fLO specializes in helping small businesses and non-profits determine the social media/online content tools that are the most effective for their unique business and customer. They provide both high-level strategic planning and mechanical implementation of online content/social media marketing programs
For those unfamiliar with my personal FB page or our fLO Twitter feed, the term “gut churn” was lovingly lifted from this article by Jad Abumrad of Radiolab describing the feeling you get when you’re engaged in a creative endeavor in an unfamiliar format and you have no idea what you’re doing. Frankly, I think it’s something that any entrepreneur or business owner can easily relate to.
Over the past year, John and I have become increasingly intrigued by the idea of transmedia storytelling as a means of viral marketing. The perfect opportunity for a test project fell in our lap, and for the past 3 months we’ve been working with Sacramento’s well-known edgy theater company, Kolt Run Creations to develop our very first.....”Transmedia Experience” to promote an upcoming production.
We are in the process of transitioning from the “idea stage” to the “making it happen” stage and are in a constant state of discovery. Mainly a lot of “Oh, I thought we could do it this way”, discovering we can’t, and then finding a different way to do it instead. Stuff like that. I’m going to do my best to document the process here, both for ourselves and for anyone else who might be interested.
Today: The Setup
Kolt Run Creations is a 5-year old Sacramento theater company that has built a solid reputation for doing edgy, innovative, well-produced work. They have a lock on their market and while there is competition amongst other companies for the general theater-attending dollar, there is no direct competition for the kind of pieces they produce. The problem for theater (any theater really) is that there is only a small amount of the population that will go out and see it. So our challenge is to see if we can create an experience that will draw non-traditional theater attendees to the show.
We worked with KOLT to narrow down a specific target market and we settled on college students for a number of reasons. Sacramento has a number of higher education outlets, students are likely to be familiar with the media platforms we’ll be using and college students are at a time of life when they are open to experimentation - and therefore more likely to make the leap to our ultimate goal which is purchasing a ticket and participating in the live theater experience.
Another factor that we believe will appeal to the college-student demographic is the theme, location and timing of the opening of the play. Vinegar Tom, by Carol Churchill is a feminist piece about British witch trials of the late 1600s. This spooky tale is opening in the perfect Halloween-y time of late October and will be held in a non-traditional theater setting. The drained basement pool the historic Elks Tower, significant to the production for its’ own history (women were not allowed to swim, but could watch from platforms above) as well as the connotations to witches (who were often drowned in the attempt to prove their guilt or innocence of witchcraft - they died either way)
So, we’ve got our target market, we’ve got a great product to sell and now the fun begins. Our next obstacle was coming up with a transmedia experience that would enhance the production, without taking anything away from it. I’ll talk about that in my next post.
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