There are those who feel Google has the potential of becoming Big Brother for all the information it collects and stores. However, Google will deliver some of its information horde to you without requiring you to create an account.

One of these services is Google Alerts. If you have any interest at all in what is being said about you or your organization on the Internet, this is the service to have. Every time one of their little indexing bots comes across a mention of the terms you specify, you receive an email with a link to that instance.

I do suggest encapsulating your search terms in quotes to keep your results as specific to your organization as possible. You can enter a number of different term groupings at once. For example, I have seen my blog referred to as Butts In Seats so I have specified those words along with Butts in the Seats for my search.

As an experiment, back in August I entered a request for alerts on search terms for my theatre. Some of the initial results that came back were for our webpages and old newspaper articles on past shows. In recent weeks I have been beginning to get links for newspaper stories on our current season.

The interesting thing I have learned is that the major newspapers have been printing up stories about my events in the neighborhood specific inserts that come out about 10 days before the performances. The listings are only appearing in the inserts specific to the neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of my building so I don’t actually see the listings in the paper I get at home.

I had an inkling that this had been happening because we occasionally get calls from people who say they have seen something in the newspaper a week before our ads or the feature stories appear. There have been times we have chalked it up to people saving the Fall/Spring Arts pull outs, but now we know that could be an erroneous assumption.

This knowledge does help me make decisions about the timing of my ad placement and underscores the need to get good pictures out early. It has also shown me the value of learning to write well since my press release appeared verbatim in the neighborhood editions this week. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me so I have become a big believer in making it easy for the papers to cover your event by providing an interesting release ready to be dropped in.

Possibly the greater value of Google Alerts is that they trawl through blog entries as well. If a newspaper doesn’t like your work, their bad review will by and large be civil. Not so with blogs. The alerts help you keep an eye on conversations occurring away from the mainstream media.

If someone is saying nice stuff about you, you may decide to cultivate them and link to their work to show you are friendly with bloggers. If people are complaining about their experience, you can look into addressing the problem. If they are eviscerating you out of pure malice, you can at least monitor what is being said. (Unless you can figure out how to address the situation without exacerbating it.)

“People Gonna Talk” as the song says. You might as well know what they are saying.

Chad Baumann, new Director of Marketing and Communications at Arena Stage has an interesting situation. In his blog, he notes that the Arena Stage will be closing down for the next two and a half years to construct a new $125 million theatre complex.

During that time, the organization will perform at two separate spaces in Virgina! Chad’s problem is that for the last 50 years, people have been attending performances in Washington, DC and are now faced with crossing the Potomac, a much bigger psychic obstacle than physical one.

Chad understands that if he doesn’t make the river crossing as painless as possible for the quarter million people who attend every year, he may lose a significant portion of them. He is working on getting signs erected along the route but is also creating personalized webpages for all subscribers and ticket buyers. Chad describes them as an electronic direct mail piece and says the ones they will create will contain “step by step directions from their house to the new theatre, a seating diagram showing them the location of their new seats, promotional offers from local restaurants, and an opportunity to sign up for our e-newsletter.”

Reading about Personalized URLs, it doesn’t seem to be as difficult to pull off as it first sounds. It does involve an investment of money and staff time, as one might imagine.

It will be interesting to see how successful the campaign is. I am reminded of the Museum of Modern Art’s move to Queens when they renovating and how important public relations and image were to that transition.

I would also be interested to see if Arena Stage picks up more people than they lose from Virginians who didn’t attend because they didn’t want to cross the Potomac.