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Hard Work Getting Those Grassroots to Grow

June 20, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

I have been hearing Americans for the Arts’ “The Less Arts Kids Get, The More It Shows” PSAs on the radio lately. Inspired, I went to the website trying to see if they had any banner ads that I could put on my organizational website when I announced my new season. I looked under all the tabs, including resources, get involved and join us. I noticed there were bumper stickers available so I sent them an email asking about web images and floating some ideas.

That was two weeks ago and I still haven’t heard from them. I intended to make a tongue in cheek post about how if I was a 20-something, I would probably simply appropriate the image from their website, photoshop it into something usable and use it in a video I posted on YouTube.

However, upon returning to the site, I noticed a link about becoming an official campaign partner. Since the list of their partners is mostly state and local arts councils, I didn’t think that applied to me. I only wanted to toss up something on my work site to show my support.

It turns out that is exactly what I was looking for. If it wasn’t for my curiosity, I may not have discovered that fact even after following the link since it isn’t until page 3 that you learn you can apply to get the logo for your website and newsletters for free.

Frankly, it seems like a lot of impediments for individual arts organizations to show their support. I can see from the structure of their campaign that they want to provide some exclusivity to the state and community arts partners who paid to participate in the effort. But I think it would all really be effective if members of the community saw the logo on webpages, brochure and program book so often that they automatically began intoning “The Less Kids Get, the More It Shows,” every time the word Art came up in conversation.

In spite of what I feel are missteps, I want to encourage everyone to think about filling out the application as a general level partner and placing the logo on your website as you begin adding the events of your next season.

If you run/host arts classes or have youth arts organizations who rent your facilities for recitals/performances, think about posting a big sign where parents dropping of their kids can see it thanking them for getting their children involved in the arts. Maybe list some of the benefits for their kids, success stories, and maybe how to get a window sticker.

And you know, if you are a passionate twenty-something (especially at heart!) who loves the arts and you are moved to create a video on YouTube…

Terms and Ideas

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Bigger Source of Pain- Hamlet vs. Dentist

June 19, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

They have probably been advertising it for a long time now and I have been ignoring the content of the commercials but I just realized that Oral-B has been promoting one of their tooth brushes as having an on board computer.

My first thought was that the thing was going to report my brushing habits to my dentist. (Avaunt thee, traitorous dental implement!)

The truth is, no matter how high tech his practice becomes in its information collection and interpretation, my dentist won’t be terribly effective if he doesn’t have a good bedside, or in this case, spit sink side, manner. Sure he may have lots of patients. But dental visits are the cause for a lot of anxiety as it is. If his manner is a contributing factor to people delaying a return visit, he is failing the purpose of his profession. (Unless we are to believe Little Shop of Horrors)

I am sure you see where I am going with this. I can easily foresee that the use of RFID chips or something similar in the future will allow arts organizations to capture more data about audiences, especially those who walk up to a performance, than ever before. But performing regression analysis on the demographics attending each performance is only going to go so far in cultivating relationships with people.

It certainly isn’t going to tell you a person is on crutches and should be diverted to another door before they arrive at the main entrance so they don’t have to hobble all the way back. A well trained house staff will tell you these things after they have attended to the patron’s needs.

Dentists have a much higher barrier of entry to overcome than arts organizations do. (Though some people have a better sense of what to expect at the dentist.) There is no reason not to aspire to providing the same level of reassurance and comfort that a dentist office needs to extend to make their customers comfortable.

Audience Relations

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Joshua Bell Experiment Issues Discussed

June 18, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

Via Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog is a three part discussion about Joshua Bell’s experience playing anonymously at a Washington, DC train station back in April.

The three parts were actually recorded on the same day but have been posted periodically on the Polysemy Woodshed podcast/blog page. (Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Their discussions were some of the most thoughtful on the event that I have come across. The participants tackled a lot of the same issues about respect and recognition of talent, appropriateness of venue and curiosity of the children that I and others who have blogged on this topic have.

Among the specific ideas I found intriguing was the concept of an agreement existing between the performer and listener. Another was comments in part two by one of the participants where she talks about how discouraging it was that people walking by Bell seemed determined to ignore him. A short time later she acknowledges the common practice of tuning out information that is not immediately pertinent when she admits that she has only just noticed there were a lot of birds singing in her backyard and she has no idea if they have recently taken up residence there or if she has been tuning them out for a long time now.

The idea that you have have to have a frame of reference of some sort to assist your evaluation of art also came up in relation to art appearing in familiar and unfamiliar situations as well as simply having had enough prior experience that you can make a deliberate choice between stopping or walking away.

Part of the allure of Joshua Bell, one commenter argues is that there are a series of actions one engages in prior to attending a performance that create a sense of excitement and anticipation. Having circumvented these preparatory stages by appearing unannounced in a train station, Bell divested himself of much of the framework that make his performances so valued. He became merely a good violin player in the subway.

For those of you who recoil at the idea that Joshua Bell has much less value unannounced outside the symphony hall as he does inside let me point out that the U.S. dollar has no value outside what we invest in it. It is not backed by gold or silver–just belief. Print the exact design of a dollar bill on the exact same paper using only black ink and it is worth only the paper it is printed on. Add the blues, greens, yellows and reds and suddenly it is worth a bit more. It isn’t perfect analogy but in the same manner do tickets, clothes, dinner arrangements and nice performance halls contribute additional value to Joshua Bell.

As those discussing the situation point out, all these ancillary elements that enhance the value of the experience in our minds don’t actually improve the art. They are just things we as attendees have convinced ourselves are important to improving our receptiveness and enjoyment of the event.

One of the people talks about Matt Haimovitz who looked be one of the next great concert cellists but gave it all up because he felt he was disconnected from the audience and instead started playing in rock clubs, ice cream parlors and malls.

As the third segment ended, they pondered whether it was worth having orchestra musicians busk from time to time in the hopes that some ideas about how things might be changed to reach the man on the street would emerge.

I am not quite sure if there will be another installment or not. Each episode didn’t really indicate either overtly or imply by incomplete discussion arc that there would be additional sections posted. Since each segment was posted in two week intervals, I may just have to wait a couple weeks to find out!

General Musings

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Consider the Source

June 13, 2007

by:

Joe Patti

We all know (or at least suspect) that when you survey a group and allow people to reply if they are moved to do so that you will generally get responses at either end of the spectrum and not many from the middle. People will really only go to the trouble of filling out a survey if they love or hate the survey subject.

Over on Salon.com’s Machinist blog, they dealt with the same issue with online rating systems like TripAdvisor, IMDb and Amazon.com. (Read the comments section on the entry for a lot of other insight into other weaknesses in these rating systems.)

“To see how an Amazon star-rating compares to society’s “true” opinion, Hu, Pavlou and Zhang conducted their own survey of one product, singer-songwriter Jason Mraz’s 2005 album, “Mr. A-Z.” In a survey of 66 college students, about two-thirds gave the album three or four stars. There were also a bunch of twos, some ones, and very few fives. On Amazon the picture is completely different. More than half of reviewers judge “Mr. A-Z” a five-star CD, while there are only a small number of threes, twos and ones.

Pavlou explains the lovefest by citing a specific kind of response bias, what he calls “purchasing bias.” In order to review something, you must have already purchased it. But people buy stuff they think they’re going to like — that’s why they buy stuff…Purchasing bias, Pavlou points out, is related to the price of a product; a higher price reduces the probability that someone who is unlikely to enjoy a product will buy it and review it anyway….If the Jason Mraz album was $200 rather than $11, then only die-hard fans would buy it and rate it, skewing its average review higher…The more expensive a product, Pavlou says, the more you should discount its high reviews.”

The article talks about a company called Summize which is translating all the star ratings into a thermometer bar like this one for the aforementioned Mraz album. Clicking on the various colors representing the good, bad and ugly number of ratings gives you direct access to the reviews with those ratings. Seeing all the reviews of each star category together rather than interspersed with ratings of other stars aids a little more in decision making. It can also reveal if marketing departments have tried to seed in good reviews at intervals when comments with similar syntax and spelling errors pop up side by side.

As the entry also points out, considering the source is still paramount when dealing with critiques. A reviewing site called Yelp allows you to cross reference reviewers with other reviewers of similar minds to evaluate if you share their taste and thus, have a higher degree of confidence in their opinions.

Refining software to compare our taste to those of others for us is what Web 3.0 is projected to be all about. (Web 2.0 is user generated content like blogging, Wikipedia, YouTube.) It is speculated that the next generation of web applications will search the internet for what we want and like a TIVO, will gradually learn what our preferences are in order to make suggestions. Presumably, we will be able to trade these specs with loved ones to aid them in Christmas shopping for us.

I imagine that as with Tivo, advertisers will be scrambling to figure out how to position their products in ways that the next generation of search agents will suggest them to consumers. (I am guessing they will pay software developers to have the agents favor them.)

The potential good news for arts organizations is that even if they don’t try to be manipulative in the type of Metawords they use in their web design, the artificial intelligences of the search agents may inform their masters that they have a high degree of confidence that they will enjoy a performance based on the years of criteria the agent has indexed even though they have never gone to see a show before.

I am sure that large corporations will see to it that software is developed enabling the agent to inform the arts organization website that this is the first time its master has purchased tickets to a show allowing the arts organization to offer great seats at reduced prices and perhaps flag the purchaser to receive free background information about the show and special attention by the front of house staff.

If the companies that develop these agents are smart, they won’t allow the users to be so specific in their criteria that they close themselves off from seemingly out of left field recommendations synthesized by the agent based on a profile it has compiled.

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