What makes a festival succeed? What lessons can be learned about using social media?
How can this experience be applied to other types of businesses?
This last weekend were two contrasting festivals. Reading is a rock festival that has been going for years, whereas Serenata is a classical music festival in its first year. Reading was sold out completely before the weekend, whereas Serenata had only sold some 2000 out of an expected 9000 by half-way, but hopefully sold some more before the close. Pleased to see Serenata announced "thousands" attended (two?) and it will take place again next year.
So what can be learned? What makes a festival succeed? How can social media be used, not just for festivals but other businesses?
Why Do People Pay Good Money?
Music must be very powerful for normally sane people to pay to camp over a weekend in mud with broken sleep and probably filthy loos. Or in the case of the BBC Proms, to stand queuing for hours only to stand another few hours for the performance (I’ve been there, done that!)
First point of call was Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist. His reply “It's all to do with identity and the construction of self.” Deep, man. “Or the people who go to festivals just like the music...! And their love of the music outweighs the mud, broken sleep and dodgy toilets...!” That’s more likely. Why?
“The music that we like tends to be of two kinds, what we hear in the womb and music which has the same rhythm as our mother's heartbeat. We’ll also like the music our friends like when we are trying to establish our self-identity during our teenage years.” That certainly explains the success of the 80s Rewind Festival.
Either way, the fact is that people love music. Rather like food and water, they will move heaven and earth to get it. People also like to party, and festivals can provide a giant, exciting party atmosphere. A welcome, exciting release from the weekly grind! People will also tend to get a group of friends together to go to events like this.
So is partying the real driver? I’ve mentioned the BBC proms. Most people will have seen the Last Night, with flags and balloons and silly noises. Other concerts in the series are far more refined, so partying isn’t necessarily the driver by comparison to a normal sit-down concert. What about Henley Festival, which is an outdoor classical music festival that often requires welly boots? It's different from Serenata and rock festivals in that people attend for individual days, going home each night. Nonetheless let's take a look ...
A Look At Henley Festival
The Henley Festival took place in early July, using the Regatta site and facilities. Interestingly Henley's website is titled “The Summer’s Greatest Party”, and they ask “Who came to the party”. Artists ranged from Nigel Kennedy to Ronan Keating. This is a black-tie and long dresses party with posh sit-down restaurants rather than burger vans. The event is always well attended, with some days’ tickets selling out well in advance
The Henley website has links to two social media sites, but positioned oddly such that I missed them initially:
- Twitter. Only started this year, a couple of weeks before the event. Well utilised. Retweeted where people had said positive things about the festival before the event, neatly building on “word of mouth”. Then tweeted during the festival as to what was going on. Not sure about relevance of the tweets made afterwards though (I suspect they're trying to continue engagement and build a following pending the build-up to next year's event). Certainly a good foundation
- Facebook. An initial flurry in May to post photos from last year and headliners for this year. Otherwise apparently forgotten and under-utilised. So not surprising that virtually no festival-goers posts or discussions. Where's the photos from this year?
So how does an event like Seranata help to get people along using social media?:
- It helps to create a party atmosphere, both at the venue and in publicity. Social media provides the opportunity for words, photos and videos
- It helps to talk about the headlining artists and the music they will be playing, and social media can help spread the word and engage with potential festival-goers
- As people like to come along in groups, social media is ideal to help them do it – it’s a matter of making it easier for them. None of the festivals used Apps to encourage people to spread the word to their friends, but like we saw for the general election, these can be very powerful
Unlike festivals such as Henley, Serenata have made a point of updating their website and the social media streams to talk about the event and post testimonial comments.. They are really keen to hold it again next year, and are starting now!
Applicability To Other Types Of Business
Whilst these ideas aren’t directly applicable to marketing other forms of business, the underlying principles are:
- Have something interesting to say, especially by the use of events or time-limited specials
- Use that to generate involvement and that magic word “engagement”
- Make it easy for people to spread the word. “Word of mouth” is always the most powerful form of marketing!
- Testimonials are so important as part of this process
For "local" businesses, such as shops, pubs and entertainment venues, it's also worth looking at the "location-based" services such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places which I'll look at next week ....
Stop Press – Apple’s new Ping service
Apple have just launched a new social media service apparently to rival MySpace called “Ping.com”. Here’s 5 reasons not to use Ping, which actually gives a good insight into how Ping works. I’ll take a closer look later too …
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