Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

Look at What People Look At

I'm particularly interested in what people pay attention to online. I've long known that images are particularly valuable in guiding the eye towards an article. In many cases, images can convey more about an arts event than can text.

Now there's some research from the Poyntner Institute which can help guide arts managers in terms of what images work better than others. Notice I say "work better" which isn't necessarily "look better" in the traditional sense. Stay with me here.

The Poyntner study (Poynter Online - EyeTrack07 ASNE Presentation Script) focused on how people got their news from newspapers, both online and offline. Here's what caught my eye:

Color photos draw dramatic attention in broadsheet (print), compared to black and white photos. Live, documentary news photos -- photos of real people doing things in real time -- got more attention than staged photos. Studio or staged photos received little attention. And mug shots got relatively little attention in any format.

So, if you've got a choice to use a stock image supplied by a PR company or agent, that won't be nearly as engaging as an unstaged photo or something you may be able to take on your own. For instance, use a shot of an actor backstage, rather than their headshot. Take a picture of an author or speaker yourself with a digital camera, rather than one he or she provides.

Sure, some will argue the image you'll get won't be of the same "quality" as a professional shot, but it seems that doesn't matter. The rules online are different than in print. Authenticity is more important than almost anything else. 

Another Staggering Statistic

Following on this week's announcement about Yahoo's unlimited e-mail storage size, here's another bit of news about Broadband access.  Although not surprising, I think the adoption speed we're witnessing is staggering. 

I read this yesterday:

Broadband penetration continues to surge, according to a new report by Magna Global. As of the end of last year, an estimated 55.6 million U.S. households, or 74% of all Internet households, connected to the Web via high-speed lines. That's up significantly from 2005's 43.9 million households and more than double 2003's 26 million.

What's more, broadband penetration is soon expected to surpass 90%, with an estimated 81 million U.S. homes connecting via high-speed connections by 2008.

The implications for this are clear, and something I've been saying for a while. As Internet speed gets faster, the online experience will get better. People will watch more video, buy more things and the overall satisfaction level of the Web as an information tool will only get better.

How does that impact us?  Well, today there are only a few arts sites that have video clips within them. That's going to change in a big way, and when it does, it will be more likely arts patrons will choose to go to an unfamiliar arts event over a more familiar (and presumably better marketed)

Free Email accounts forever

I just read this on Zdnet.com:

Yahoo will begin offering unlimited storage for its free Web-based e-mail in May, the company announced late Tuesday. The move makes Yahoo the first of the major free e-mail providers to offer unlimited storage, but it likely will not be the last.

Yahoo currently offers 1 gigabyte for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service. Google's free Gmail service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free.

This is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, its amazing that the cost of providing online storage has become so inexpensive they they can actually do this. And, with 250 million users of its email system, giving it away for free will have a big impact. Google did something like this when it introduced its email system, but it still remains a tiny player in the personal email market.

With Yahoo's move, we're essentially moving towards a world where all personal email will be free, and presumably advertising supported. As this medium of email communication is continues to grow, it is becoming more and more a daily part of the lives of everyday Americans. This new development seems to only reinforce this trend.

How small is too small, for E-mail marketing?

Thinking back on last week’s seminar tour it’s clear to me that many smaller arts organizations are now waking up to the potential of e-mail marketing. That’s a good thing.

However, no matter how emphatically I describe the anti-spam efforts of ISPs, I don’t think I’m getting the message out clearly enough. If you’re sending group e-mail from Outlook or an AOL account, you run a very high risk of having your account “blacklisted” by ISPs. That means your e-mail won’t get delivered.

Some arts managers say “But we’re really a small organization, and we want to do e-mail marketing well, but we’re too small, so what can we do to do it right, without spending any money?”  My answer is that the ISPs don't care how small or large you are. If they see bulk e-mail coming from a suspect address, they will block it.

So, if you believe that e-mail marketing is valuable to your organization, it’s worth spending money on it. Relative to the cost of any other kind of marketing, this is the one that will give you the best return on your investment, hands down.

If you’re just getting started, before you dump any money in offline marketing, I’d say that your best strategy is to do something very cutting edge, and make your first marketing investment in online marketing. Once you've decided that, e-mail is the clearly best place to begin.

Summary Seminar Thoughts

I’ve been speaking around the country doing e-mail marketing seminars this month and I’ve now completed sessions in seven of eight cities. Yesterday’s was in Tulsa and tomorrow I’m in San Francisco.

I've had the wonderful opportunity to meet with many of you over meals and coffee. And as I speak with you I’ve realized there’s a subtle but important attitudinal change that’s happened in the last year.

For the last few years I think collectively most arts managers have been thinking “I want to do e-mail marketing, but I want to spend the least amount of time and money on it, because I’m busy juggling a million other things and this is just one more thing I don’t have time to deal with.”

I think that point of view is slowly but surely being replaced by a different perspective. The new collective thinking seems to be “I see that this e-mail marketing thing is working for a lot of my colleagues, and it’s going to become more and more important to my organization during the next few years. Now I’m ready to devote the time, energy, and money to do it right."

What I’ve learned these past few weeks is that more and more of you are seeing the arts marketing world filled with the kind of online marketing potential that I’ve been excited about for years. 

Learning from Las Vegas and JetBlue

This week I’m on the road again doing more e-mail marketing seminars, and yesterday I was in Las Vegas.  To get there I had my 7^th flight of the month. For arts marketers, there’s a lot to learn from Las Vegas, and a lot to learn from JetBlue.

Digesting the sensory overload that is “the strip” in Las Vegas will take me a few more days. But I did have an experience at Cirque du Soliel that was worth noticing. I went to see “Love” which is their homage to the Beatles. Even before I entered the theater it has hard to not notice that virtually everything was in British theme. And I mean everything - the colors, the music, the graphics, the spelling.  Even the clearly American college student ticket-takers had fake British accents. In fact, it annoyed me at first until I realized that these people were trying to make this a total experience. Cirque understand that even the ticket-takers help make the event a memorable one.

Now let’s skip over to the JetBlue experience and the lesser one I had yesterday on American Airlines. While JetBlue is still my favorite airline, the bloom is definitely off, since I was also caught in the Valentine’s Day cancellation mess. Having said that, when I boarded my 9 AM flight on Sunday morning to Las Vegas, the flight attendants were clearly happy to be there, and in a good mood. They smiled, they were helpful and the flight was packed.

Now, I compare the packed American flight I was on to Dallas yesterday. The flight attendants were not happy to be there, and in fact, everything about their demeanor said “tired” to me. The announcements on the loudspeaker, the service, the smiles, and the overall mood were competent at best. Did they serve drinks? Sure. Did they say “hello” and “welcome to Dallas” like they were supposed to? Sure.

But, the message I got was clearly that this was their job, a job they didn’t care much about doing more than the minimum. And it didn’t help that about 50% of the flight didn’t get their luggage until one hour after the flight landed. No explanation, nothing.

So, what’s this got to do with the arts, you say? A lot! When was the last time you bought a ticket at your box office? How about the ticket takers at your events? Are they happy to be there? Is there a welcoming attitude on the phone, and in the theater? How about in the language you use in your e-mails and on your web site. All of these things matter a lot, and in a way, maybe as much as the actual show itself.

I learned a lot from Las Vegas and JetBlue. 

Video E-mail to Replace Regular E-mail?

When Apple ships nearly all of its notebook PCs with a small video camera built right into the screen, you know that e-mail messages will eventually become old school, and video e-mail isn't far behind.

I was trolling around today and read about a site that's doing exactly this. Here's an example. SightSpeed. You have to give this guy credit for coolness - he recorded this at 30,000 feet.

I'm not convinced yet whether if, how, or when this will catch on. I mean, he could have easily said this quicker and faster in a text e-mail. Sure, the visual and audio cues are more powerful than text, but if you had 40 of these in your in-box in the morning, you'd need an entire extra morning just to get through your video-mail. And until you can play a video right in your in-box, your viewers are going to have to wait for a web browser to load up. (Yawn.)

I say the jury's still out on this one, but it's something I'm paying attention to. What do you think?

TV Viewing Still Going Strong -- What's Going On?

I've been thinking a lot about the convergence of the television and the Internet. I've always thought that someday (sooner than later) most of us will be kicking back on the easy chair in the living room watching what we used to call a TV set, which will  be nothing more than a monitor picking up streams from zillions of sites the Web. Then yesterday I read this, and for a moment thought I might be wrong:

clipped from publications.mediapost.com AMERICANS ARE RECEIVING MORE TV channels than ever before, but the number they actually watch does not appear to be growing, according the 2007 findings of an annual report on U.S. TV audiences from Nielsen Media Research. For the first time, the number of channels "receivable" by the average TV household shot up past 100, jumping to 104.2 in 2006, up from 96.4 in 2005. But the number actually tuned by the average household remained about the same, moving to 15.7 in 2006 from 15.4 in 2005 and 15.0 in 2004, the first year for which Nielsen reports that statistic.   That pattern isn't surprising to television researchers who have long known that people will only watch a limited number of channels regardless of how many options are available to them.

I came to my senses when I realized something else is lurking beneath the surface. People will change their behavior when there's a compelling reason to do so. The old phrase "100 channels and nothing on" is as true today as it was years ago. It's not about how many channels, it's about how finely tuned those channels are to what people will watch. (Direct marketing 101, all over again.)

If the TV set turns into the Web-set, then I think we'll begin to see major differences in this kind of research. It's my bet that a symphony lover will change his TV viewing habits when he can watch a broadcast of a Finnish orchestra concert coming from Helsinki. The same will be true of a theater lover who can now watch a reading of a new Mamet play coming from Austin, Texas.

Then we'll be in a world where there are 10 million "channels" and it won't be the case that 7 or 10 traditional TV channels will rule the living room.

Check back with me in about 2010, will you?

Tools vs Technique Redux

Let's remember where we left off a few days ago:

E-mail Success Depends on Marketing Skill

I got this e-mail today from Nicole Kindred who does the e-mail marketing for the Wang Center in Boston. At the risk of the shameless promotion of my own seminar, I offer up her note as testimony that the statement above is indeed true.

Nicole writes:

I just sent out the first announcement since the seminar, and it was exclusively to our opt-in list using  the e-Postcard template.  In the past, I had been uploading my own image, which was a document created in Publisher and saved as a jpeg.  Now that I better understand Alt Text, I used the PatronMail system directly and my open rate just about doubled!

Now, I know that is probably also due to sending exclusively to the opt-in list and because the subject line included a compelling piece of information ("On Sale Notice: Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds"), so the open rate will be higher than recent mailings.  Nonetheless, I am excited by it!

To this I would like to add another few bits of wisdom: Targeted messages perform better to targeted lists, and clear subject lines are invaluable. I rest my case (at least for the moment.)

Edwards Gets My vote

This is not a political statement. It is a marketing statement.

Just look at this main page. I cannot imagine what our arts world would look like if every arts organization had a main screen that was as clearly focused on collecting e-mail addresses as this is. Check the call to action, and the use of design to guide your eye to the sign-up box.

Also, notice the little red area on the bottom right that enables you to bypass this screen and go to the web site directly.

Since the election is so far away, who can tell which candidate is better or worse? At least for today, my vote is for Edwards.