AudienceBuzz

The Manchester, New Hampshire Union Leader reports that two PR professionals have launched AudienceBuzz, a social networking site meant to allow performing arts patrons to write their own reviews and influence others’ ticket purchases. According to the Union Leader’s Gary Rayno, co-founder Ric Waldman “…‘recognized what the ad world has been saying for the last couple years was true, that people trust their peers more when deciding what shows to see instead of top-down marketers.’" Like Broadway.com.

The Union Leader says that 80 people registered for the site within the first 24 hours of its launch, but they don’t seem too active. I registered and saw that only a handful of performances were reviewed. AudienceBuzz might learn from threadless, a company that prints tee shirts designed by its community members, and which is profiled in Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s new book Citizen Marketers. Threadless offers incentives like credit toward future purchases to keep involvement high.

At AudienceBuzz you can set up events on a calendar and invite your friends – perfect for capitalizing on those super-connectors in the community. However, when I tried to search for like-minded people, I came up with zero. But wait, the first “New Registrant” page I clicked on showed someone with an interest in opera, one of my search terms --  huh? Perhaps it would have been better to wait til the members were really buzzing before the PR launch for AudienceBuzz – who will join a community where not much is going on?

Or maybe it is having a soft opening. The roll-out for AudienceBuzz seems to be starting with a few venues in New England – it’s unclear if the founders mean to take it to venues internationally, although they say in the Union Leader piece that they hope to get reviews from people around the world. They also say they’re giving the project only a year to get going.

Will micro social networking sites based on interest take the place of myspace, facebook, and gather.com, or is it more efficient to use the existing tools that these sites provide? What do you think?

Comments

[Natalia]

I would love to see something like AudienceBuzz turn into the same kind of resource for performances as yelp.com is for food.

Unfortunately, it looks like they opened the doors a little early. First of all, they should have had their friends and family seed the place with reviews so that prospective members could get a feel for what the functionality is like. And second, I think they're going to have to put some real work into coming up with more meaningful categorization and search.

Oh well, it is definately a good idea, if they don't make it work, someone else eventually will!

[Ric Waldman]

I hope you'll allow a few comments from one of the creators of http://AudienceBuzz.com, the topic of this discussion.

Maryanne, you were quite correct in your guess that we were attempting a "soft opening." We moved to a live server less than two weeks ago, and sent out an introductory email to patrons at only one theater -- the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, NH, where I work as the director of marketing. The article you read in the Union Leader came about because a reporter at a competing newspaper, the Hippo Press, happened to be a patron of the Capitol Center's and was intrigued enough by the concept to call and interview me for a story.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have turned down the request, but man, it's hard to turn down free p.r. You are right to point out that it is frustrating to log on to AudienceBuzz.com and find that very few people are using it.

But we had to start somewhere. In the coming weeks we plan to invite marketing directors at around 40 performing arts center around the country to load their performances into our database and invite their patrons to join AudienceBuzz. These are people we know personally through our years of arts marketing. We are also planning a legitimate p.r. campaign, starting with ArtsReach, a monthly trade newsletter read by around 1,500 arts marketers. Our goal is to market AudienceBuzz through marketers at the nation's thousands of theaters.

AudienceBuzz.com will be valuable, we believe, to three main constituencies:
• Users looking to make informed decisions and to meet people with a shared love of the arts;
• Arts marketers looking to use social-networking tools to build and sustain audiences;
• Artists looking to gain insight into how their work is received and to engage in two-way conversations with their audiences.

And Natalia, I think you make a good point that we should have done a better job of beta testing the functionality of the site. We certainly did do that to a point, but we felt pressure to get the site launched before the end of the year, in part because of certain marketing opportunities we knew we'd have (I just got back from the National Arts Marketing Conference in New York), and also because we thought there might be other people trying to beat us to market with a similar offering.

I am very grateful for your feedback, positive and negative, and welcome further comment.

[Maryann Devine]

Ric, thanks so much for the inside look at your planning and goals for AudienceBuzz. I'll be very interested to see how your members are using the site a year from now. Best of luck!

P.S. I agree, it's soooo hard to say no to PR!