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Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dominant 7ths?

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

Obsessing over food and where it comes from seems to have become this era’s answer to previous nationwide fads like blogging in the early ’00s, Bill Clinton’s sex life in the ’90s, and chasing the almighty dollar in the ’80s. I’ll admit, I’m an unashamed participant in this foodie thing. I bake my own bread, tend a good-sized backyard vegetable and herb garden, and probably spend almost as many hours cooking as I do playing music in an average week.

I also, and here’s the shameful part, am totally addicted to the Food Network. I can’t really figure out why, since I’m all about learning and perfecting new ways of making food, and the Food Network as it exists in 2010 is primarily about watching minor celebrities eat food that someone else has prepared, usually either on closed sets that you’re not invited to, or in restaurants hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live. Sure, there’s still a smattering of shows where knowledgeable people actually show you how to cook things, but they’re few and far between. Strangely, this does not seem to have dampened my interest in the channel even a little bit. I really have no excuse for this – it is what it is.

The other night, I was writing a blog post while watching an episode of one of the most polarizing shows on the Food Network. It’s called Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and it’s hosted by a frost-tipped hipper-than-thou California freakshow named Guy Fieri. (For some reason, he pronounces his last name “Fietti.” I’m assuming this is an attempt to sound Italian. It doesn’t.) There are foodies out there who despise Guy Fieri. They hate his laugh, they hate his catch phrases, they hate his hair, and they particularly hate that his show celebrates big fatty slabs of American-style comfort food – heavy on the meat and dairy, please – at a time when most of the foodie culture is centered around rediscovering healthful eating and worshiping Michael Pollan as a minor god.

Figure 1: Why Foodies Hate Guy Fieri

I am not one of these people, partly because I just don’t get that worked up about other people’s eating habits, but mostly because I don’t see any reason that Guy Fieri and Michael Pollan can’t coexist. Pollan is all about balanced diets, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning America off our factory-farmed, high fructose corn syrup-soaked, genetically modified supply chain. Fieri is all about guilty pleasures, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning us off the endlessly generic and tasteless fast food chains that have replaced mom-and-pop diners across the US. (No, really, he is. Go read this if you don’t believe me.) That’s a lot of common ground, and let’s face it, Michael Pollan probably enjoys a tasty burger on occasion, too, so…

Yeah, I know. Music blog. Not food blog. Get to the point. Fine. In a minute.

See, there’s pretty obviously a disconnect right now between the hardcore world of seasonal-eating, corn-fed-beef-eschewing foodies who know what kohlrabi is, and the larger American society where most people want to eat healthier and have no interest in destroying the environment just so they can have a cheeseburger, but don’t have the time or inclination to devote huge chunks of their lives to changing everything about their food supply. (There are various class, race, and geographic issues at play here, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears, I’m not going to get into them just now.)

I see a very direct parallel between the food disconnect I’ve just described, and the gulf that exists between hardcore classical music lovers who refer to Beethoven String Quartets by their opus numbers and have definite opinions on Karajan vs. Bernstein, and the wider populace that, for the most part, has nothing against classical music, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over it and consequently feels completely alienated by the clublike atmosphere that pervades its core audience. And while I don’t think there’s a blessed thing wrong with knowing Beethoven’s opus numbers, I worry that the primary exposure most outsiders get to classical music these days is the same kind of exposure they get to the idea of a sustainable food system: that is to say, earnest, overly intellectual pleas and lectures from upper middle class white folks who shop at a coop, adore NPR and Al Gore, and get a CSA box delivered to their house every week.

If I’m right, that’s a shockingly limited demographic of advocates, and, I believe, one which doesn’t begin to represent the broad swath of people who actually come to Minnesota Orchestra concerts every week. And in the same way that I think the local/sustainable food movement will only really gain traction in a global way once it allows a whole lot of non-purists in the door, I think classical music needs a whole lot more advocates whose exhortations sound a lot less like this and a lot more like our friend Emily Liz from a couple of weeks back.

Figure 2: Nobody cares what this guy thinks anymore.

We’re living in the age of Ultimate Word of Mouth, where a lot of the cultural and intellectual discoveries we make come from hearing or reading someone else’s enthusiastic endorsement in some far-flung corner of the internet that we happen to frequent. Restaurants, rock bands, video games, and orchestras sink or swim based on how many well-connected people we can get to talk us up, not just to friends and neighbors, but to the much wider circle of Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers.

A lot of that sort of thing is beyond our control as performers, of course, except to the extent that we generate interest by visibly and audibly giving our all every time we step onstage. (No small consideration, since far too may orchestra musicians still seem to think looking bored or irritated while performing is okay.) But other industries are way ahead of us in using the good will and enthusiasm of our existing fans to draw in new ones, and like Guy Fieri making a point of visiting a greasy spoon that grinds its own grass-fed beef and tops it with locally made cheese, we could do a lot worse than welcoming in as many non-experts as we can find, and finding out what it takes to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

Posted in audience participation, food, marketing, state of the art | 7 Comments »

Free Music!

Friday, May 28th, 2010

So, not to go all press-releasey on you, but there’s this cool new thing on the Minnesota Orchestra website today. It’s a free MP3 download of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, which we performed and recorded just last night. Yes, you have to register with us to get the download, and from the look of things, I’m guessing that registration might result in your hearing from our marketing department in the future, but hey – free music! And apparently, we’ll be doing this again next week with our performance of Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, giving away what normally isn’t available for any price – a live concert recording you can keep forever. Next season, we’ll put up a bunch more concert recordings, but I’m told you’ll have to start paying (albeit a very small amount) for those.

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that everyone in the music world but American symphony orchestras has been doing for quite a while now. We should have done it years ago, but the media rules governing our industry are massively complex, nationally negotiated, and quite frankly, about two decades out of date. There are some very good, smart people who have been working to change this, but the process frequently seems to get hung up when other people with very old, dull axes to grind start grinding them against the wheels of progress. If that makes any sense.

But anyway, the good news is that we are, finally, making progress, and these downloads are some of the first evidence of it. Over in St. Paul, the chamber orchestra launched its own music-streaming site this week as well, and really, once you open those floodgates, it’s nearly impossible to close them again, so with any luck, these projects will be the first of a lot of great things to come!

Posted in marketing, music and technology, recordings | 2 Comments »

Heh. Heh heh. (ouch.) Heh.

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

Normally, I’m not a big fan of April Fool’s stories in the press. They’re rarely funny, usually blindingly obvious, and generally seem to be taking needed space away from the important journalistic business of determining whether the Devil’s instrument on Earth has chosen to take the form of Barack Obama or Fox News.

Leave it to The New Yorker’s Alex Ross to buck the trend. His April Fool’s blog post, which took the form of a 2010-11 season announcement for a nonexistent Manhattan-based orchestra, is darkly hilarious, and like all great satire, the more you know about the larger unpleasant truths of the industry it parodies, the funnier it gets…

“While other orchestras retread the tired old classics, we at the [Lower Midtown Orchestra] are elated to announce a raft of world premières. The acclaimed American master John Adams is our Composer-in-Residence; in October he will be on hand to conduct a new large-scale orchestral work with the intriguing title “Sorry Guys, Much Too Busy This Season, Best of Luck .”

And don’t you hate it when conductors insist on trying to do innovative things with your favorite symphonies when you just want the performance to sound like the recording you’ve owned since 1976? Have no fear, Ross has you covered:

“Our Beethoven Cycle will consist of Beethoven’s best-loved piece, the Symphony No. 5, “Duh-duh-duh DUUUHHH,” being played over and over and over and over again. In a series of five concerts, the Fifth will be heard no fewer than twenty times, with no variation whatsoever in the particulars of the interpretation. To ensure a total lack of spontaneity, the podium at ConAgra Jiffy Pop™ [Concert Hall] will be occupied by a TV set playing a video of Lorin Maazel. After each performance, listeners are invited to a panel discussion at McGrimm’s bar, where members of the Orchestra will reflect on the experience while drinking themselves into oblivion.”

Posted in fun, marketing, orchestra culture | Comments Off

And you thought our Symphony Magazine cover photo was awesome…

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

…check out this very stylish poster by the Berlin Philharmonic:

Or even better, take a look at each individual portrait that makes up the poster – “128 Soloists”.

Posted in marketing, orchestras not named minnesota, the business of music | Comments Off

Treat Your Audience Well

Friday, February 19th, 2010

There’s been a bit of an industry kerfuffle going on in Orchestra World lately over a new marketing campaign launched by the Philadelphia Orchestra. I’m not going to get into it, partly because I have a number of good friends in that orchestra and it’s the band I grew up listening to, so I’m hardly objective; and partly because I think it’s silly to get so worked up over a slogan.

But one of my favorite ArtsJournal bloggers, Molly Sheridan, wrote a post earlier this week that went beyond the trashing of a slogan to address the larger issue that some American orchestras still aren’t very good at making the audience feel welcome. That Molly makes the point by relating a personal experience in which she was made to feel welcome makes the post all the more effective:

“I think being open to and engaged in hearing much of the orchestral repertoire in 2010 hinges on fostering that connection between the mass of performers on stage and the audience members out in the dark of the hall. Without it, the most transcendental musical experience has an uphill fight on its hands.”

It really can’t be said much more succinctly than that. Times change, and though the music we’re playing might be timeless (I said might,) the social trappings and crowd etiquette that go along with any public event evolve from generation to generation, and orchestras tend to be horrifically bad at noticing this. My pet theory is that this is because orchestras (especially major ones with venerable histories) prize Tradition so highly, and are therefore slow to accept any change, for fear that even a small adjustment in the proceedings will snowball into a wholesale devaluing of that Tradition.

That’s why I’m not surprised that the orchestra that gave Molly such an unexpectedly pleasant night out was the Baltimore Symphony. The BSO is a major-league band, to be sure, but in the hierarchy of big-time American ensembles, Baltimore, like Minnesota, fits comfortably into what I think of as the “upstart” category.

Upstarts generally perform at a level comparable to more famous orchestras like New York and Philadelphia, but toil in unglamorous mid-sized cities that the New Yorkers who write the rule book of cultural fame tend to overlook. This can be annoying if you’re an upstart band trying to find a permanent place on the mythical list of Great American Orchestras, but it’s never going to change, so it’s best just to accept it.

Besides, the upside to being an upstart is that you’re probably less shackled to the whole Tradition thing than the hidebound ensembles at the top of the meaningless GAO list, so innovation is easier to achieve. And because residents of midsized American cities tend to be less likely than your average jaded New Yorker to interpret friendliness as a sign of weakness or stupidity, you can buy an awful lot of goodwill from the public just by smiling a lot and telling concertgoers how much you appreciate them coming out to the show.

Of course, I rarely experience an orchestra concert as a customer, so my view of things may be somewhat skewed. So I’m throwing this one open to all of you who buy tickets and slog through the winter snows to hear us play: give me your best/worst customer service experiences with an orchestra. Who does the little things right, and what is “right” to you? And most importantly, what’s the one thing an orchestra can do, other than playing great music well, to make you want to come back?

Posted in marketing, orchestras not named minnesota, the long-suffering audience | 2 Comments »

Selling It

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

So, this past Friday night, a big group of MN Orchers made our way to the Walker for the annual celebration of salesmanship and corporate artistry that is the British Television Advertisting Awards. (For those readers not from the Twin Cities: I know. Sitting and watching 90 minutes of TV ads sounds ridiculous, and not like something a major American museum should be promoting. But you’ll just have to trust us. It’s awesome.) I’ve been going to the BTAA show for several years now, and I have to say, 2009 was one of the best reels I’ve seen. Very few clunkers, several amazingly poignant ads, plenty of laughs…

…and then, about midway through the show, there was this, which had everyone in the theater baffled right up to the very end…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1EYBckMRb4]

If there is a better way to market grand opera in 2009, I don’t know what it would be. And if you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing orchestras need to be doing more of. Opera companies have gotten very good in recent years at reinventing their image, making their performances seem like not-to-be-missed events, and generally making themselves seem like the cool corner of the classical music world. And that, by extension, makes orchestras the decidedly uncool corner. They’re exciting, we’re sleepy, they’re hip and fresh, we’re stuffy and tuxedoed, they’re simulcasting their biggest shows live to your local movie theater, we’re stuck in a mid-20th century universe pretending that the internet doesn’t exist.

You might point out that it’s easier for an opera company to market itself on a visual medium like YouTube than it would be for an orchestra, but I’m not buying it. The stories behind symphonic music, even non-programmatic stuff like a Shostakovich symphony, are easily as riveting as your average opera libretto. It’s just a matter of finding the part of the narrative that’s going to grab people, and then retelling it in a creative way and getting it out there where people can see it. It’s really not rocket science, and orchestras need to get a whole lot better at embracing that sort of idea, even if it means changing some longstanding elements of our business model…

Posted in marketing, opera, the business of music | 3 Comments »

Name Recognition

Monday, December 14th, 2009

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of the time between Inside the Classics concerts is spent gathering and analyzing data from people who attend, or are thinking about attending, our series. From the beginning, ItC was conceived to be something of an incubator for new orchestral ideas, and it does us very little good to be throwing new concepts at the wall unless we have a way of measuring which ones are sticking. Thus all the research, and the pleas for feedback, and our virtual obsession with who is coming to our concerts and why.

To that end, we’re currently working with a great Chicago-based company that specializes in such research and has been running polls and focus groups for us to measure the effectiveness not only of what we do on stage, but also the various posters, flyers, ads, and mailings we put out to try to generate interest. It’s always fascinating to read the diversity of opinion that gets offered up in these situations – in a room of 7 or 8 people, you’re likely to have 9 or 10 opinions. (This is why we use professionals to analyze it all – they’ve seen it all a thousand times before, and they’re expert at picking out and explaining the trends that are hiding in the mass of data.)

This past week, we had a big meeting to go over the latest focus group data, and as usual, my favorite part of the morning wasn’t so much reading about the larger trends that we’ll actually look at as we form our future concert seasons, but the individual comments and quips from audience members. For instance, it’s abundantly clear from all the research we do that Sarah’s name and identity are firmly lodged in the mind of everyone who’s ever seen an Inside the Classics show. When it comes to me, however…

…not so much. It could be a function of years of pre-conditioning of audience members to make the conductor the primary focus of their attention, or it could be that I actually say Sarah’s name several times over the course of any given ItC show, whereas mine might come up only once. It could even be (gasp!) that Sarah is simply a more memorable onstage presence than some dorky violist with a microphone.

But whatever the reason, the research is clear that, while people tend to be very complimentary of the role I play in our concerts, and say very nice things about the onstage chemistry between Sarah and me, they seem to have a very hard time remembering my name. Which doesn’t actually bother me in the least – I’d much rather they remember the music they heard, or the fact that they want to be sure to return the next time Sarah’s conducting – but it has led to my acquiring some interesting nicknames among the ItC planning team.

One woman in the most recent round of audience research referred to me as “The Other Fellow.” Another went with “the character.” Yet another said, “I was very intrigued when a viola player got up… because they don’t get to speak very much!” (This person has clearly never seen the Minnesota Orchestra viola section in rehearsal.) And my favorite: one gentleman, after struggling to remember my name mid-sentence, finally went with “Viola Boy.” (This last one so delighted our Marketing VP that she immediately dashed off an e-mail to inform me of my new nickname.)

As I say, I could actually care less whether anyone remembers my name, so long as they remember that they liked the show. And I have to admit, I’ve started looking forward to reading whatever new noms de spectateurs I’m graced with when new research data arrives. Not sure anyone’s gonna top Viola Boy, though. I might need a superhero costume to go with that one…

Image borrowed from the awesome ViolaMan.net…

Posted in audience feedback, fun, marketing | 3 Comments »

Why We Ask

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Because the Inside the Classics series is meant to be something of an incubator for new ideas, we tend to do an awful lot of audience research, and we spend a lot of time discussing things like how to attract newbies to Orchestra Hall, how to be responsive to audience concerns without completely turning the series over to the tyranny of public opinion, and how to balance the needs of one concertgoing demographic against another.

Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it’s been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn’t understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they’d had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.

What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won’t know if you don’t ask.

Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we’ve cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there’s really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don’t say a word. (I’ll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)

Other times, we’ll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don’t own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn’t care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I’ll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours…)

But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren’t terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you’re seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.

And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we’re still not quite nailing that balance – rest assured, we’ll keep working on it.)

All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can’t possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.

Posted in audience feedback, marketing | Comments Off

Easier Said Than Done

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

There’s never been a shortage of people anxious to tell those of us who work in the arts that we’re a) hopelessly behind the times, b) in desperate need of making our “product” more relevant to the next generation of consumers, and c) on the verge of complete irrelevance if we don’t become more cutting edge and daring right this very minute. In the orchestra business, these people are usually consultants or media pundits (frequently the same people,) and in recent years, they’ve become shockingly good at getting their alarmist message wide distribution within the industry.

For the purposes of civility, I’ll leave aside the question of how ethical it is for someone who runs a consulting business for orchestras to double as a pundit and editorialist forever claiming in whatever publication will have them that orchestras are in crisis and need someone (someone professional… you know, to consult with) to help turn them around. That’s a topic for another day. My major beef with a lot of the “future of the industry” analysis I come across (and I read a lot of it, believe me) is that it tends to be awfully long on diagnosis and awfully short on cure.

For instance, it’s become almost a religious conviction on the part of some in the orchestra business that the union rules governing recording, broadcasting, and other media are antiquated, and orchestras are being terribly hurt by their continued existence. (I’m starting with this issue because I don’t entirely disagree with its premise. Our media rules are antiquated, and I defy anyone to say otherwise.) So you hear a lot of noise from the consultant/pundits about how fast the media landscape is evolving, and how desperate the situation is, and how if we don’t wake up and change everything, like, yesterday, we’re doomed to the same fate as 8-track tapes and Betamax video.

But even assuming they’re right, where’s the solution? Our media agreements are a nationally negotiated rule book that individual orchestras usually don’t have the right to change even if we want to. (Also, these rules are agreed to by both musicians and managers, so blaming the whole thing on the union is disingenuous and wrong. Last I heard, a new set of more progressive media rules had been tabled because a certain crucial CEO walked out of the process.) And while the consultants are great at pointing out the finish line they want you to get to, I’ve yet to meet one who’s found a way to navigate the tangle of individual interests that stand in the way. Or, for that matter, one who’s even tried.

Another supposed truism you hear all the time lately is that orchestras have just got to invest major marketing bucks in social networking. Facebook and Twitter aren’t the future, they’re the present, and we’re missing an entire generation of potential fans by not marketing to them where they live online! I recently read an entire newspaper article by a local Minnesota entrepreneur who wants to hold symposiums to teach arts leaders how to set up Facebook groups.

Now, here again, I don’t totally disagree. I’ve been on Facebook for years, and I even finally signed up for a Twitter account this summer (mainly because Sarah bullied me, and also because someone told me I’d get the NHL entry draft news fastest there.) Social networking is an undeniably useful way of keeping in touch with large numbers of people, and that’s obviously alluring to arts groups looking to build the 21st-century equivalent of word of mouth.

But honestly, when’s the last time you responded positively to a company trying to solicit your business on Facebook? Hell, the Facebook universe practically exploded when they started running small ads on the site, and flamed up anew when the rumor went around that the company was going to start using your profile info to decide which ads to show you. And last year, when Sarah and I started creating event pages for our ItC concerts and sending them to everyone we knew (as well as asking y’all to invite people for us,) the response was, quite frankly, underwhelming. I’d be shocked if we sold a single extra ticket as a result. These days, the Minnesota Orchestra’s official Twitter and Facebook pages mainly link to our blog entries and offer occasional concert come-ons and ticket discounts, which I suppose is better than not doing it at all, but which I doubt has resulted in much of an uptick in sales.

Again, I’m not saying that orchestras and other arts groups don’t need to face the new realities of the entertainment world head-on, or even that the arts punditocracy is wrong to be constantly chanting their Change mantra. (As Sarah is fond of saying, if you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.) But as this awful recession drags on and the ranks of those who seem to think they have all the answers for our industry grow by the week, I’m getting a little tired of reading condescending screeds full of lofty pronouncements but no specific ideas for how we might achieve the end results that the authors are so certain we need. Quite honestly, it’s making me grumpy (as you can probably tell.)

Basically, what I’m saying to the ever-expanding universe of arts consultants and commentators is this: if you’re so smart, kindly pick up a hammer and jump in, rather than standing around the edge of the foundation talking about how grand it will be if we just stick to your vision. Thanks.

Postscript: I’m aware that I didn’t link to any offending articles in this post, which may seem to undermine my point for those who don’t spend their free time reading consultants’ reports and browsing arts blogs. Trust me, these people are out there – I didn’t link them because a) I didn’t want to boost their page views, and b) I don’t really care to hear their responses.

Posted in marketing, state of the art, stirring the pot | 2 Comments »

Help Us Entertain You

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Okay, here’s the deal, people. We don’t ask for a lot around here, aside from the occasional intelligent comment (which y’all have been excellent about providing) and your continued willingness to take an interest in what Sarah and I do for a living.

But we’re looking for a bit of help here. Times are tough, as you know, and any arts organization will tell you that getting people out of their houses and into a museum, concert hall, or theater is darned tough in the month or two after Christmas, even in the best of economic circumstances. But the fact is, we’ve got an Inside the Classics concert coming up at the end of the month that we’re awfully excited about, and if you were to push me, I’d confess that I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the best show we’ve done yet in two years of putting these things on at Orchestra Hall.

So here’s what we’re asking. We’ve thrown up an event page over at Facebook, with a basic description of what we’ll be doing on the 28th and 29th, and invited everyone we know who might be in the MSP area on those dates and doesn’t actually play in the orchestra. But we need more invites, so if you’re a Facebook type (and we know for a fact that some of you are,) please take a couple of minutes to head on over to our page and invite literally everyone you know in the Twin Cities metro. If you wanted to add a note telling them about past ItC shows you’ve attended, more power to you. But even just spreading the word would be a tremendous help to us.

Even if you’re not a Facebooker, we want to do everything we can to pack the hall for these shows, and you’d be amazed how a little word of mouth can make a difference. So if you were already planning on attending, first of all, thank you, and secondly, would you consider asking a few friends to come along? And if you’ve been perusing this blog or any of the rest of the MN Orch web site and wondered why the heck we’re not using Proven Viral Marketing Technique X to attract people to the hall, chime in down in the comments and let us know what we ought to be doing! We’re always looking for new ideas…

So, to sum up:

Facebook Event Page Here

Concert Detail Page Here (with link to online ticketing)

Comments Here

Posted in marketing, shameless self-promotion | Comments Off