Blogs vs. Advertising

Everyone should check out this excellent piece over at Greg Sandow's blog on artsjournal.com. (For those of you who don't know who Greg is, he's a music critic, composer, teacher, and and audience relations consultant for several classical music organizations.) Most of what he says about music can be directly applied to our efforts in the School of Theatre and Dance, but there are a couple passages that particularly struck me.

Regarding the use of student blogs as recruiting tools for universities:

"[H]igh school students trust these blogs. They want to know what various colleges are really like. That's how they decide where they want to go. And who better to tell them, than students already there?

Some schools resist this, though. They want to control their message. They want prospective students to have the school's own official view of itself. This, the piece seems to say, is a losing strategy. The students see through the official message, and want something more authentic, something that feels more like the truth.

(snip)

"[Y]ou can't use new technologies -- or at least not use them to their full potential -- without embracing the new culture. If you're on Twitter, you can't (as I've said before) just send out tiny press releases, as so many classical music organizations do. Your tweets can't be anonymous. And it's not enough to give them a tiny bit of ersatz sparkle, by saying things ("Hey, today is Mahler's birthday!") that you've manufactured because you think they might be fetching, even though you yourself don't even care about them much. Your tweets need to come from an actual person, and say things that this person cares about.

Students entering college today have spent their entire lives immersed in sophisticated advertising, and can distinguish advertising from other forms of communication very quickly. Blogs (like this one) can provide a window into the School of T&D experience that advertising cannot. Not to say that our advertising is somehow less honest, but it is a fundamentally different form of communication than what can be done here.

--Bill Sallak (Asst. Prof./Dance Music Director/Moderator)