Postcard from the Edge

Dear family, friends, and various well-wishers of all kinds.

Still in limbo. Wish you were here, but that's a selfish wish, really, because you'd probably be bored out of your mind in no time flat. It's depressing. Especially when it rains, which is often.

Phone interviewing my brains out. This job says, your degree is no good here, go back to the copy machine, loser. This one says, even though we're paying more money than you've ever made in your life and you speak articulately and passionately about exactly what we do, we think you might have too much experience. This one says, hey! you're great! we can only pay you in bushels of apples, but no dental insurance if you break your tooth on one, is that OK?

Seeing lots of sights. Heard that kooky Alaska governor give the same speech twice in one day: prom hair just as pretty in person. Film festival, high school play, cat paintings, live bald eagle demonstrations. Not a fan of the last, due to crippling fear of birds. Also, rumor has it there are some lakes here, but we're frequently driven inside by off the charts pollen counts. Stupid city-tuned nasal passages.

Feeling homesick. All my postage stamps got wet from all the rain, and now the sticky stuff is gone and I have to glue them to the envelopes. Oh, wait, no, sorry, I was thinking of Girl Scout camp. Oh, well. Out of space now.

Write back soon.

Love, Laura

Some more social media ideas

Here's what Stolen Chair is doing.

I'm intrigued to hear more about the Jenzabar Foundation's findings from this project. Lots of people with lots of clever ideas posted here.

How do we do something with all this social media chatter?

I can't shake the feeling that there's got to be a way to maximize the benefit of all this stuff.

• Thomas Garvey doesn't see the feasibility of trying to monetize it. His argument makes a lot of sense to me, but there's got to be something we can do here.
• People with TV probably heard even more about this than I did, but despite finding the actor's public persona a bit on the grating side, I was intrigued by Ashton Kutcher's Twitter race with CNN. Last I heard, between Kutcher, CNN, Ryan Seacrest and Oprah, Malaria No More raked in $500,000 in donations in a matter of a few days - and that doesn't include the "regular" people who chipped in as a result of the campaign as well.
  
• Hugh Jackman pledged to donate $100,000 to the charity whose supporter tweets him the best pitch. He is increasing the visibility of many different charities in the blink of an eye, well before he even hands over a check.
• TED Talks are the exact right length to listen to on my walk to work in the morning. Today I heard a 2005 talk by Clay Shirky entitled "Institutions vs. Collaboration." He seems to be thinking along the same lines I am, but like me, he hasn't quite figured out what to do with it.
  

So, my questions are for those that are doing it well, I guess. I find the conversations that these kinds of tools can create fascinating. But what do they really amount to? Do your audiences talk back in these forums, or are you just constantly creating great content and feeding it out into an empty void? (Besides "come see my show!," of course) What action items are you putting out there for audiences to on your blog, your Twitter feed, your Facebook page, etc.? I've seen so many examples of attempts to start a conversation that went absolutely nowhere. So how do you get it going? And what does the conversation produce? Just enthusiasm (which is reason enough, I think)? Word of mouth advertising? New people learning about your company, or just further engagement with those who Ticket sales? Anything?

I think we can all agree that theatre isn't really theatre until someone is watching. And a conversation isn't a conversation unless somebody's talking back. So how do you get to that point? What else can we (and by we, I mean the arts community at large) do to make it even more exciting? How do we get the people who aren't already talking to us to want to start?