"They're Your Tools."

This evening I begin with a quote and title borrowed from The Guys, by Anne Nelson:

JOAN: "(...) I want to do something. But this is all I know how to do. Words. I can't think of anything else."

NICK: "That's OK. They're your tools."

These lines are a bit out of context, taken from a poignant and beautiful play set in the days following the attacks on September 11, 2001. I think of them as important reminders to theatre practitioners. Words are our tools.

I'm beginning this way in an attempt to bring it back to my own current set of tools, and hopefully, a set that belongs to many of you, as well. Not only do I have the opportunity to build with my tools onstage, I also have a blog and several social media pages which I can build with words off stage, too.



I will admit to not being the most technologically savvy person in the world. My experiments with social media and blogging are just that: experiments. I realized last night why it's important not only to experiment, but also to understand your tools.

All of your account and privacy settings, metrics, etc. are tools of social media. For a dinosaur of the pre-web world like me, these tools are often mishandled. For example, I just realized yesterday how to allow people to leave a comment on my posts. Yes. Really.

This may sound silly to many of you, but we do have a generational digital divide these days. For not-for-profit theatres that deal in old-fashioned, hand-crafted art, there is great importance in learning how to use all the tools available to us. If you have pages on social media sites as part of your overall PR and marketing strategies, and especially if you keep a blog for your organization (which I highly recommend), you must take the time to get to know how to use all of your tools. This can mean the difference between simply sending out information (as I found out I had been doing), and creating a place for dialogue with readers, patrons, and fellow practitioners, which should be what PR and marketing are all about for not-for-profit theatres.

Also, if you plan to create a space for dialogue, you must decide if or how you will moderate the discussions, and what tools you will use to do so. This page from Social Media DIY Workshop offers a simple set of guidelines for, and examples of, setting a blog comment policy. It's a couple of years old, but it's simple to understand, especially if you're a Jurassic Blogger, like me.

I hope all of this is useful to some and made the web-fluent readers at least smile. Have fun learning to use your social media tools. It's an adventure, and that's OK.

Until next time...
Ro Huizinga