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Questions to get started:

1. Whom to include in which order?
2. Which information to collect?
3. How to present this information?

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1. Whom to include in which order?

• Whom do I want to reach in the first place?
• Where are they? (geographically, media-consumption/platform-wise, technology-wise, in which scene)
• What turns them on?
• Who influences them?
• What do I want them to do? Do I need awareness, word of mouth, interaction, sales?

How to motivate the audience to interact?

• Stop just shouting to them – reply to, discuss with, cooperate with them.
• Turn participation and interaction into collaboration.
• What can you offer them, fitting their needs, engaging their interests?
• Provide additional value – even if it isn’t about you; share the limelight.
• Stay gentle in your audience approach – don’t press a sales pitch (@smudgewatchuk: “social media = no marketing”)

Content shaping and developing

• Basis: be there in the first place; be recognizable, authentic, personal & trustworthy.
• Don’t be afraid of being a person making errors, stay identifiable.
• Thus: build your reputation.
• Define stories to be told.
• Who are your protagonists? What are they struggling about? What is their goal?
• Find different perspectives on your narrative and identify appropriate media to tell them.
• Don’t focus on the result, show the process leading there, too.

Where to publish and to interact

• Which kinds of media do you have / produce / want to use?
• Select the right channels / platforms / networks and combine them into a transmedia narration.
• Established audiences: how does a channel fit into their lifestyle?
• Ease of use: make your content easy to share and integrate into the workflow of your audience. Provide your audience with means to use it as they like, not as you’d like.
• Media sources: Flickr, YouTube, Soundcloud – multimedia content available for social bookmarking
• Combination and contextualization: Blog – group different media around a topic, provide web access / RSS source for your story. Lots of options out there.
• Announce, discuss & interact: Twitter & Facebook; differentiate your communication styles!
• Check current technology for easy means of production workflows (eg Google+ Hangouts on air for interactive video podcasting and auto-publishing).
• Is it cool to be there? But: don’t switch too often, you might alienate people. Be careful about new and hip platforms; don’t invest in them if they can not easily be integrated with existing ones at first.
• Don’t forget old media – these might still be relevant, too.
• But: dot be afraid to cut your traditional media related budgets if the turnout is better elsewhere, even if you loose parts of your audience that way. Change hurts, but it might allow growth.

The inside perspective

• Identify and educate evangelists in your institution, make them your representatives.
• Don’t throw additional people and money at things at first glance; try to stay small, create double function jobs.
• That way you’ll get additional perspectives and insights for your outbound narrative, too.
• Reduce to the essentials – don’t do everything, don’t try being everywhere at once.

Change yourself – carefully, but do it

• Communication channels: carefully migrate internal communication to open platforms and adjust the level of openness
• Overcome conflicts of interest (“Why selling ideas instead of just creating world class art?” / “I need a closed space for artistic development” / “I just want to show perfect results” / “It’s our artistic freedom”). No easy solution here, sorry. Be gentle and persistent.
• Allow and integrate input from the outside, give up some control (it’s hard).
• Have patience – substantial changes in organizations take time, and establishing the necessary trust in the value of outside input even more so.
• Do you need a social media policy? It depends on how big and how fast you are. Accept your errors, don’t hide them, learn publicly.

Some reading

• Getting started in transmedia storytelling, by Robert Pratten http://www.tstoryteller.com/getting-started-in-transmedia-storytelling
• Das Kulturmanagement Blog, Christian Henner-Fehr (German) http://kulturmanagement.wordpress.com/
• Frank Tentler on Posterous (German) http://echtzeitgeist.posterous.com/

These are just a lot of points that invite to further reflecting, true enough. I’ll revisit some of them. Discuss, and enlighten me!

I believe that even with purely institutional Twitter accounts (which this one isn’t) one needs to know who the person behind it is, and the credit of this should should avoid misunderstandings. But still – maybe a clarification is in order anyway? This is my first draft – any input is appreciated.

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Twitter account policy for @musikFabrik

This is the account of Lukas Hellermann, project manager for Ensemble musikFabrik, one of the leading ensembles for contemporary music. You’ll find stuff related to Ensemble musikFabrik, of course – updates on rehearsals, pictures, concerts, upcoming projects and more.

You’ll also get a lot of retweets of stuff that I find interesting, or worthy of further discussion. The assumption is that based on my connection with Ensemble musikFabrik and your interest in us you’d like to participate in my (mostly new music related) reading, too. Even what other players in the contemporary music scene are doing, writing and tweeting about I will be sharing frequently.@-replies are part of a more personal discussion and do not necessarily represent an institutional Ensemble musikFabrik position, too. Chances are that there is a connection between my personal and the Ensemble’s position, though. When in doubt take it with a grain of salt.

If you are interested in the purely institutional side of things, you can do two things:
1) Check Ensemble musikFabrik’s Facebook page.
2) Just let me know – splitting up this Twitter account might be an option, too. If I get enough feedback that this would be the way to go I’ll do I might do that.

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Discuss this.

Ein Argument, auf dass hier Bezug genommen wird, würde ich so fassen: Da ein technischer Schutz von Inhalten immer komplizierter und nur unter immer tieferen Eingriffen in die Rechte des Einzelnen (in diesem Fall) Konsumenten durchsetzbar wird, liegt eine de facto freie Verfügbarkeit vor. Attraktive Bezahl- und Bezugsmodelle konkurrieren über den ‘Ease of use’ mit illegalem Download, nicht über technische und legale Restriktionen – teilweise erfolgreich.

Spannend ist die Frage, wie Anbieter und Konsumenten damit umgehen, wenn dieses Angebot als nicht ausreichend empfunden wird. Der Konsument kann dann entweder darauf verzichten, den Inhalt überhaupt wahrzunehmen (zu faul für illegalen Download) – ein Reichweitenverlust für den Anbieter. Oder er macht sich die Mühe der Piraterie – ein wirtschaftlicher Verlust für den Anbieter.

Der Anbieter dagegen wird versuchen, sein Angebot so attraktiv und erreichbar wie möglich zu machen, ohne dabei die wirtschaftliche Grundlage zu verlieren – bis hin zu veränderten Geschäftsmodellen. Oder er versucht, Zwangsmaßnahmen durchzusetzen, um den illegalen Konsum weniger attraktiv zu machen – bis hin zu gesellschaftlichen Kollateralschäden.

Hier muss sich ein neues Gleichgewicht einspielen, bei dem es weniger um das aktuelle Recht geht, sondern um die Klugheit der Beteiligten. Sobald der Konsument dem Anbieter keine wirtschaftliche Kompensation für dessen Leistung gibt oder ermöglicht (durch welches Geschäftsmodell auch immer), wird er den Zugriff auf attraktive Inhalte verlieren – es entstehen schlicht weniger. Umgekehrt verliert der Anbieter seine Kunden, wenn er ihre Bedürfnisse nicht ausreichend bedient – oder provoziert eine gesellschaftliche Zuspitzung, die ihm letztlich nicht helfen kann.

Ein wenig Gelassenheit steht uns allen gut an – lasst uns weder enteignen noch die Daumenschrauben anziehen, sondern geeignete Stellschrauben suchen. Das können alternative Bezahlmodelle sein (bitte schon einmal fleißig flattern und crowdfunden), ausgeweitete Zitatrechte, Regelungen für verwaiste oder ungenutzte Werke… Der Phantasie sind erst einmal keine Grenzen gesetzt.

Und gleich noch ein umfangreiches Zitat aus einer Rezension des Buches Gutenberg the Geek: History’s First Technology Entrepreneur and Silicon Valley’s Patron Saint von Jeff Jarvis, die Kevin Bonham auf http://www.downloadtheuniverse.com/dtu/2012/03/the-pioneer-of-print.html veröffentlicht hat:

“To say that the internet is changing the world is so cliché that it’s almost meaningless, but reading Gutenberg the Geek made it real for me.

(Jarvis:) Our accepted wisdom today is that the change we are experiencing is pushing us forward at lightning speed. But I’m coming to wonder whether, instead, it is happening very slowly. That is, we are only at the bare beginning of the change we will undergo and we cannot yet fathom its full shape and extent.(/Jarvis)

We’re so busy thinking about the death of newspapers and Facebook’s huge IPO, it’s hard to realize that this is just the beginning. We’ve only had the internet for 17 years. Jarvis asks us to imagine ourselves 17 years after the invention of the printing press, trying to predict the impact that it would have on humanity and on society over the next 500 years. Early uses of the printing press merely recapitulated the work that scribes would do – early typefaces were modeld on hand written script and the process was even called ‘automated writing.’ But the speed and efficiency of printing soon enabled new forms of writing, new genres and ultimately, Jarvis says, ‘changed not just writing but politics, religion, education, our sense of ourselves, our memories.’”

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Discuss this.