The RSC’s audience seems a lot more confident talking to us on Facebook rather than Twitter, but then Twitter has allowed us to be more creative about what we do. For me the reason we use Facebook and Twitter is to firstly engage people with our brand and secondly to communicate with audiences in an environment that is familiar to them where 2 way communication is common place (and, from a marketing perspective, all this will evetually lead to a ticket sale).

Our main success has been the live(ish) tweets from the set of the filming of Hamlet – 3 actors sent updates which were then broadcast on Twitter. Each actor was identified at the beginning of their tweet by their initials. I think that what people want from Twitter (and what has worked for us) is the stories that arts organisations generate – the everyday goings ons which are interesting to the general public – but do the Facebook users want the same thing? I worry that creating different RSC accounts with different personas may just lead with people losing interest or becoming frustrated at having to sign up to follow different accounts to get the full picture of the organisation.

On another note I wonder whether we are becoming a bit too obsessed with Twitter and hence alienating a good chunk of our audiences.

I tweet a bit on behalf of @belgradetheatre and we’re very much still trying to find our voice. For the Belgrade it seems increasingly as though Twitter is a place for us to converse with other Arts and partner organisations rather than our audience, who are more likely to be on Facebook.

I’d imagine the Ikon would differ from us on that point but I’m starting to think that a number of separate accounts might be the way to go – similarily to how the Guardian has a number of more specific twitter feeds. It makes sense to me for @BelgradeBoxOffice to talk about tickets and last minute offers whilst @BelgradeCommunity could be a place for our Comm & Education company to liaise with and source partnership orgs. I’m still thinking this through though!

The Belgrade did a lot of branding work a couple of years ago and I think that’s helped inform the personailty of our online voice. We’ve got a fairly clear idea of who we are and how we’d like to be perceived. If Ikon has done anything similar then it might be helpful to look back at that.

Re: online events etc, I’m sure you’re already aware of the Youtube symphony orchestra http://www.youtube.com/symphony and although it was obviously a huge scale, expensive project, it’s a great example of what’s possible.

An idea to help increase engagement from their followers on twitter as an example would be to encourage them to be part of the arts project, by “crowd sourcing”: dates and times for opening/closing each event, ideas for shaping arts projects (which you’ve already touched upon), volunteers to participate in the projects, source ideas for exhibitions, get social media users to engage on all levels of the quadrant – segment 3 is the always going to be the most difficult to include.

Getting segments 1 and 4 of people seems to be the best way of getting interest – maybe some sort of mix between the two camps could be the answer?

Either way – you’ve highlighted some interesting points for further discussion.

my position on this is that it forms a sort of club around people who get the concept (either because they know who is tweeting, or are happy not to know, or know enough people who work at the Ikon to guess) – which risks alienating new people (new to Twitter, or the Ikon).

I think it’s a case of asking yourself (as the tweeter) whether “the ikon” (the organisation) is doing something – or are you. If you can’t say “we” (or who in particular) then I think this is exactly the sort of communication that risks building barriers rather than including people. I’ve written at length about this http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/blog/670/you-are-not-your-brand-online-%E2%80%94%C2%A0and-especially-not-on-twitter/

I come down on the idea of “signing” org tweets – with another twitter acc if the user is comfortable with that – unless they are purely informational.

There are also Customer Relation Management questions, if an org is serious about this it still has to be handled with efficiency and care – even in “unordered” media. If someone has an issue who’s monitoring (and monitoring is more efficient than following) and who has to deal? It is too important to be left to chance.

The only tool I’ve seen do all of this so far is CoTweet – worth investigating.