off-stage right

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The line in the song goes “You say it best when you say nothing at all” and sure that is true when you are in a long, loving relationship, but when you are courting, lack of communication is a sure fire way for someone to lose interest, forget about you, or feel ignored.

Marketing and fundraising for the arts is all about the relationship – enough people including me have written about that, so let’s just accept it as a fact.   There are lots of ways to build a relationship, as varied as the folks we are trying to reach.  So what happens when a company starts to use certain communication tools and then just stops.

Let me start with, my name is Jodi and I am a social networking addict.

I actually use TwInbox to download all of my tweets to my Outlook inbox.  Yes, I read every tweet from everyone I follow (I also do the same via RSS feed for all status updates from Facebook).  Some of my dear Twitter friends are very active so I can get anywhere from 800-2000 tweets a day.  Last night I realized I was following over 1000 people on twitter.

This just looked so extreme to me that I decided to streamline a bit.  Rather than eliminate active tweeters who help me keep up with the news and have such great conversations, I decided I would trim those infrequent folks who are “lurkers” or simply inactive, most likely they signed up for Twitter and just never really got how to use it or didn’t like it – hey, to each their own.

Someone had tweeted me about this great program “UnTweeps” that allows you to see who hasn’t tweeted in intervals of 30, 60, and 90 days.  I figured if someone hasn’t used the program in two months, they were not really using it, so I picked the 60 day option.

As I was scrolling down the list of 88 accounts who had been inactive for over 60 days, I was wondering why on earth people didn’t delete the accounts rather than letting them “hang” out there in cyberspace.  Maybe I am super vigilant but I can’t stand having dead accounts out there.

Now of the 88 folks who hadn’t been active, 85 were individuals – about 5 were celebrity accounts that I am sure a well-meaning publicist insisted the actor start.  I am sure the rest fell into the aforementioned, set it up, didn’t like it, didn’t get it or maybe are just way too busy too type 140 characters category.

But three accounts stood out glaringly:

Lincoln Center

Kennedy Center

Westside Story

Now certainly it is every organization or businesses option on how to communicate with customers and how often.  I know how busy marketing departments are.  And, I am among those that believe interns shouldn’t be in charge of the social networking sites, so I understand truly how difficult it is to keep up.   But what does is say when you start something and just stop?  And worse you leave it out there just hanging?

To me this was the same as having a website that was out-of-date.  Something that has been improved upon greatly.

I was turned off and frankly I expected better.  I un-followed two of the three – I’ll let you guess which ones and left it at that.

In building relationships information in key.  People are in a relationship because they want to be in the know. They want to be able to information quickly.  They chose to follow you, and you can’t just leave them hanging.  So either delete the account or better yet, don’t set it up until you know how you are going to use it and have a plan to keep it up-to-date.

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