NPR has been no slouch when it comes to social networking and now has more than a million Facebook fans. It recently surveyed that population, and the findings raise a question that has me and my colleagues wondering: how segmented is the social media audience by platform?

Social networking is on our minds quite a bit these days at Slover Linett, and not just in my own domain, higher ed. As many of you know, our collaborative study with CASE and mStoner looked at how colleges and universities are using social media for fundraising and alumni relations. Cheryl presented initial findings in New York and the research was written up in the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. And we’re conducting several surveys to help performing arts organizations understand how their audiences are using interactive technologies to connect with the institution and engage with the art form.

So the new NPR study caught my eye, and based on the 9 slides that their in-house research group has shared publicly, it looks like wonderful work. Some of the findings were a little surprising to me (which I always enjoy — surprises in research reports are like plot twists in a mystery novel). Perhaps the most interesting surprise was the apparent lack of overlap between NPR’s Facebook fans and its Twitter followers.

Only about 8% of the Facebook fans who participated in the survey say they also follow NPR on Twitter. Yet NPR has well over two million Twitter followers (the numbers are complicated because different departments and on-air personalities have their own Twitter accounts; NPR Politics has 1.8 million followers, and Weekend Edition host Scott Simon has 1.3 million).

So clearly there are plenty of NPR Facebook fans who aren’t following the organization on Twitter, and vice versa. NPR researchers Andy Carvin and Noel Cody, who posted the results I just linked to in NPR's research blog, were also surprised by this and note that the two communities appear to be more mutually exclusive than they thought. ...

I was in Seattle last week for meetings with a few of our arts clients and attended a terrific brainstorming session about developing teen and young-adult audiences. I came in — and left — with a big question about the limits of marketing to meet the challenge.

The session was set up for us to generate ideas about how to attract more young people to the organization’s performances. At the outset, those performances were treated as a given; the question was how to enhance the desire to have those arts experiences among the target age groups.

But, tellingly, the ideas that began zinging around the room were about changing the nature of those experiences — about new approaches to programming and the artistic “product” onstage, but also about venue, format, before-and-after events, audience behavior, overall vibe, and many other aspects outside the control of the organization’s marketing department.

A few people in the room made the point explicit: No matter how clever your marketing communications are, no matter how technologically and socially networked your message is, if the experience you’re offering isn’t perceived as enjoyable by young people, they won’t come...or won’t come back. Marketing alone can’t do the trick. It’s the programming, stupid.

To quote my newfound Seattle colleague Holly Arsenault, who runs Seattle Center Teen Tix and wrote me an email after the brainstorming session:

If you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our [teen] members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent . . . but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is — nor would I want to. ...

Yale’s already-infamous musical admissions video shows how easy it is for institutions to come across as old fashioned even when they’re using new media.

Billed as an “independent an independent collaboration between Yale undergraduates and recent alumni working in the admissions office,” the 17 minute video is a slickly-produced, peppy campus musical number in which students sing and dance answers to the question that all college recruitment videos (and viewbooks and brochures) are meant to answer: it’s titled “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”
 

The Gawker took its swings shortly after the video was released in mid January, and a post at IvyGate was titled “That’s Why I Chose to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.” At some point the university felt it prudent to disable the ratings and comment features on YouTube.

This week even the New Yorker couldn’t restrain itself from jumping on the pileup, running a “Talk of the Town” piece about the embarrassed giggles and cringing bewilderment of Yale alumni who have seen the video...although some of them couldn’t bear to watch the whole thing.

Wait a minute. Isn’t this the very prescription for success in the YouTube era? The video was a participatory creative act rather than a top-down fiat. It let the students speak — okay, sing — for themselves about the university, not unlike MIT’s pioneering student blogs on its admissions page (which my colleague Bill wrote about in a recent post). It uses contemporary media to meet its audiences on their own turf. It delivers its message with energy and enthusiasm, avoiding the rationalist trap into which so many educational and cultural marketing efforts fall. And it’s an innovation, a risk: just what the doctors have been ordering.

So what’s wrong with this (motion) picture?