Letting marketing slip through

My highly esteemed colleague in Vienna, Christian Henner-Fehr, highlighted a subject in his blog lately an article, which appeared on the web exactly at a point, where I banged my head against the same issue here in Slovakia. The original author Bernd Röthlingshöfer in his blog "... und jeztz zur Werbung" - translated as "and now to advertisement" - gives an interesting insight in the post for whom social media apparently is not intended. 

Not so much, that there is a real restricted area, but the title is meant ironically. Were it not, that I deal with it almost daily, where I still need convincing clients to get out of their academically stuffy cultural cocoon and try to interface with the world, since a huge potential market is almost exclusively expecting you to be on the web, especially on social media.

Just in short, these are examples - according to the article - where social media is off limits:

1. when no clear goals are defined
2. missing long-term strategies
3. relying on an agent, since they have hardly a clue what it is all about
4. not having inhouse the necessary competency to make a decision
5. having no time
6. having no staff
7. not fully understanding how social media works
8. their reaction to developments within social media takes too long

Again, it may look a bit like mockery, yet these aforementioned clients do exist. Even those, who combine several of the above, if not all. Wonder why they are dangling on a rope and not understanding why business is so slow.

About time to catch up, else you really let your marketing slip through your fingers.

MS

Managerial challenges

Running a cultural entity, whether an orchestra, theatre or museum is a bit of a different type of job as running a regular commercial business. Your output is far less tangible as let's say selling books or computers.

Speaking of the latter, computers do play an increasingly important role in every day's society. Let's admit it, we do search for the best train connections, the latest discounts or the next concert with the help of the browser. The web-page is therefore not just a fancy window, but provides the first impression to keep the visitor interested - hopefully to make avail of your offer.

Recently, one institution, despite hiring me in as to help our with their marketing, decided without consulting me into a totally different approach, implementing inadequate parallel web-domains, showing not just disregard for portfolio's but most of all, inadequate understanding of marketing and web-applications as such.

What became more apparent, was the total lack of leadership, where suddenly every one became an expert for another person's portfolio. 

Sad to see a another unique and valuable ensemble in Slovakia - with much international potential - go down the drain. Despite all warnings and written reports on threats, they cut their last life line. Slovak culture is hardly viable, since not only corruptions from above is damaging, but also human prestige is blocking much instead of taking a professional approach to move a bit forward.

MS