Greetings from the Next Gen team!
As you may have noticed, we are spending lots of time asking about communication lately. We received some great feedback about postal addresses, phones and general communication methods.
Today we are asking about current and future trends surrounding web-based methods of communication. I will let you determine what you consider a “web-based method of communication”, but examples might include email, sms, chat, various social media, etc.
So the questions:
1. How are you communicating with your constituents through web-based methods of communication today, and how do you see this changing in the future?
2. How are constituents communicating with you through web-based methods of communication today and how do you see this changing in the future?
3. What web-based communication information would you like to be able to store (or would like constituents to be able to store about themselves) to enable these current or future business needs?
Thanks!Andrew
Communication methods are evolving faster than I can remember. This applies to all forms of communication, not just web-based communication. So answering Andrew's first two questions is challenging. The third question however, is key. We may not know much about the particular commnucations methods we will be using 2-5 years from now. We DO however have a pretty good sense of the kind of information we need to know about any particular communication method even if we don't know what that communication method will be. Here is the start of a list:
1. Address -- whether it is a phone number, an IM address, an SMS address, a facebook or twitter id, there is some block of information that defines the path to that contact.
2. Length -- what is the size limit of the communication method -- 140/160 character, 10 MB, 4 minutes, etc.
2. Is it text only? Graphical? Multimedia (MIME)?
3. Is it live -- direct, real-time? Or created-stored-forwarded-delivered?
4. What are the hours it is available -- for instance, we might only want to telemarket someone between 9AM and 9PM, whereas we might use the same telephone number for SMS messages 24x7.
5. Is it point-to-point or group based (like a chat), or is it social-based -- where it is sent to someone in particular but then shared with their entire social network.
6. Is it secure, point-to-point but not secure, or public?
7. Is it location-based -- either triggered by the user reaching or arriving at a certain location, or tied to a particular location?
8. Is it one-way, or can it be replied to? What is the reply address. For instance, email and SMS are both examples of methods that can be replied to via a particular reply address.
9. Can it be customer-initiated, or do we initiate the communication and the customer also may or may not be able to reply (see #8).
I am sure I will think of other important details, and I know others will have good thoughts. The important thing is if we are able to define the above pieces of information for any communication method, we can reasonably expect to be able to accommodate any communication method that develops in teh future.
This question reminds me a lot of the question posed here:http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/2180/7759.aspx#7759
So I'll copy my response from that thread, which also applies to this one.
Here at the Science Museum of Minnesota those of us in marketing do have 2-way conversations with our constituents on a lot of social networks these days:
- Twitter- Facebook- YouTube- LinkedIn- Flickr- MySpace
I'm not sure how these forms of communication may change in the future, except for the fact that there are always new social networks popping up as well as others going away. (we still have a Friendster account, although nothing is really happening there!)
We're also starting to do text messaging campaigns. We've offered discounts on museum admission if people text a certain word - and we're building our list of phone numbers who want to receive SMS (text) communication from us on their phones. Would be fun if this could be done through Tessitura, or at least tracked in Tessitura somehow.
I agree with the sentiments about not tryig to predict the future communication channels. The younger your patrons, the faster they will switch from one service to another. To a degree you are dependent on the API capabilities of the various social media services. Because of that, I would tend to think of communications in two forms.
The first is private and formal (email, opt-in text messages, traditional phone and mail). The second is public (twitter, facebook, foursquare, yelp, et al). I think the methods for tracking and managing the private communications are well established at this point. While there is certainly room to improve the tools used, I think that best practices exist for these.
For the public communications, I believe the missing piece that Tessitura could provide is tracking on the constituent level. If someone is a fan of the SYmphony's pageon Facebook, I'd like to see that in their constituent record. If they've checked in on foursquare during a matinee, or left a review on Yelp or Where.com about a performance, that should be tied back to their record as well.
I know this is a very pie-in-the sky kind of vision, but the tools that will be the most effective for understanding patrons in the future will be the ones that can aggregate more kinds of data.
While I wouldn't expect Tessitura to necesarily build tools for specific services (will Twitter be around in 3 years? I think so, but I wouldn't put money on it) I do think that the Next Gen applcation can help by offering some flexible data structure and good APIs so that third parties can easily build an interface to the system.
(I'll also make another plug for something I mentioned in an earlier thread. Services like Facebook connect and other single sign-on offerings should be thought about in the APIs)
So, in terms of stories, if a person is a fan of our page on Facebook and they leave a comment about last week's performance, it should appear in their Research or Contact tab.
If someone mentions us by hashtag or @username on Twitter, it would be tied back to their constituent record (because, of course, we've already given them incentive to provide us with their twiter user name through an offer).
Whoever is the mayor of our venue on Foursquare has their Tessitura account flagged so the next time they call the box office they get a comp to a future show.
The social media services are absolutely going to evolve faster than anyone can keep up, but I think it is possible to build an application that is flexible enough to allow third parties to integrate social media data into Tessitura easily.
I think Levi brings up an excellent concept.
Andrew asked about communication from us to the patron, and from patrons to us. There really is a third critical category, and that is communication between patrons about us, but not directly involving us.
No doubt we could use the Widgets functionality in Tessitura to easily display messages posted on social media sites like Twitter that mention us. At the same time, actually storing some of those messages so they become searchable within Tessitura or could be used as criteria in Extractions is very intriguing.