Submitted by Marc van Bree on Mon, 04/07/2008 - 1:57pm.
Social network services on the Internet come and go; a while ago MySpace was the dominant service, now it is equaled, and soon undoubtedly surpassed, by Facebook in traffic. There are dozens of other popular services, such as Orkut and Friendster, and probably thousands of small, niche-market sites.
What’s an arts organization to do with all this new media? Jason Heath talks about it in a video (in which he mentions Chicago Classical Music as an excellent example). In the last section, he talks about Facebook (“more and more Facebook over Myspace,” according to Jason).
Facebook didn’t start out very business friendly, but there have always been ways for fans of different organizations to express their love. The most commonly used way was Facebook Groups. Some of CCM’s Participating Organizations have these groups (I’m not sure which were started by fans and which were started by the organization: Ars Antiqua; Chicago Chamber Musicians; Grand Park Music Festival; Ravinia Festival). The CSO has several, all started by fans.
Then in November of last year, Facebook launched Facebook Pages. Two CCM organizations have already established a presence: Chicago Opera Theater and WFMT. Today, we launched our own Facebook page. There are obvious marketing benefits to having a page for your own organization, but I believe the main strength is building a community and participate (just like CCM aims to do).
So go explore Facebook and if you have an account, be sure to become a fan of the CSO. If you do so before this Friday, April 11, you enter for a chance to win the latest recording from our new CSO Resound label, Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, signed by Principal Conductor Bernard Haitink.
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