Introduction

In preparing for this post, I did a Google search on “Conversations with Edith Head.” This is the Invisible Theatre play currently in production at the Leicester Square Theatre in London through the end of August (2008).  It stars, and was co-written by the Invisible Theatre’s inimitable Susan Classen.

Google’s very first listing was the production’s very own website!  People would pay a lot of money to SEO “experts” for such a ranking.

Kudos aside, what next surprised me was the realization that, from my first pass-through of Invisible Theatre’s website and other online presences, I had never noticed any link or mention of this website.

Putting that insight on the shelf for the moment (we’ll come back to it), I should stop right here to say a few words about the Invisible Theatre and my engagement with it.

Back-Story

If you’ve read in my first post in this series, you know that my wife, Betsy Kruse-Craig, was taken on staff by the Invisible Theatre as an “Artistic Associate.” As for me, I’ve been fascinated by the phenomenon of Social Media and the possibilities that arise out of it’s emergence, and I have been working for over ten years designing and engineering software.  What you are not aware of is that before my career as a software maker began, I was in graduate school studying playwriting and performance.  It was natural, even casual, that Betsy made the request of me that I turn my attention toward the Invisible Theatre.

Not long before her request, I happened to have begun this blog.  It seemed a good mix to write about my process of developing a Social Media strategy for the Invisible Theatre.

So I did.

The Recent Past

This gave birth to my “Social Media Makeover Series.”

My very first post was picked up by Chris Laning, a producer of the podcast “Your Neighborhood Stage: The podcast for everybody who works or plays in community theatre.”  He emailed me, expressing his interest in an interview.

I was grateful for his interest, we made arrangements, and did the interview.  The unexpected thing about the interview was its context.  Chris had arranged to conduct the interview over the Internet, in the virtual world of Second Life.

If you are unaware of Second Life, you’re in the majority.  It’s a free, online virtual 3D (rendered in two dimensions) world.  In the world, you create an avatar (a personalizable, animated self-representation) and you interact in particular locations in a virtual “world” with other people through their own avatars. And you interact directly through voice.  And it’s free.

Unfortunately I hadn’t gotten the head-up from Chris that the interview was going to occur in a virtual world, so I was only present (hooked into the world) via audio.  But my experience, and the interview itself was enhanced by questions from the virtual attendees.

What a great idea!  An online, interactive virtual reality interview.  The idea was totally novel to me, but made perfect sense.

The Present

Yesterday, Chris published the interview, which you can download and listen to.  He entitled it “Social Media and Theatre.”  My only wish is that I had been better able to convey what the Invisible Theatre is.  In the interview, on that account, I totally Fail-Whaled.  My sincerest apologies to Susan Claasen, my wife, and to any of you who hear that part of the interview.

The Future

Chris has inspired me to add podcast versions of my blog entries.  Although I am not starting that just yet, I have already acquired the basic, essential equipment and software to do so.  I just need to rearrange my schedule to fit in the extra requisite time to put out a marginally descent podcast.  In other words, I have a bit more to learn before you’ll be seeing podcast versions of my blog available.

My current thoughts on the Social Media Makeover of the Invisible Theatre will be hitting the pavement after Susan returns from London in September.

Until then, I will keep posting my possibly but not necessarily unrelated thoughts, and working my way towards adding audio feeds (podcasts).

By virtue of being the husband of the latest staff member of the Tucson-based Invisible Theatre, I find myself their latest technology adviser.

What’s fun is that this provides me with the opportunity to work in the medium of social media.  This will be my first foray into the world of actually leveraging Social Media to expand an organization’s business.  The added bonus for me is that, in this instance, the business is actually something I truly value: art.

As part of this adventure I will be blogging about my experience and process.  Since the subject is social media, I invite you readers of this series to share your comments.

So let’s begin.

First off, with any marketing analysis, it is critical to know the business’ goals.  For the Invisible Theatre, they are looking to expand their existing and very loyal audience base.  Specifically, they would like to connect with younger generations.  Their current audience is fairly liberal, and is generally on the upper end of the scale in both age and education.

With that in the back our our minds, let’s dive right into their existing web presence:

It turns out that the Invisible Theatre has already made several Internet inroads.  Kudos!  Here’s the list:

• Invisible Theatre domain (with website)
• Invisible Theatre Blog
• Invisible Theatre MySpace account
• Invisible Theatre Facebook group

A quick review of their website tells me that, while they have all the right pieces, the organization/navigation is a bit awkward (Frames?!!!).  Recommendation 1: Might I suggest moving to a CMS?  Perhaps even WordPress!

Their About Us page looks a bit old school, and isn’t the most readable one on the planet.  But since any self-respecting CMS will take care of that, I’ll leave it be.  One thing I did take note of was that the “Email” icon linked to an email that isn’t at their domain.  Aha!  Recommendation 2: Google Apps for Domains.  The basic edition It completely free and, not even mentioning the plethora of other benefits it provides, it allows you to have gmail-hosted email service in the name of your domain!

Exploring a bit further, I could not find any direct links to their other web “presences” in the preceding list.  Under “News” you can find their blog but it is stuck in a sub-frame as if they didn’t want anyone to know it was a blog!  Recommendation 3: Make the islands of your online empire strongly connected.  You should be able to get anywhere else in the kingdom in a single click.

The next thing to check is their Googleability: Their website comes up first — High Marks!  Next in line, however, is a link to a Wikipedia entry on “invisible theater” with an “-ER.”  The article is not about them.

A quick check of Wikipedia shows no results at all for “Invisible Theatre” with an “-RE.”   Recommendation 4: Make (and keep updated) your Wikipedia article.

In the interest of keeping these posts somewhat brief, let’s bring this one in for a landing.

You can see that, with very minimal effort, we’ve already identified for the Invisible Theatre some simple, concrete steps they can take to start moving in the right direction.

On deck:

Coming up in the next post in this series we will try to make sense of this whole thing about placement in search engine results, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.  Hopefully we will come out of our investigation with some practical advice for the Invisible Theatre.  Also, we’ll look into some of the tools available for measuring SEO.  As always, we’re shooting for options which are as close as possible to being free (as in beer).