I came across a great interview on Memeburn yesterday where Memeburn Editor Jeremy Daniel interviewed Jessica Berlin. Jessica is the social media manager for Cirque du Soleil. Who knew that Cirque du Soleil had a social media manager??
Here are some of the highlights from the interview. You can find the whole interview here.
Memeburn: What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter?
JB: For us, Twitter is a great way to spread information quickly, it’s probably the best channel we have to distribute last-minute information and ticket discounts. Of course, this also refers to the weakness of Twitter. Information is moving so quickly that even though you have a large number of followers, in reality you are only reaching a small percentage of them with each tweet.
That’s why it’s critical to produce relevant content and participate in your followers conversations, so that they in turn trust you enough to re-tweet your posts.
MB: Facebook?
JB: We love how easy Facebook makes it to share all types of content. For us, the targeting and tracking available is key. Since our shows tour and we put on special events in particular cities, we regularly target our updates based on where people live. The best part – it’s free!
One of the current weaknesses with Facebook is the constant changes to pages. It’s hard for businesses to continually adopt and adjust their creative, particularly for anything they have had specially designed for a Facebook page.
MB: Blogging?
JB: There are so many great benefits of blogging, particularly SEO, brand building and the low cost. Most importantly, blogging is a wonderful way for us to tell a story in a longer-form. The best part of blogging for a brand is that you can empower other employees as “guest bloggers” to help tell the company’s story from a different perspective.
When you remain authentic, I don’t think there is any weakness to blogging.
MB: What other social media tools do you use for campaigns?
For online contests we use Wildfire, which is a great application to integrate a branded campaign with the viral features of Facebook. We just launched our new “Seven Worlds” campaign which utilises Facebook Connect to integrate a user’s information with a Cirque du Soleil experience.
MB: How do you respond when the chatter around a show of yours starts to get negative? Can you give us an example?
I am so lucky to work for a brand that people not only like but have an emotional connection to. When we do get negative comments about a show, fans or followers will actually respond to it before we even do and defend the show or recommend another show to that person. Other comments aren’t specific to a show and are more customer service based. No matter what the comment is, we always respond.
MB: What is it about social media that makes it such an effective tool of communication for CDS?
JB: By participating in social media, we want customers to recognise that we’re an approachable brand, we also want to reach a new audience that may not be that familiar with our shows. And obviously, we hope by engaging online we can eventually translate that to ticket sales.
Really interesting answers from Jessica. I liked the explanation of how CDS uses Facebook, Twitter and Blogging and the pro’s and con’s to each. While all three are social media tactics they are very different tactics and I liked her explanation of how CDS uses all three channels.
The “how do you respond to negative comments” answer was very interesting. When your brand is so strong, that your customers will evangelize your brand, then you have something very special going on.