...so you’re cup-sizes that cappucino is served in now?

Many thanks for stopping here and explaining. I wont add to the suggestions already made. I’m sure you would most like to know this is behind you so you can get on with all that organising! Good Luck to you and also all the people who volunteer. Hopefully many more of us are now subscribed to your blog.

http://www.artsfest365.wordpress.com/

So, not that we need to make a defence for ourselves, but for the record we thought you might like some OFFICIAL ArtsFest views on the subject and an official response to your comments:

If we were to set up this kind of account we wouldn’t have automatically sought advice from the existing local community simply because it wouldn’t have even occurred to us that there was any required ‘etiquette’. I’d say for us the approach would have been one of common sense and our instinct would be to approach only relevant people and therefore contribute to real growth and sustainability within Birmingham’s arts community (after all sustainability is what we shed blood, sweat and tears for in the office so why would we throw all of that out the window and jeopardise the credibility of the festival by spamming?!).

In any case, as I said before we don’t have time to monitor this effectively and so don’t have the capacity to sustain a twitter account – and to be honest to come in this morning to all these enlightening (and however well intended messages) just reiterate this decision for us. I know it might sound defeatist but to put it in perspective for everyone there are about 50 artists that could have been confirmed in the time it has taken us to read these comments and respond today! Yes, social networking is great, but not if it stops us actually organising the festival!
For us the priority at this stage has to be actually organising the festival and that isn’t going to happen on its own (I can’t begin to stress how much work we have to do between the 3 of us (and our life saving volunteers). So although it is with great regret that we’re not taking part in twitter JUST YET and we do understand that there is massive potential for partnership development and word spreading to be done by ArtsFest through Twitter – I hope you appreciate that we wouldn’t want to take part half heartedly! Also, I hope that this ‘storm in a teacup’ shows why we the team have to be able to manage web promotion/networking and cannot let volunteers take something like Twitter upon themselves without us monitoring content being put out there as ‘officially ArtsFest’.

On another note as a family friendly festival we would certainly want to have some control over the type of people we were ‘friends’ with (or whatever the twitter equivalent is). There is no way in this world that we would want to encourage unsolicited approaches to our ArtsFest supporters (again I’m only guessing that this is a possible consequence of making friends with the whole world). I certainly don’t agree that we shouldn’t be communicating with people from other countries – I think we all agree that we should be shouting from the rooftops about the greatness of Birmingham (or else what are we in this for?).

I have no idea what it’s like to be spammed by twitter so I can only apologise to those of you who were offended. So, final thoughts… maybe we should hold this idea until post September and instigate twitter for 2009 … one step at a time for 2008… check out our blog www.artsfest365.wordpress.com which will be where you can be first to find out announcements of this years programme before the publicity brochure is available!!!

And final final thoughts … we really are sorry to anybody who found themselves personally insulted through an attempt to make constructive criticism about the ‘ArtsFest’ Twitter yesterday. These comments were in no way representative of the views of the ArtsFest team! We do think Aidan was only trying to help but shouldn’t have taken this upon himself without running it by us first or expressing any personal views on behalf of ArtsFest.

Now, maybe its time to forget about all of this. We have deleted the Twitter page for the time being.

Thanks for your time

Kate & Emily

(Oh and great ideas Stef – we do appreciate them and will be looking into this with our web host and trying our best to find a way to do some of these – but please remember –500 artists, 26 venues, 6 stages and just 3 staff … we do try and be wonder woman but have to sleep sometime!)

How about:

• Sending twitter messages for programme changes
• Make your own programme? Tick a box next to each event and subscribe to those events that you want to go to in advance. Then get twitter updates just before they are happening so you can walk there
• Organise flashmobs. Eg. “Flashmob at the IKON now and wait for further instructions”
• Have a “question and answer” service where you can send a message to them via twitter like “Where was the breakdancing happening today again?” and get “Breakdancing happening in Centenary Square at 7.30pm today” back
• Umm – loads more I’m sure…

In light of this, I would be so interested to see what Aidan has to say now. He’s gone awfully quiet, you know.

I wouldn’t overstate how important my tweet was and how much I cared about the whole thing at the time. I like your burst ketchup packet analogy – something minor happened that I found a bit icky, I made a verbal roll of the eyes and, but for this, I’d have moved on.

So let’s try and turn this into a positive – http://www.createdinbirmingham.com/2008/07/06/artsfest-need-volunteers/ There, that’ll pass the message to 1000+ mainly local, arts-interested folk and perhaps some good will come of this discussion.

Seems like this has generated a lot of hot air over what is essentially a faux-pas.

Aidan – it’s good that you came here to talk about this, but I’m not so hot on the way you’ve done it. Perhaps the appropriate place could have been Twitter itself?

I’d also say that being a little more measured in your acceptance of criticism would be a good idea in future.

The reason the twitterspamming annoyed me is that I’ve been involved on the periphery of ArtsFest for a couple of years (taking photos that they have used since for promo on a creative commons basis: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=artsfest ) and it seemed like a big mistake to be using spammy methods to promote the event.

Where I come from (purely my own take on Twitter): you sent out 3000 follower notifications to people, of whom 50 have responded. If everyone were to do that we’d be inundated. Also, for a public organisation to be spamming is probably a little iffy on a number of fronts outside Twitter’s terms of service. I guess that’s a grey area.

I call it spam because it’s unsolicited and on a large scale. I was sitting hitting refresh on the @artsfest page watching the number going up every time, which lead me to assume it was a bot, rather than a rapid mousefinger.

It sounds like you’ve got a bit of a chip on your shoulder about a few people including me so I’m not going to engage in a dialogue about the more insulting parts of your last message – I doubt I’d be able to change your mind.

It comes down to:

• Good idea setting up the account – it could prove very useful during the festival. Fierce’s one actually meant that I got to an event I wouldn’t have.

• I think that a better approach to a couple of critical tweets is to say ‘oops – I didn’t know, sorry’, rather than lay into me and others in quite a personal way on a Sunday when I’d rather be taking a day off.

• You could make your account better and more useful by unfollowing a load of people and not tweet the same thing multiple times.

Stef

Plus “We’ve stopped following a few people now who weren’t at all interesting, and we’re getting 1 or 2 people following me each day which is nice. Especially as most of the people following us are arty and birminghamy / sutton coldfieldy and those are the people we’re most interested in talking to.”

Both indicate what I’d consider the best long term approach to using social media tools. Its about building the right relationships over the long term rather than trying to grab the maximum attention in the short.

Twitter is not like a normal web page where you ‘put the most important stuff at the top’. A normal webpage doesn’t send a message to thousands of people every time you tweak the layout. I realise that some web pages have RSS feeds, but people would be equally annoyed if the same item kept coming through on the feed.

I was originally pleased to discover that artsfest had a twitter account. I thought it would be used to announce acts/artists appearing as they were confirmed. It would also be useful during the festival to announce last minute changes etc.. However, the fact that the person responsible for the Twitter account has overreacted to some constructive criticism by namecalling has put me off somewhat. And I’ll have to stop following if the same tweet keeps coming through over and over.

Just for the record here’s what we did:

1. Searched for people with Sutton based profiles using twitter and twellow and followed them

2. Had a squizz through followers of a few of the people with lots of connections to the local arts scene in the wider Bham area, and added them – the hope being that if they’re interested then they’ll follow and we’ll pick some of their people up that way

3. Just got on with making tweets

And that’s it really – that’s enough to put a flag in the sand and tell people we’re there.

We’ve stopped following a few people now who weren’t at all interesting, and we’re getting 1 or 2 people following me each day which is nice. Especially as most of the people following us are arty and birminghamy / sutton coldfieldy and those are the people we’re most interested in talking to.

We only have 18 followers I think – we may have say 30 by next week. But that’s fine – it’s our first year, and we can continue building that up and making it a really useful comms channel for us ahead of the ‘09 event. I’m in no rush.

A final aside: Aidan Mann’s post from Aidan Mann from 3:34 am wasn’t visible when I made my first post today.

Having now read it I’m still largely OK with what @artsfest is up to and on their side on the main… BUT that was kind of a snipey post really – no need to be so defensive or personal: that won’t help win this fight back, now will it?
I think people ARE trying to help, and best to never burn a bridge…

I didn’t block.

But I’ve not followed either – both because I didn’t like the spammy approach and because it’s a bit early to be honest; I’ll follow when we’re closer to the event.

If I hadn’t known about Artsfest beforehand, I may well have blocked them due to the extraordinarily high number of accounts (‘accounts’ as opposed to ‘people’) they’re following, compared to their followers. This simply strikes me as spammy. But I do know about Artsfest, so didn’t block.

I wonder what Artsfest could do instead of Twitter-spamming?

Artsfest have a mailing list (I know ‘cos I’m on it!) so another approach might be to email their database with the news that ‘Artsfest is now on Twitter’, so giving people the chance to decide whether or not to follow. This way they might even introduce more people to the joys of tweeting and look all innovative and cutting-edge and that?! Granted this would be a slower way of getting the message out – but once a few people follow, word spreads pretty swiftly.

I understand it’s about the ‘call for volunteers’ at the moment rather than promoting specific performances but again, an email to the Artsfest database may have been a good move in the first instance – directly targetting those people they know are interested in the festival and who would surely be more inclined to help out than, for example, @BarackObama or @StephenColbert …?

@suttonart managed the ‘cold’ approach really well – they also followed me so I had a squizz at the profile (Following 10s rather than 1000s of people), checked out the website and decided it was worth a look. They seemed more selective – more human – which is infinitely better.

So, yes, I think it was a really bad move to spam.

But no, I don’t think it was done with bad intentions and – as Shona points out – we all make mistakes.

I think Pete’s point, that the unwritten and evolving rules of Twitter are complete unknowns to anyone new to it, is spot-on – spammy robot things just don’t ‘get’ etiquette; but people do.

I’ll echo Chris in saying that Antonio sums it up very nicely, but I haven’t blocked them yet…