suggest we ask staff and volunteers to help out as they are best informed about the Festival and the arts industry. Each staff member to do this should have a profile on the Fringe website and use this URL when leaving comments to drive traffic to our site.

Facebook Currently the Fringe has a Facebook group. A group is a great tool for encouraging discussion and interaction but for promotion, a Fan Page is better. Anything we post to a Fan Page will appear in fans’ news feeds and fans’ interaction with us will appear on our fans’ profiles.

I recommend we create a Fan Page to target festival attendees and change to focus of the current group to be a resource for artists to communicate with us and each other on the Festival process.

Fan Page On a Fan Page, it’s perfectly OK just to predominantly talk about ourselves and those working with us.


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Ask all staff to suggest the Page to their relevant friends and networks. Promote on emails, website and blog.

Notes:

• When posting to the Page and commenting on other posts, all administrators post as The Fringe

• There are two ways to communicate: status updates and email updates. Email updates do not go to fans’ inboxes but to a separate folder called ‘Updates’ which I’m not convinced gets us many eyeballs. Status updates display on our wall and in Fans’ newsfeeds.

• When sending email updates to fans, keep them real short. Preferably link to website or blog posts.

• At all times we monitor and engage in conversation

• What do we do about negative feedback? Refer to the Guidelines.

1 Send email updates: Once a week

Create a submissions tab with brief details on the submissions process, link to website and link to Group

Create a landing page tab for non-fans to arrive on. Overview of festival.

Status updates naming who we’ve got submissions from, links to their sites, general news about the festival etc.

2 Send email updates: Twice a week

Change submissions tab info to ‘submissions closed’ (remove closer to the Festival date but before next stage)

Status updates: Start posting events (see below), links to blog posts, festival news

3 Send email updates: Twice a week

Status updates: event reminders, links to blog posts, “tonight we’re going to see xyz, who’s with us?”

Post photos from shows, encourage staff and audience to post shows

Post links to reviews by the media

4 Send email updates: as needed

Call for opinions from Fans about events and festival as a whole

Thank you messages: sponsors, artists, volunteers etc

Promote next shows at key venues

5 Monitor

Facebook Group To note:

• When posting to the group, administrators post as themselves

• Emails from groups go into ‘actual’ inbox on Facebook

1 Send email: Once a week - reminder that submissions close April 1st

Wall posts naming who we’ve got submissions from, links to their sites

Promote Group to venues looking for performers

Assist with artists connecting with one another

News from venues looking for performers

Links to website articles / blogs posts on submission process

2 Frequency: Once a week - how to promote show, official Fringe event listings.


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3 Encourage posting of photos and videos on our Fan page

Congratulate artists on shows

Post links to reviews by the media

4 Ask for feedback from artists

5 No Action

Facebook Events It’s proposed that the Fringe creates event listings on Facebook for all of the events throughout the Festival. We would then add key people from each event as administrators of their events and encourage them to promote the official event listing to their networks. This will hopefully reduce the likelihood of multiple events being created and fragmenting the audience.

Events are one of the easiest things for users to share through Facebook and my harnessing this, we can hopefully also drive traffic our Fan Page and website.

1 No action

2 Create event listing for each event during the Festival as dates are confirmed.

Create images for each event using photography supplied by the artists combined with the Fringe logo

Add event organisers as administrators of their events to enable them to make updates to the information

Promote each event to our networks as appropriate - advice: we should pick and choose who we send events to, we don’t want our friends getting annoyed by the volume

3 Post photos and videos to the event listings. Concentrate on those with more than one show.

4 No action

5 No action

Other communication on Facebook Festival staff and volunteers should, as appropriate seek to become fans and join other groups within the arts and participate in conversation. Guidelines can be provided on how to do this but essentially, we want to avoid any spammy behaviour.

Twitter Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. (Wikipedia)

Some terminology (Source: http://katekendall.com/2010/03/16/twitter-noobiquette):

• @reply = how you converse with someone

• RT = retweet (directly quoting someone else’s tweet)

• DM = direct message (private)

• # = tag to collate tweets or to micro-reference your thoughts/consciousness stream

How should we use Twitter? Twitter is primarily a tool for conversation and sharing and sometimes we can use it to promote ourselves.

The Twitter account can be utilised by various members of Fringe staff if required or content can be filtered through once person. It’s recommended that the link on the Twitter profile points to a page on the Fringe site dedicated to Twitter. It should contain a profile of each of the staff members using the account. Each tweet sent by Festival staff other than the main user of the account should be followed by their initials (i.e. ^SM).


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Building up followers and engagement on Twitter should be the main focus initially followed by providing information about the Festival and our artists in the lead-up to and during the Festival.

We should nominate a hashtag for the festival and publicise it through twitter and on our website. Hashtags, words or phrases prefixed with a #, are used to group posts together by topic (for example: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23sydfest) and are added to tweets. We can then use RSS feed for our hashtag to syndicate this content on our website and in Facebook under “What people are saying about the Fringe”.

A hastag should be as short as possible so as to not take up too much room but still be descriptive and unique. We will need to decide on one. Perhaps ‘#SydFringe’?

Twitter lists are a great way to group and promote people we follow or recommend. We are limited by Twitter to 20 lists. I suggest we create lists for:

• Fringe Artists

• Fringe Venues

• Fringe Sponsors

• Fringe Staff

• Australian Festivals

Twitter can be used for contests, simple ones involving retweeting, and this is a great way to gain followers and spread the word about the Fringe. Simply offering free tickets should do the trick but before the Festival begins, we should consider a contest offering a Festival wide pass to all events as the one thing that will get people interested more than free stuff, is LOTS of free stuff.

Listening to conversations around keywords and responding as appropriate. E.g.:

• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22Sydney+Fringe%22

Twitter (as well as Facebook) is a good tool for offering last minute tickets at a discount (if necessary).

Foursquare

What is Foursquare? Source: Wikipedia

Foursquare is a location based social network and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location.

Foursquare is also a game where points are awarded for "checking in" at venues and users can also earn badges by checking in at locations with certain tags or for check-in frequency.

Users can choose to have their Twitter and/or their Facebook accounts updated when they check in.

Users can create a "To Do" list for their private use and add "Tips" to venues that other users can read, which serve as suggestions for great things to do, see or eat at the location.

Why we should seek a partnership with Foursquare As is, Foursquare has gained some traction in the social media community but it still has a way to go. Where the real possibilities of the platform have been shown, especially in relation to an event like the Fringe, are through it’s recent partnership with SPIN magazine the South by South West (SXSW) Festival in Austin, Texas, USA. (http://www.spin.com/articles/check-foursquare-win-passes-spins-2010-sxsw-bash)

With a partnership with Foursquare we would be able to work with them on creating specific badges, run scavenger hunts and offer a prize (say, a Festival pass for 2011) for most events attended. The ability for users to add tips (or reviews) is also a good way for buzz to build around Festival events.

Foursquare would also offer our partner venues a way to begin playing in this space and they would continue to gain value from the network once the Festival is over.

Lastly, no one in Australia has done this yet. It’s an opportunity for the Fringe to create something unique as location based social networks, Foursquare in particular, are considered to be the ‘next big thing’ in social networking.

Using Foursquare without a partnership There are two things we could do:

• Add tips to each participating venue with the dates of shows being held there

• Have venues create profiles and offer prizes or incentives to attend their events


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MySpace Yes, you read right. MySpace. Rumours of its demise are much exaggerated and since we’re talking about the arts community, they are on MySpace in droves.

Having said that, activity on the site is low and it could be we don’t have the time and resources for this one. However, MySpace does now have applications (including twitter integration) so time spent elsewhere can feed content into our MySpace page.

My suggestion would be to set up a basic profile, connect with our key partners and performers, set up some integration with other social media sites and check it occasionally. Mainly the profile would act as a placeholder and direct traffic to our website. It’s also easy (and acceptable) to add friends of friends of friends and so on, to build up our contacts on MySpace, it’s just time consuming to do manually.

If we have a volunteer or intern who is familiar with MySpace willing to look after this, that would be ideal.

Some numbers • 185 results for festival in Australia

• 23 results for director in Australia

• 113 results for artist in Australia

• 11 results for venue in Australia

• 27 results for photographer in Australia

• 500 results for photography in Australia

• 100 results for arts in Australia

• 190 results for film in Australia

• 207 results for comedy in Australia

• 500 results for music in Australia

• 97 results for theatre in Australia

• 94 results for circus in Australia

• 462 results for dance in Australia

• 16 results for cabaret in Australia

• 54 results for performance in Australia

• 5 results for acting in Australia

• 8 results for actor in Australia

Some key profiles • http://www.myspace.com/factorytheatre

• http://www.myspace.com/theaureview

• http://www.myspace.com/the_red_rattler

Flickr Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. (Wikipedia)

Flickr allows users to store up to 200 images for free. I’d suggest upgrading to a ‘Pro’ account which allows for unlimited photo uploads and costs US$47.99 for 2 years.

How can we use Flickr? Create an account for the Fringe and give key staff access to it to upload photos during the Festival.

Syndicate the images via RSS on the Fringe website.

Add all artists, venues, etc as contacts to the Fringe account.

Create a public group for artists and Festival goers to upload their images to. Use as a source of user generated content, publish (with permission) on our blog, website and Facebook.


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Delicious Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms. (Wikipedia)

Delicious is a great resource for both Fringe staff and our artists, venues and festival goers and will help set up the Fringe as a go-to resource for our audiences and assist us with our long-term goals of keeping up awareness of the Fringe outside of the Festival period.

How can we use Delicious? Bookmark and tag the following items and use the generated RSS feed to syndicate content on the Fringe website:

• Third party articles about the Fringe

• Event reviews

Bookmark and tag the following, link from the website as a resource:

• Friends of the Fringe

o Artists

o Venues

o Sponsors

o Staff

o Media

• Venues throughout Australia

• Australian Arts Organisations

• Arts media

• etc

Google Maps Google Maps can be used to create a multimedia map of venues and happenings during the Festival.

We could use third party software or create our own map for embedding on the website.

For example: BlockWild is a Google Maps mashup that allows users to post, search and discover location-based, community-generated content like events, social groups, classified ads, jobs, real estate and Yelp reviews.

The site is a great way to see what is going on around you. The site geo-locates and relies on user-generated content.

For discussion.

Video Create a profile on Vimeo to upload video created by Fringe staff and volunteers.

Perhaps we should go for a lo-fi look (unless anyone has a contact with experience who wished to take this on?).

If any artists use or incorporate video in their work, we should look at seeing if they are able to contribute content

Videos to be embedded on the Fringe website

1 No Action

2 Frequency: Once a week

Profile of artists, rehearsals – call for artists to submit video

3 Frequency: Daily - Look for user generated content

Filming of shows, show comments from performers

4 No Action

5 No Action


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Additional Activities Below are some suggestions for integrating social media with existing activities. I’d like to have further discussions with relevant people about whether this is possible and look at expanding the below.

Online Advertising We should consider running a low budget, targeted online advertising campaign through both Google and Facebook. This type of advertising has many advantages and considering our restricted budget, would be money well spent.

Facebook Social Ads The targeting capabilities of Facebook advertising are quite powerful, allowing us to reach specific users. Some suggestions would be to run campaigns for:

• Growing our Fan Page • Specific events. Perhaps co-funded by artists

Google AdWords Google AdWords could used to target people searching from in and around Sydney for events similar to those we are presenting. Some suggestions:

• Piggy back of Sydney Festival’s name to raise awareness for the Fringe

• Specific events. Perhaps co-funded by artists

Email campaigns Social media should be incorporated into email campaigns where possible to best promote our social media assets to our existing contacts.

Something as small and as basic as a link in a sidebar will suffice.

I also advise adding sharing capabilities to the newsletter to allow for readers to share items through their networks on Twitter and Facebook.

Lastly, we should consider updating the email signature of each staff member with a Sydney Fringe email address to include links to Facebook and Twitter as well as the website.

Mobile Campaigns

iPhone We should look into building an iPhone application similar to that of the Sydney Festival and the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival:

• http://www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au/the-festival/free-festival-iphone-app

• http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2010/Plan-Your-Festival/Optus-Festival-Buddy2/

Given our resources, this may not be possible and there are several other alternatives that we could look into. For discussion.

Website The website is to be the hub of all social media activities, the central point that pulls the whole social media communications plan together.

I’ve made some suggestions as to possible website content as well as laying out how we can integrate our various social media assets with the website.

I’d like to have a chat about the website, how we plan to grow it and which of the following I’m able to implement.

Content Guideline 1 Provide submission information

Offer marketing help (see Melbourne festival), social media classes.

Introductions to other artists via twitter (create a twitter feed of confirmed artists)


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2 Develop a Google map of venues

Profile artists

Profile staff / volunteers

Profile venues

Profile sponsors / supporters

3 Switch focus to the blog for daily reviews, photos and video

4 Switch focus to easily maintains social media assets such as Twitter.

Continue to promote events at participating venues (through twitter with RSS feed to website).

Promote sponsors (only if we love them as this is in addition to any agreed sponsorship. don’t use this as a bargaining chip unless you can be sure of being able to resource these activities).

Support and promote staff / volunteers with a thank you page and ‘where are they now’ including links to their websites or social media profiles as appropriate.

5 Maintain focus on Twitter and add Delicious.

Display feeds from blogs of select artists, our twitter, RSS of Delicious bookmarks (providing resources to artists and news about the industry)

Provide links to other festival websites.

Sign up for next years festival (email list).

Blogs A summary of our latest blog articles should feature on the home page with a link though to the blog. This should appear seamless to the visitor.

RSS feeds from the blogs of venues / artists participating in the Festival could also be syndicated on our site.

Staff profiles I recommend all staff and key volunteers at the Fringe have a profile on the website. This serves two purposes, one, to put a human face (well, several human faces) on the organisation and two, provide a way of showing our appreciation of our volunteers and promoting the work they do for us.

Some features to be considered for each profile page:

• RSS of twitter feeds and blog comments.

• Links to personal / professional home page and social media profiles (if desired)

Facebook Integration Facebook Page badge to be placed in appropriate location on the site to encourage interaction with the page and other festival goers. Fans can join without having to click through to Facebook.

We should also look at using Facebook Connect for website sign-in. For discussion.

Twitter Integration Twitter profile link: to twitter page on the website explaining who monitors / talks on twitter and a link to their profile.

We already have a Twitter feed from the Fringe account on the home page. In addition, we could also consider:

• Feed of all tweets using our nominated hashtag

• Feed of twitter lists of our artists / venues / sponsors / etc

Delicious Integration • Feed of any news, reviews about the Fringe

• Link to resources for artists

‘Share this’ To enable visitors to the website and blog share content, we should include a sharing widget on all pages.


Date: March 2010

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SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) SEO is an ongoing process and many of the activities listed above, such as blogging, commenting on blogs, purchasing Google AdWords and importing RSS feeds will assist with improving our Google rank.

In addition, I’ve outlined a few suggestions below and I’m happy to discuss this further if it’s decided we would like to spend any significant time on SEO.

Keywords One of the first things we need to do is to decide what keywords we would like to optimise the website for. I have made some assumptions and come up with the following list:

• Sydney Fringe Festival

• Sydney Fringe

• Sydney Festival

• Inner West Festival

• Newtown Festival

• Marrickville Festival

• Enmore Festival

Off site Below is a list of suggested actions to be undertaken off site:

• Locate all websites that link to ‘fake’ festival sites. Contact them and ask them to update those links to point to our site

• Identify relevant sites (particularly .gov and .edu) we could approach for inbound links

• Find websites that rank highly for our keywords and using Google’s inbound link search to discover who links to them, approach them for inbound links

Website Below is a list of basic suggested changes to the current website:

• Change the titles of all pages to: Sydney Fringe Festival: Enmore, Marrickville, Newtown - ‘Page Name’

• Utilise H1 & H2 headers better. Currently the H1 header is an image with no keyword text

• META tags: Add description to each page (otherwise Google just pulls content from the page)

• Update the footer to read “The Sydney Fringe Festival”

• Perhaps add a page about the history of Fringe Festivals in Sydney. It’s an opportunity to add keyword heavy copy and also to proclaim we are the ‘real’ Fringe


Date: March 2010

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Measurement In addition to keeping track of numbers of fans / followers / friends / video views for each network, I shall also provide a weekly update of the following:

• Number of total Social Media Mentions of “Sydney Fringe”

• Facebook

o Number of interactions (wall posts, comments, likes) with the Page

o Number of visits to the Page

• Twitter

o Impact

o Engagement

o Influence

o Generosity

o Clout

o Velocity

o Retweeted

o Referenced

o Referencing

o Updates

o Lists

o Hashtags Cited

• Number of Blog Comments

All to be taken with a grain of salt!

Sydney Fringe Festival - Social Media Strategy 2010

Marketing

Transcript of Sydney Fringe Festival - Social Media Strategy 2010