By Chris Lee

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is the UK capital’s oldest orchestra, founded in 1904, and was recently voted as one of the top five orchestras in the world. Based at the Barbican Centre in the City of London, the orchestra performs concerts all over the world but is possibly best known for providing the soundtracks to hundreds of major movies, including all six Star Wars films, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman. It also runs its own record label and education centre, as well as music education and community programme.

Jo Johnson is the LSO’s digital marketing manager and heads up social media engagement. NMK’s Chris Lee caught up with her to learn more about how social channels have helped the orchestra engage further with its audience.

When did the LSO first get into social media and what was the process?

We had a MySpace page for a number of years, but the first proper foray into social media was in 2007 with Facebook. It came about mainly because a number of students participating in an orchestral training scheme in Daytona Beach, Florida, where the LSO was on tour, found a page I had created for the LSO a couple of months before, just as an experiment to see what "this Facebook thing" was all about. They started writing on the page about what a great time they were having, and soon it had started to go viral, as it would in Facebook. It showed me exactly what can happen when people find an online outlet for their feelings.

Which platforms do you use and how?

We maintain profiles in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, and a couple of ones on specific services like Flickr and Last.fm. To be quite honest, MySpace is the poor relation, and we don't really give it that much time - but we do have a reasonable following in there so it feels wrong to get rid of it. We largely use Facebook and Twitter to interact on a personal level with our friends and fans, with just the tiniest bit of marketing thrown in. Our feeling was that people use these sites to socialise, and that for us to be overtly marketing-focused would not be particularly welcome. Also, around half our fans aren't based in the UK and probably have no chance of coming to hear us in concert in London, so what's the point of trying to push this too much? So we think of social media as community and brand building, to enhance and encourage goodwill towards the LSO (and be able to respond to negative comments, although there aren’t many) - and if this results in a ticket or CD sale somewhere down the line, then that's great!

Which have been the most successful?

The quickest growing has been Twitter, with 9,500 followers (as of 12 May 2010) built up in just over a year. But Facebook is also successful, with 13,500 fans, establishing itself firmly in the top referrers to our main website. The videos that we have uploaded to YouTube have been viewed more than 1.1 million times, and we get a lot of traffic to our main site from here as well. Our following has been built up organically, letting the sites themselves spread the word virally, but we have also pointed people to the sites via links on our emails and main website

Were there any major challenges to instigating a social media programme?

Not really - we were fairly lucky with attitudes to what we were doing internally, not encountering too much cynicism from above, nor anything like a ban from doing it. It helps that initially I set up these sites as experiments, rather than asking permission first. I was then able to demonstrate their value then once I had decided to formalise everything by writing a strategy document. That said, I still work at demonstrating the value of our continued presence in these sites by circulating all the comments and conversations once a week (quite a few people don't have their own accounts and no opportunity to see for themselves), and have to give constant reassurance to the powers that be that I am not damaging the LSO brand in any way.

Did you use social media to target any particular audiences?

Like most people, at first I believed that I could use these sites to target younger audiences, and it is true that the largest age segment on our Facebook page is 18-24 year-olds. But other age groups are not far behind, with the oldest age group of 55+ being the fastest growing, and 35-44 being the most active on our page. It's more difficult to say in Twitter, since you aren't required to give any age information, but I get the feeling that Twitter is used more by an older generation - or at least post-university. And YouTube - its demographics suggest the biggest age group watching our videos is 45-54 year-olds. I'm more interested in the geographic location of our fans - all over the world - and using this to create a worldwide group of 'online ambassadors' for the LSO.

What’s in the pipeline?

I am watching developments with interest, and I was quite excited recently by Facebook's development of the 'Like' function which means that any Web page can become an extension of Facebook. This could work well for arts organisations wanting to attract people to performances, but not in a pushy way. If someone 'Likes' an event detail page on your own website this is automatically shared with all their friends, and the viral and ambassadorial possibilities of this are huge. However I am mindful of the fact that the landscape is constantly shifting, and that individual social sites may not be here to stay. Who predicted the Bebo closure? And with advertising, security issues and the need for the site owners to make money ever present, will people remain loyal to these sites?

How do you measure the success of your social media campaigns?

We aren't running any time sensitive campaigns yet - I'm thinking of trying a bit of Facebook PPC advertising, so measuring success is an ongoing task. Obvious metrics are numbers of friends/fans/page views, but I also track referrals into our main website and conversions to sales. I use the bit.ly link shortening service to monitor link clicks. Numbers of comments, likes and re-tweets are also a good measure of whether what we are saying is of interest.