Feature: Digital Drama Queen, Part IV

flavours.me home page

Tool Time - Using Flavours.me For Online Promotion

by Liesl Barrell

Hot off the success of my Montreal Girl Geek talk, where about 50 of us gathered at Twist Image to drink beer and build websites, this month I thought it was about time I profile one of my favourite tools of the interwebs, flavours.me.

IN A NUTSHELL

Flavours.me (née flavors, but I forgive them so you should, too) is a sleek and simple aggregator that pulls in feeds from over 30 online services (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Etsy and many more...) You can play for free and link up to four services to your profile, or for less than two movie tickets ($20/year) you can subscribe to the full version for additional features and to use your own domain. 

Why do I like it? Because it’s easy, flexible and requires very little commitment: the cornerstones of internet goodness. Just how flexible? Read on for some ideas on using flavours.me to promote yourself, a show or your company.

The Sunday Feature, April 3, 2010

André Belanger

Digital Drama Queen III: 

TNM & Phéromone Tweet in Character

by Liesl Barrell

With CharPo already on a second TweeAtre instalment, I figured this would be the perfect time to cover a social media campaign involving Twitter that took the theatre world by storm. 

For Théâtre du Nouveau Monde’s 2010 production of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme  they enlisted Phéromone to helm the company’s first forays into tweeting, and together they produced the innovative interactive marketing strategy that won the agency a Bee’s Award and an Infopresse nod, to boot.

SOCIAL CLIMBING

To get some industry insight into the campaign, I spoke with André Bélanger, VP at Phéromone, who remembers the snowballing momentum of the effort as a thrilling experience for his team. Spanning just four weeks, he laughs, “the campaign was too short!”  

The Friday Five, March 4, 2011

The Importance of Being Online

Whether you’re a theatre artist or practitioner, whoring yourself online is just as important as, ahem, whoring yourself in person.

David King

Almost two decades ago, I embarked upon a three-year program in Theatre Performance at Concordia University. Knowing full well I would never be able to pay back $30,000.00 in student loans after graduation, I did the program over four years while begging, borrowing, pleading, researching and even ironing one of my professor’s clothes to make ends meet. In the end, I came away with not one but two families of fellow performance peers, and only $10,000.00 to torture me for the rest of my career.

Long before online social networking became a daily activity, not one course at Concordia in the mid 1990s was aimed towards students’ post-grad careers as self-employed artists. While the kids at National Theatre School had their resumes mailed across the country before graduation year after year, we second-class Concordians begged our own department to help us do the same as we jumped into our final productions.

The Sunday Feature, February 19, 2011

The boys of Uncalled For

Digital Drama Queen (Part II): 

How Uncalled For Hijacked My Inbox

by Liesl Barrell

In this instalment we’ll be looking at email marketing strategies, with a few insights to get you thinking outside the junk mail box. If you like what you read and want to hear about more strategies for artists, you’re in luck because I’ll be a panelist at QDF’s Marketing & Social Media Workshop on February 21. It’s gonna be the best thing since sliced internetz, so hope to see you there!

I’ll tell you a little secret: I hate emails.  I’ll tell you a little secret: As a marketer, I love emails. As a user, I hate them. 

Marketer love:

Email is still one of the most cost-effective methods to spread the word, despite social media titans proclaiming its death or the blogosphere constantly feeling for its pulse. When effectively deployed and paired with good, timely, useful content it can be an amazing tool to build awareness and keep people in the loop.

User hate:

I feel the same way you probably feel about bulk emails: I’m bombarded with constant, bite-sized information, and here come these cumbersome, awkward chunks of dull, stock-photo-ridden meh-inducing content. Often pointlessly seasonal (It’s Valentine’s Day so buy socks!) and needlessly long-winded, I confess to having no fewer than 12,353 unread emails in my primary account inbox. That’s a whole heckuva lot of ignored emails!

Feature: Liesl Barrell, January 21, 2010

Confessions of a Grown Up Digital Drama Queen

By Liesl Barrell

In a new monthly segment for CharPo, I’ll be profiling theatre artists and companies to investigate their digital marketing strategies, online lives and incorporation of new media in production. 

In this first instalment, I’ll take you on a little trip through my twin passions (stage and web) and give you an idea of where this Digital Drama segment will be heading.

THE NET AND ITS DOUBLE

People are often surprised by what seems to them like a strange move for me, from theatre into the digital marketing world. When asked about it, I like to discuss how all communications stem from the oral tradition, and by extension, the ancient art of the stage. Or that the phrase “virtual reality” was first coined by avant garde theatre theorist Antonin Artaud. 

This often does little to lower their eyebrows, as I suspect the reasons they think of the two spaces in binary opposition are the same that bring them together for me: old or new, media is what I’m passionate about. 

THE EMPTY (CYBER)SPACE

Perhaps the first time I heard the siren call of the series of tubes was in 2007, when I watched a piece on one of my all-time favourite multi-platform marketing campaigns: The HBO Voyeur Project. It was launched by BBDO (the real life inspiration for Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, as well as their fictional onscreen rival) in partnership with a number of smaller agencies, vendors and media buyers. 

Watch the campaign summary video above and you’ll immediately notice the stunning theatricality of the silent vignettes that are at the heart of this award-winning campaign.