Social Media Marketing: Tweeting, Friending and You

You have a Facebook page. You read a lot of blogs. You invested in a great website. You may have even sent a tweet or two. But you want to integrate these and other online tools into your communications efforts to build your audience, deepen your relationships, and even strengthen your brand. The marketing team at Portland Center Stage shares with you some of the techniques and strategies that have made PCS a leader in the use of social media networking, as cited by Oregon Business Magazine. The half day workshop is designed to present the basics and share success stories, as well as harness the power of “crowd sourcing” to benefit all participants with new ideas, regardless of how much experience you have with online marketing.

Update: Yale study ranked PCS as #2 nationally for use of Twitter as a marketing tool by regional theaters.  We’ll outline, step-by-step how we’ve integrated Twitter into our communication plan in the workshop.

November 13
1pm – 5pm
Gerding Theater at the Armory
Cost: $40

Instructors: Cynthia Fuhrman, Director of Marketing and Communications; Trisha Mead, Public Relations Manager; Natalie Gilmore, Promotions Manager; Michael Buchino, Graphic Designer; Patrick Weishampel, Multimedia Designer.

For enrollment, or any other questions, please call Kelsey Tyler
at 503.445.3793 or email him at kelseyt@pcs.org.

Ben Franklin may be most famous for his role in a certain hand-signed Founding Document, but he actually made his living for many years as a printer and author of the Poor Richard’s Almanack. In celebration of that fact we have invited Portland-Area letterpress artists to create a series of special art-quality prints in honor of the man and inspired by the aphorisms of the Almanack.

They’ve been arriving into the building all week and the results have been beautiful, thought provoking, and so tactile…in each case the direct interaction of plate with paper is clearly visible. Today’s digital printing may be speedy, high resolution and efficient, but it sure doesn’t have the sheer tactile pleasures of a letterpress.

This cell phone photo does not even remotely do it justice, but just to give you a sense of the creativity being brought to the project:

The exhibit will be up in the Armory’s lower lobbies throughout November and December, but this week we are hosting two very special events to kick things off on a celebratory note.

Join us Thursday, November 5th from 5 pm to 7 pm for a First Thursday reception where you can browse the work and then head off on further Pearl District gallery adventures (or stay and see the show that inspired the exhibit, Ben Franklin: Unplugged, at 7:30 pm).

Or bring the kids on Saturday, November 7th from 10 am to 1 pm for a Letterpress Fair and Demonstration in the Armory Lobby. In addition to browsing the exhibit, you’ll get to see a demonstration of a working letterpress, a short film about the last letterpress edition of the NY Times, and meet many of the PDX letterpress printers at work here in Portland. Afterwards, stay for the 2:00 pm matinee performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged.

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

My daughter has the right idea, very dialed in with this high-velocity noveling.

She’s only 195 words into her nanowrimo novel, and already the hero/villain (to save time cutting to the chase, one character does double-duty as both good AND evil) has committed the crime, set out on a quest to find the antidote to make it right, and at the moment is riding a Pega-corn (winged unicorn) into combat with a pack of ogres. Wow. You go, noveling 6-year-old!

Me? Not zooming along as speedily, plot-wise. Yesterday I left my character in a fencing class, considering the balance between defense and aggression. Zzzzzzzz.

6-year-olds don’t pace themselves, they give it all they’ve got. That’s the way to do it.

I’m going to follow her lead. Hop on a Pega-corn, maybe fight some ogres. But first, coffee.

Novel Influenza A, H1N1, yes, the swine flu, has blown its foul, fetid breath through our humble abode, leaving us all weak, pale, and pounds lighter, even our six-year-old, who hadn’t an ounce to spare, and now, only now, soon to be restored to our former health and vigor, and filled with the glory that it is to be alive, we stand, three-fourths of us anyway, stand united, sharpened pencils in pinched fingers, ready to face November and whatnot.

Glad you’re over the hump, susanl, but, why so wordy, and not quite true, and, well, badly written?

Oh, that. Because… it’s National Novel Writing Month.  And every word counts. Literally. All 50,000 of them. They must be counted, they must be written quickly, and they must add up to 50k.

National Novel Writing Month, in the words of Evil Genius and Founder Chris Baty, is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.  Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” Now in its 10th year, 2008 nano had 120,000 participants around the globe, and 20,000 of them won. That is, they wrote the 50,000 words. That’s a decent novel, the length of Huck Finn, for example.

It’s all about the word count. It’s about going forward, building without tearing down. Kurt Vonnegut: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way of making your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”

So when Tim DuRoche asked me to blog about my nano experience for the PCS website – well, he didn’t ask ME, per se, he asked my friend, the writer Natalie S., but she has never done nano in her life, and besides, she is off at a prestigious and very fancy writers’ retreat you all have heard of and wish you could go to, but let me just say to Natalie, Hey, Natalie, I have my own writer’s retreat right here (see cute T-shirt: “An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life”), just me and my mini HP, and a hundred and twenty thousand or so other fellows — so, yeah. (Again, with the wordiness!!)

So, when N couldn’t do it, and she passed the buck to me and Tim said, “uh, okay,” I was TOO THRILLED. Here’s why: (insert wiggly line flashback effect here…)

Think back…One year ago… Nano 2008.  I trotted my winner’s certificate (in its clear sheet-protector) down to the PCS box office, and a man wearing an excellent tie presented me with four free, count ‘em, free tickets to “A Christmas Carol.” My entire family went to see the production on one of those dark and stormy days we had so many of in December. Remember?  There was no one out on the roads, the wind was howling, and the snow was falling, but the show went on, as the show must! and the entire experience was just like magic. (I am not just going for word count, here. My husband and I were filled with such good will and enthusiasm that we subscribed to the remainder of the PCS season!)

Sadly, I thought I might skip NaNo this year, because I’m in the middle of a novel revision, and, thanks be, I have a lot of contract work, and then there’s this FLU, and such and so on. But, you know, I’d miss the community. For a lot of us typically solitary writers, that’s what it’s all about — this gorgeous web of noveling people in all pockets of the world, including a town called “Dinosaur,” all supporting each other online and in person, and never is heard a discouraging word, all month long. It’s a beautiful thing.

And, thanks to the lovely and talented NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program, my two daughters (ages 6 and 9) will be writing novels this month, too. Fully three fourths of my family will be shirking our duties, eating takeout, wearing the same clothes day in and day out, etc. etc. to be nanoing fools this month. That’s three out of four, seventy-five percent, or per cent, three slices of the family pie, three quarters, oh AGAIN with the word count!

So, yes. Truly, when Tim asked me if I’d be interested in blogging about Nano on the PCS website, I said, in the words of Dickens, “Abso-bloomin’-lutely!” I’m pretty sure it’s Dickens. Maybe Rogers and Hart. Or Lionel Bart. Lerner and Lowe. George Bernard Shaw. (Word count, sorry! Habit!) Anybody? Help?  Because I don’t have even a MOment to look it up. It’s nano-time. And I’m writing.

Hope to see you here.

One very fun part of Benjamin Franklin’s printing career was the creation of Poor Richard’s Almanack , a collection of little nuggets of wisdom, or aphorisms.  To celebrate Ben Franklin Unplugged, we ran a contest on Twitter to coin your own 21st Century aphorism and tweet it to @pcsghost. Here are some of the results:

@nicolealane An invitation in the inbox is worth two in the mailbox

@clairewillett Early to bed and early to rise makes a man a terrible college roommate.

@BethMcShane Energy and persistence conquer all things….except H1N1

@little_panther Politicians are good for making excuses & seldom good for anything else

@trishamead A penny saved is an inappropriate waste of strip mined natural resources.

Thanks everyone for the tweets! We’ll draw the winners of the Ben Franklin Unplugged tickets on November 1st.