Ambassador Theatre Group: Where a multi-faceted social strategy takes centre stage
ATG is the driving force behind 32 regional theatres across the UK, and many more around the world. Chris Welton, Head of Social and Content, shares how social media is a key tool in selling some of country’s most beloved shows to millions of audience members, and in supporting the producers and theatres behind them.
Hear what advice Sprout’s social media agony aunt Stacey has for community groups looking to make best use of social channels, and if you have your own social media predicament, you can ask for Stacey’s help by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.
See how ATG part in creating showstopping content via @ATGTickets on Twitter and Facebook, or @ATG_Tickets on Instagram.
Transcript
Cat: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favorite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone and really, nearly anything goes.
But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.
Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know, and some that you don’t. To explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organizations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies.
And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.
This week, I’m joined by Chris Welton, head of social and content at the Ambassadors’ Theatre Group or ATG. ATG is the driving force behind 32 regional theatres across the UK and many more around the world.
It operates venues, running ticketing platforms, and supports producers in putting on some of the best-selling shows that millions of audience members have enjoyed under their expertise and guardianship for over 30 years.
ATG are also customers of Sprout. And after catching up with Chris recently, I was fascinated with the work that they do and the multiple, multiple different avenues of work that Chris and his social team are working on.
So, I’m looking forward to exploring those areas today. If you would like to follow the valuable work of ATG and perhaps, inspire a trip to the theatre, you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook at ATGTICKETS or on Instagram, via @atg_tickets.
Chris, welcome to Social Creatures.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me.
Cat: I’m delighted that you’re here. I’m so excited to tell everyone or show everyone all of the wonderful work that you’ve been doing.
And so, right off the bat, 32 UK venues, that is a lot. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how your team’s structured, how you liaise with those venues, and maybe the different types of responsibilities that you have?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big old job in a big organization, the biggest arts organization in the UK. And so, it is an incredible amount and we do have a very small team, but a very energetic team who we try and do as much as possible for everyone effectively, but fundamentally, our team is a central office support for our venues.
So, as much as it might look like from the outside, with the big ATG and we kind of manage all these venues and all these channels, all these venues, they weren’t always under ATG.
We love to give them a certain amount of autonomy, especially when it comes to social media, in terms of helping them hire great people, bring out their own kind of creativity and upskill them, giving them toolkits and guidance in terms of, okay, this is a big thing coming up, and this is ways you can talk about it, or maybe a more reactive piece.
The central role can be outrageously busy. These are incredible venues with brilliant people in them. And we are really the facilitators for those venues to do the best possible social media while we own the brand ATG, like you plugged at the beginning, thank you very much.
And we will obviously dedicate a lot of resources to sharing the news from our venues as well as the news from our producer partners. So, our CEO, Mark Connell always says, “It’s all about the content.” That’s basically referring to the shows.
If you really strip it down, ATG is an owner of buildings. Without the producers coming with their shows and recruiting the talent to be in those shows, we wouldn’t have a business.
So, really, it’s supporting those venues to effectively make the most of those producers and the social media part of it is us being connected to that producer, but also making sure when the producer talks to a venue, saying, “My show’s coming in three days, is there anything we could do to shift a few more tickets or this has happened,” that venue is very wordy and very creative and able to support that producer.
But everything is towards our producer partners and then the venues and giving them that expertise, I guess, and the best practice to be able to do it themselves.
Cat: And I just feel like stretching that across 32 venues, it must be enormous because selling tickets is one thing, but it’s kind of like if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, if it plays on in a theatre and no one’s there to watch it, you have to sell those tickets.
But theatre goers are going to want to be inspired by the content that they’re seeing on social to go and actually purchase a ticket. So, it’s sort of a whole purchase funnel that you’re operating; from inspiration, capturing people’s interest and imagination and attention, right through to that actual purchase, which is interesting.
Do you enable the purchase of tickets via social or do you put them through to a further website?
Chris: No. So, we can push them through to ATG tickets, so that website’s been developed and finessed over years and years and years, long before me and operates incredibly well.
I think obviously, a massive part of our job is how can we help shift tickets. And we do that through paid advertising through Facebook Meta, and obviously, your Twitters and LinkedIns and the likes.
I think one of the main things I learned over the two and a bit years I’ve been at ATG is actually giving more credence to the fact these venues are kind of really central in these communities.
They’re not just physically sat there on the high street or slap bang in the middle of a city. They’re also the biggest employer of people in the arts, in the UK. And all those venues have a massive kind of, almost a responsibility.
It is entertainment, but it’s also culture. It’s representing that community through the staff. And some of the shows that come in, we use social definitely from kind of the direct response, get people to buy tickets piece.
But the venues talking as themselves on social media, they’re nesting their own tone of voice and making sure they’re talking like their community talks and making sure that they are reaching everyone because we don’t want it to be every venue follows an ATG tone of voice.
When Glasgow came back after COVID, the greeting was Glaswegian. I’m not going to try and say it, but that’s how they announced their return. And that’s perfect because that’s hopefully, got them to come back.
And so, social media does a lot of things for us, but I try and emphasize that piece at the awareness phase, but it’s kind of dripping more into that engagement piece between our venues, people, and then the customers as well.
Cat: That’s so great to hear. And I think that is one of the best parts of when people are successful in social media is when you build that community. And I totally agree as a huge theatre fan, I think that supporting your local theatre is really, really important and just also a good thing to do.
But you did touch on, I feel like the elephant in the room, which is the pandemic, which must have been bloody awful for you. And I wonder, how did you cope during that period of time when all of your venues shut down and how did your role and how did social media play a role in how you handled that pretty dark period?
Chris: Yeah, you could feel something coming, but I think the actual urgency of when decisions were made and announcements were made happened so quickly.
And I’ll always remember on March the 16th, 2020 being sat in an office with basically like a crisis comms team that we had quickly established with people across the business and watching the TV.
And Boris had already started saying, “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” But he hadn’t equivocally said close as a business and insurance and all those things. We had to wait until it was forced effectively.
So, on that night, I remember he said the word theatre in this broadcast on TV and looking around the room, it was obviously like, right okay, it’s happening. Obviously, it was a very dark time, but we had to understand that social media was at that point, pretty much our one communications platform out to our customers and our fans.
And for us, that initial period was like so many businesses that have reservations or future tickets. Obviously, the main thing for business is if all those got refunded, there would be no business. All these buildings would close.
So, there was a lot of very smart people in our organization and in SOLT in kind of the wider kind of theatre industry, finding the messaging and the structure for encouraging people to retain credit vouchers or encouraging people to support that local theatre.
This isn’t about so much ATG, it’s about your Edinburgh Playhouse, your Princess Theatre in Torquay, retain that ticket because we will be back and it’s going to be fantastic.
And a lot of shows rescheduled 3, 4, 5 times, but most of them eventually did happen. We did retain so many customers; we’re so good in retaining their tickets and retaining their credit vouchers that I might not be here chatting to you today if those customers didn’t trust us and believe that theatre’s important and that when it comes back, they want to be part of it.
So, yeah, it was a bit of a blurry two and a bit years, but a lot of customer care, that became a very clear piece that we needed to focus more attention on from a social media perspective.
So, making sure with no venues in and reduce teams everywhere, if people were asking us questions on social media, which of course, they were, that we had a set up through Sprout and through our FAQs that we created and save replies that we could give people responses and we could give them assurances and give them updates on their tickets.
So yeah, customer care obviously, became the name of the game for me for a year or so sitting in that lovely lockdown sun in my garden, just responding to customers, but we got through it. And I think as an organization, we really grew. I think we became more empathetic to our staff and hopefully, our customers and our producer partners.
And when we actually came back, incredibly emotional, incredibly powerful scenes across the country, it’s genuinely hard to think that we actually just went through all that and came out the other side somehow.
Cat: And thank God we did because yeah, it was definitely awful. And you did mention customer care and customer service became a lot more … would you say a lot more important as part of the social strategy?
And then also, I think this was quite universal. Social is the great leveler, everyone has got a space on social, but it became like the primary communication channel. So, that’s obviously where you’re distributing and broadcasting information and updates, but then also dealing with the inbound. So, that’s an awful lot of work to have been doing.
So, I wonder were you working with other departments in ATG or was this handled all with the social team?
Chris: Like I said, we were very fortunate that we got this crisis comms team set up and so, making sure we’re aligned with the ticketing team and our PR team and getting that messaging exactly right.
Because it was obviously, for the customers, but also, we have producer partners who are scared and worried. They’re not putting on shows. They’re also not making money. So, we had to make sure all those messages were aligned across every team.
So, there was a very big kind of, I guess, external internal kind of collaboration in terms of comms. It’s not just telling customers, it’s people being furloughed for another however much time.
So, people not having a job. It’s obviously, devastating if someone has a lot of money reserved in a show that they really, really want to see. But it’s also that usher isn’t going to work, because there is no job.
So, yeah, it was a lot of cross-team, definitely more than the first 30 days I had in my job in the office. I certainly didn’t meet all these teams straight off the bat, but when you are kind of … the company’s reduced and there’s a core team left behind, we got very close and we talked and managed a lot of things together.
So, the reduced team really brought us closer to other teams in terms of kind of knowledge gathering and sharing and stuff like that.
And then, yeah, the customer care side of things, it had to be better and it did get better. And I think any company — I used to work at Expedia and they used to do sessions where you could listen in to phone calls from customers as kind of training. So, you could be from any department and you could come along and listen.
And as much as I would love a world where customer care was perfect and there was no challenges at all, but there is something really insightful about actually seeing what customers are saying directly to your company.
Whether it’s the venue or directly to ATG or directly to our sister company, LOVEtheatre, and understand how maybe we are responding, how maybe we aren’t responding or is this a pattern? Is this new?
So, I still, first thing in the morning, we’ll look at our Sprout inbox and kind of get a sense of what’s going on across the country, what’s going on in ATG land. And I’m not saying it’s then like my whole day, but it’s something that’s certainly maintained off the back of a pandemic where customer care becomes paramount alongside supporting our producers and our stakeholders.
So, yeah, that’s been a piece that stayed for some positives as well.
[Music playing 00:13:16]
Cat: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex, even the hardiest of social media users.
Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits, in the part of the show we like to call, Sound Advice.
Stacey: Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it is time for us to take a break and cozy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, to your trickiest digital dilemmas.
Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.
“Dear Stacey, I’m working for a local county council and we have a small medium agency to help us deliver our social media content strategy.
“We look after Twitter ourselves, publishing updates and news releases as they happen, but needed extra support for the likes of Facebook and Instagram for an always on content stream and community engagement ideas.
“The agency are a great team, but I’m starting to feel like a Negative Nelly as I keep rejecting posts they suggest in monthly content plans as we have to be so very careful of all the comms that go out onto our channels.
“We can’t really join social media trends or awareness days like International Donut Day, without being responsible about people’s health and sugar intake. It can be a bit of a minefield.
“I feel a bit like we’re going around in circles and I end up spending more time editing the content upon suggestions to the point where I wonder whether it will better to bring this back in house, which defeats the object of hiring them in the first place. Look forward to hearing your social advice, Ron.”
Ron, I know how really hard this can be especially in public sector. You’re probably dealing with headcount freezes and trying to do five jobs in one.
If it’s really feeling that you’d rather have someone in-house due to a compliance or tone of voice issue, maybe consider a freelancer. They tend to be more flexible in terms of even working from your office from time to time. And that way, they can really understand the culture of your environment and learn from your wider team as to who the key stakeholders are in your strategy.
If you are tied into a contract or keen to shift the services from your existing agency, be honest, tell them that rather than complete the original content, maybe you want to focus on resharing and disseminating what already exists.
Sorry that you’re not going to be their most wacky fun client on social media, but everyone is always going to be asking questions about bins unfortunately. You can sign post the agency to government tool kits you receive with those preexisting assets and suggest the captions from the nationwide campaigns.
Alert them to community groups and trusted local services that they could be resharing posts from, and essentially, make your pages a hub for that local community, sharing the voices of others, rather than them feeling like they have that pressure to create the conversation themselves.
You can then get them to spend that extra time that they used on creating original content to focus on their analytics and the efficiencies of that community management. If you don’t want to reduce the hours they’re working or the budget that you’re spending, that is.
So, if you’d rather save the money, you obviously get some time back. Start to ask them what content pillars work best and on what channels, where should you be spending your time, and what are people saying about the services that we need to be aware of?
By shifting the focus to the results, this might also create a good business case for you to ask for a social media specialist in-house or broaden your team to allow you to work more on the social media yourself.
So, Ron, I hope these pointers help you to elect a more efficient working relationship with your agency. Until next time listeners, stay strong and stay social. And now, back to the interview.
Cat: I’m glad that there were some silver linings and it is great to hear that you’re in such lockstep with the other departments, because I do think it makes so much sense, but often, isn’t actualized in that way.
Whereas, I feel like social media does often have the pulse of what the company’s talking about and also, what your customers are saying, but like to be so in lockstep, I think can only be a benefit.
And I absolutely agree with you that people should listen to what customers are saying. I think that would be a good practice, no matter what industry you’re in really.
But moving away from the pandemic for a second, the UK celebrated Pride back in July and it was a special year for the event as it commemorated 50 years since the first parade took part in this country.
I saw the ATG like many other businesses took part in spotlighting your support of this movement. So, I was wondering if you could talk me through how you were able to engage with the event across all of your social channels.
Chris: Yeah, of course. We’re very fortunate to have a great Pride network within the organization. So, the brilliant work that they’re doing throughout the year, but it’s especially obviously, visible and prominent during Pride Month.
So, we got together with them and the creative learning team. So, creative learning effectively helped bring people into the theatre through education and things like tours and stuff like that.
So, very really important part of our business, but they, and the Pride network, they were developing some content and some pieces that they wanted to do around Pride. So, bringing to life stories of queer joy effectively, so how can we talk to our staff and make them feel comfortable to share their stories?
And yeah, it was a lovely month getting not only to talk to people myself and get their stories and capture some images and share it and see it as a piece where it could be seen as — I know a lot of people say they just change their logos for the month and then they change back and we want to continue to tell these stories on an ongoing basis.
It’s not just a hop on LinkedIn and it’s a business thing. And showing that we have LGBTQI+ employees, sharing on Facebook, sharing on Instagram, sharing it on Twitter, on our venue channels and on our ATG channels, and consumers as well. And we support these people and they’re fantastic, and they bring so much creativity and energy and are such an important part of our company.
And I love being able to share that kind of the stories directly from our staff and our people, and then just inspiring the venues and telling them Pride is coming up and we absolutely want you to get involved in any way you see fit.
We also want to make it a place where our venues celebrate some stuff that they’re doing that they’re really proud of. And sometimes, it might make other venues want to do it and be inspired. It might make them competitive and say, “Ooh, that venue’s done that. And it’s done really well, I think we should do it.”
Pride in moments like that throughout the year, great opportunities to hop on Teams, chat on of some stuff that we are doing or applaud something that they’ve done.
They’ve all got younger, creative people within their building who do embrace channels like TikTok. They are really good at reels and stuff like that. And Pride was just a great example of them bringing to life the events that they were having in their theatre or Pride events in their community that they were taking part of.
Cat: I was kind of wondering, you’ve spoken a couple of times about inspiring the venues to be creating their own content. You have mentioned TikTok and reels. It feels like this would be quite a nice fit for you, but I’m interested. How does video fit in with what you’re doing on social?
Chris: Video especially in that kind of venue engagement piece that I want the venue to capture themselves and their stories and what’s going on in that building and around, we do get an abundance of content from producers.
Every single producer will have video content, photos, posters, production shots, it’s great stuff. It’s stuff that will help sell tickets. Yeah, when it gets to the venue, kind of trying to tell a story about themselves, I think video and especially fun little 15 to 30 second videos where they might still be selling a show, there’s so many talented people in these venues as well. They can sing, they can do these things.
So, it is that video content where yeah, it’s selling the show, but it’s them showing off their personality and the kind of creativity in that building through video or it’s, in Wimbledon, they’ve got a cute dog and it runs around the marketing office. They’ve captured some lovely video content through that.
So yeah, video plays a really key role. I think that’s obviously something where we’re talking about best practice working with the producers and working with the venues to go, if we had a reel of this poster, it might perform far better for us than paid social.
Or your trailer for your new show is fantastic, but it’s two and a half minutes long and no one’s going to watch it. So, can you give us a 15-second piece that we can push across Instagram stories for example.
I think there’s a lot of good stuff out there for sure. A lot of great producers, a lot great venues, but it is still, we have to kind of keep thinking about it. People are so time-poor on social media, whizzing past in the newsfeed or skipping in the stories that we have to stand out.
And a lot of the time, you’ll stand out with that video as opposed to your poster that maybe someone’s already seen; how can we go deeper? There is some shows and some tours where you just whack up the poster and people lose their minds, but that’s because it’s an iconic show.
For example, you put up the image of the Lion King Poster and say it’s coming to Manchester and that’s all you need sometimes. It’s an overwhelming response because people are so excited to see some of those iconic shows, but it’s the mix.
We want to make sure whatever channel we’re on or whatever audience we’re trying to reach, we have the right assets in order to connect with them. And video is a massive, massive part of that.
Cat: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I hadn’t even considered that. Obviously, if you do have a show that people … it’s kind of tried and true, like the Lion King, everyone’s going to jump to buy the tickets, but you need to make sure that the new shows that maybe don’t have that reputational heft of appeal, they sell out as well.
Wow. So fun though. I really am envious. It must just be so fun working with all of these different shows and different venues. Thank you for that.
Our final question that we’re asking all of our guests on the podcast is, if ATG had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter leaving only one behind, who would it be and why?
Chris: Yeah, I did listen to an episode and then I thought, if I do get asked this, it’s quite a challenge. So, you have lots of stakeholders, but a lot of the times, it’s the shows themselves and it’s the people who make the shows that are super, super important.
And one man who has always been supportive of theatre, has always been supportive of important wider issues and is just an absolute icon and legend is Ian McKellen. He’s done some amazing shows, not just in our venues, but obviously, venues across the country.
He also, when I was a student in Edinburgh, I went to a friend’s show and then he was collecting outside with buckets and I gave him five pounds and he kissed me on the cheek.
So, I think he’s an amazing guy. He’s very kind, very supportive. Yeah, such an amazing kind of supporter of the arts and theatre.
Cat: Yeah, that’s such a good answer. I’m so jealous that he gave you a kiss on the cheek. So cool that you’ve met him.
I think as well, one thing that you didn’t mention there about him is that he’s also a great crack. Like he’s really funny and like really mischievous. Anytime I see him, in something like he’s a fantastic actor, as you say, he’s a great patron for the arts and like protecting the value of theatre. Well, I love him too, and I’ve really loved this conversation.
So, thank you so much, Chris, for taking the time to talk to us today, it’s been so interesting and I’ve really enjoyed it. So, thank you.
[Music playing 00:25:17]
Chris: No, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Chris of ATG for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.
Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.
You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at Sprout Social or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt Stacey by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.
Thanks for listening and catch you in two weeks.
Cat: Welcome to Social Creatures, a podcast from Sprout Social. I’m Cat, and I’m here to explore some of my favorite success stories from the world of social media. This is a space for everyone and really, nearly anything goes.
But what makes an account successful or popular? Honestly, it’s hard to know, but that’s what we’re here to find out.
Throughout the series, we’ll talk with the brands behind the accounts you know, and some that you don’t. To explore the weird and wonderful ways that businesses, organizations, and individuals have achieved success on social media, all with tangible insights that you can apply to your own social strategies.
And we’ll be heeding the advice of Stacey, our social media agony aunt, who’s here to guide you through some of your trickiest digital dilemmas.
This week, I’m joined by Chris Welton, head of social and content at the Ambassadors’ Theatre Group or ATG. ATG is the driving force behind 32 regional theatres across the UK and many more around the world.
It operates venues, running ticketing platforms, and supports producers in putting on some of the best-selling shows that millions of audience members have enjoyed under their expertise and guardianship for over 30 years.
ATG are also customers of Sprout. And after catching up with Chris recently, I was fascinated with the work that they do and the multiple, multiple different avenues of work that Chris and his social team are working on.
So, I’m looking forward to exploring those areas today. If you would like to follow the valuable work of ATG and perhaps, inspire a trip to the theatre, you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook at ATGTICKETS or on Instagram, via @atg_tickets.
Chris, welcome to Social Creatures.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me.
Cat: I’m delighted that you’re here. I’m so excited to tell everyone or show everyone all of the wonderful work that you’ve been doing.
And so, right off the bat, 32 UK venues, that is a lot. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how your team’s structured, how you liaise with those venues, and maybe the different types of responsibilities that you have?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a big old job in a big organization, the biggest arts organization in the UK. And so, it is an incredible amount and we do have a very small team, but a very energetic team who we try and do as much as possible for everyone effectively, but fundamentally, our team is a central office support for our venues.
So, as much as it might look like from the outside, with the big ATG and we kind of manage all these venues and all these channels, all these venues, they weren’t always under ATG.
We love to give them a certain amount of autonomy, especially when it comes to social media, in terms of helping them hire great people, bring out their own kind of creativity and upskill them, giving them toolkits and guidance in terms of, okay, this is a big thing coming up, and this is ways you can talk about it, or maybe a more reactive piece.
The central role can be outrageously busy. These are incredible venues with brilliant people in them. And we are really the facilitators for those venues to do the best possible social media while we own the brand ATG, like you plugged at the beginning, thank you very much.
And we will obviously dedicate a lot of resources to sharing the news from our venues as well as the news from our producer partners. So, our CEO, Mark Connell always says, “It’s all about the content.” That’s basically referring to the shows.
If you really strip it down, ATG is an owner of buildings. Without the producers coming with their shows and recruiting the talent to be in those shows, we wouldn’t have a business.
So, really, it’s supporting those venues to effectively make the most of those producers and the social media part of it is us being connected to that producer, but also making sure when the producer talks to a venue, saying, “My show’s coming in three days, is there anything we could do to shift a few more tickets or this has happened,” that venue is very wordy and very creative and able to support that producer.
But everything is towards our producer partners and then the venues and giving them that expertise, I guess, and the best practice to be able to do it themselves.
Cat: And I just feel like stretching that across 32 venues, it must be enormous because selling tickets is one thing, but it’s kind of like if a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, if it plays on in a theatre and no one’s there to watch it, you have to sell those tickets.
But theatre goers are going to want to be inspired by the content that they’re seeing on social to go and actually purchase a ticket. So, it’s sort of a whole purchase funnel that you’re operating; from inspiration, capturing people’s interest and imagination and attention, right through to that actual purchase, which is interesting.
Do you enable the purchase of tickets via social or do you put them through to a further website?
Chris: No. So, we can push them through to ATG tickets, so that website’s been developed and finessed over years and years and years, long before me and operates incredibly well.
I think obviously, a massive part of our job is how can we help shift tickets. And we do that through paid advertising through Facebook Meta, and obviously, your Twitters and LinkedIns and the likes.
I think one of the main things I learned over the two and a bit years I’ve been at ATG is actually giving more credence to the fact these venues are kind of really central in these communities.
They’re not just physically sat there on the high street or slap bang in the middle of a city. They’re also the biggest employer of people in the arts, in the UK. And all those venues have a massive kind of, almost a responsibility.
It is entertainment, but it’s also culture. It’s representing that community through the staff. And some of the shows that come in, we use social definitely from kind of the direct response, get people to buy tickets piece.
But the venues talking as themselves on social media, they’re nesting their own tone of voice and making sure they’re talking like their community talks and making sure that they are reaching everyone because we don’t want it to be every venue follows an ATG tone of voice.
When Glasgow came back after COVID, the greeting was Glaswegian. I’m not going to try and say it, but that’s how they announced their return. And that’s perfect because that’s hopefully, got them to come back.
And so, social media does a lot of things for us, but I try and emphasize that piece at the awareness phase, but it’s kind of dripping more into that engagement piece between our venues, people, and then the customers as well.
Cat: That’s so great to hear. And I think that is one of the best parts of when people are successful in social media is when you build that community. And I totally agree as a huge theatre fan, I think that supporting your local theatre is really, really important and just also a good thing to do.
But you did touch on, I feel like the elephant in the room, which is the pandemic, which must have been bloody awful for you. And I wonder, how did you cope during that period of time when all of your venues shut down and how did your role and how did social media play a role in how you handled that pretty dark period?
Chris: Yeah, you could feel something coming, but I think the actual urgency of when decisions were made and announcements were made happened so quickly.
And I’ll always remember on March the 16th, 2020 being sat in an office with basically like a crisis comms team that we had quickly established with people across the business and watching the TV.
And Boris had already started saying, “Don’t do this, don’t do that.” But he hadn’t equivocally said close as a business and insurance and all those things. We had to wait until it was forced effectively.
So, on that night, I remember he said the word theatre in this broadcast on TV and looking around the room, it was obviously like, right okay, it’s happening. Obviously, it was a very dark time, but we had to understand that social media was at that point, pretty much our one communications platform out to our customers and our fans.
And for us, that initial period was like so many businesses that have reservations or future tickets. Obviously, the main thing for business is if all those got refunded, there would be no business. All these buildings would close.
So, there was a lot of very smart people in our organization and in SOLT in kind of the wider kind of theatre industry, finding the messaging and the structure for encouraging people to retain credit vouchers or encouraging people to support that local theatre.
This isn’t about so much ATG, it’s about your Edinburgh Playhouse, your Princess Theatre in Torquay, retain that ticket because we will be back and it’s going to be fantastic.
And a lot of shows rescheduled 3, 4, 5 times, but most of them eventually did happen. We did retain so many customers; we’re so good in retaining their tickets and retaining their credit vouchers that I might not be here chatting to you today if those customers didn’t trust us and believe that theatre’s important and that when it comes back, they want to be part of it.
So, yeah, it was a bit of a blurry two and a bit years, but a lot of customer care, that became a very clear piece that we needed to focus more attention on from a social media perspective.
So, making sure with no venues in and reduce teams everywhere, if people were asking us questions on social media, which of course, they were, that we had a set up through Sprout and through our FAQs that we created and save replies that we could give people responses and we could give them assurances and give them updates on their tickets.
So yeah, customer care obviously, became the name of the game for me for a year or so sitting in that lovely lockdown sun in my garden, just responding to customers, but we got through it. And I think as an organization, we really grew. I think we became more empathetic to our staff and hopefully, our customers and our producer partners.
And when we actually came back, incredibly emotional, incredibly powerful scenes across the country, it’s genuinely hard to think that we actually just went through all that and came out the other side somehow.
Cat: And thank God we did because yeah, it was definitely awful. And you did mention customer care and customer service became a lot more … would you say a lot more important as part of the social strategy?
And then also, I think this was quite universal. Social is the great leveler, everyone has got a space on social, but it became like the primary communication channel. So, that’s obviously where you’re distributing and broadcasting information and updates, but then also dealing with the inbound. So, that’s an awful lot of work to have been doing.
So, I wonder were you working with other departments in ATG or was this handled all with the social team?
Chris: Like I said, we were very fortunate that we got this crisis comms team set up and so, making sure we’re aligned with the ticketing team and our PR team and getting that messaging exactly right.
Because it was obviously, for the customers, but also, we have producer partners who are scared and worried. They’re not putting on shows. They’re also not making money. So, we had to make sure all those messages were aligned across every team.
So, there was a very big kind of, I guess, external internal kind of collaboration in terms of comms. It’s not just telling customers, it’s people being furloughed for another however much time.
So, people not having a job. It’s obviously, devastating if someone has a lot of money reserved in a show that they really, really want to see. But it’s also that usher isn’t going to work, because there is no job.
So, yeah, it was a lot of cross-team, definitely more than the first 30 days I had in my job in the office. I certainly didn’t meet all these teams straight off the bat, but when you are kind of … the company’s reduced and there’s a core team left behind, we got very close and we talked and managed a lot of things together.
So, the reduced team really brought us closer to other teams in terms of kind of knowledge gathering and sharing and stuff like that.
And then, yeah, the customer care side of things, it had to be better and it did get better. And I think any company — I used to work at Expedia and they used to do sessions where you could listen in to phone calls from customers as kind of training. So, you could be from any department and you could come along and listen.
And as much as I would love a world where customer care was perfect and there was no challenges at all, but there is something really insightful about actually seeing what customers are saying directly to your company.
Whether it’s the venue or directly to ATG or directly to our sister company, LOVEtheatre, and understand how maybe we are responding, how maybe we aren’t responding or is this a pattern? Is this new?
So, I still, first thing in the morning, we’ll look at our Sprout inbox and kind of get a sense of what’s going on across the country, what’s going on in ATG land. And I’m not saying it’s then like my whole day, but it’s something that’s certainly maintained off the back of a pandemic where customer care becomes paramount alongside supporting our producers and our stakeholders.
So, yeah, that’s been a piece that stayed for some positives as well.
[Music playing 00:13:16]
Cat: Now, here at Sprout Social, we know that social media is a wild and wonderful beast. It can surprise and delight, but it can also confuse and perplex, even the hardiest of social media users.
Who better to turn to for help than our social media expert, Stacey Wright, who’s here to answer your questions over a cup of tea and some biscuits, in the part of the show we like to call, Sound Advice.
Stacey: Right. I’ve got my cup of tea and I’ve got my letters, which can only mean it is time for us to take a break and cozy down together. This is the part of the podcast where I, your social media agony aunt, Stacey, guide you, our dear listeners, to your trickiest digital dilemmas.
Let me see what social media conundrums you’ve sent my way today.
“Dear Stacey, I’m working for a local county council and we have a small medium agency to help us deliver our social media content strategy.
“We look after Twitter ourselves, publishing updates and news releases as they happen, but needed extra support for the likes of Facebook and Instagram for an always on content stream and community engagement ideas.
“The agency are a great team, but I’m starting to feel like a Negative Nelly as I keep rejecting posts they suggest in monthly content plans as we have to be so very careful of all the comms that go out onto our channels.
“We can’t really join social media trends or awareness days like International Donut Day, without being responsible about people’s health and sugar intake. It can be a bit of a minefield.
“I feel a bit like we’re going around in circles and I end up spending more time editing the content upon suggestions to the point where I wonder whether it will better to bring this back in house, which defeats the object of hiring them in the first place. Look forward to hearing your social advice, Ron.”
Ron, I know how really hard this can be especially in public sector. You’re probably dealing with headcount freezes and trying to do five jobs in one.
If it’s really feeling that you’d rather have someone in-house due to a compliance or tone of voice issue, maybe consider a freelancer. They tend to be more flexible in terms of even working from your office from time to time. And that way, they can really understand the culture of your environment and learn from your wider team as to who the key stakeholders are in your strategy.
If you are tied into a contract or keen to shift the services from your existing agency, be honest, tell them that rather than complete the original content, maybe you want to focus on resharing and disseminating what already exists.
Sorry that you’re not going to be their most wacky fun client on social media, but everyone is always going to be asking questions about bins unfortunately. You can sign post the agency to government tool kits you receive with those preexisting assets and suggest the captions from the nationwide campaigns.
Alert them to community groups and trusted local services that they could be resharing posts from, and essentially, make your pages a hub for that local community, sharing the voices of others, rather than them feeling like they have that pressure to create the conversation themselves.
You can then get them to spend that extra time that they used on creating original content to focus on their analytics and the efficiencies of that community management. If you don’t want to reduce the hours they’re working or the budget that you’re spending, that is.
So, if you’d rather save the money, you obviously get some time back. Start to ask them what content pillars work best and on what channels, where should you be spending your time, and what are people saying about the services that we need to be aware of?
By shifting the focus to the results, this might also create a good business case for you to ask for a social media specialist in-house or broaden your team to allow you to work more on the social media yourself.
So, Ron, I hope these pointers help you to elect a more efficient working relationship with your agency. Until next time listeners, stay strong and stay social. And now, back to the interview.
Cat: I’m glad that there were some silver linings and it is great to hear that you’re in such lockstep with the other departments, because I do think it makes so much sense, but often, isn’t actualized in that way.
Whereas, I feel like social media does often have the pulse of what the company’s talking about and also, what your customers are saying, but like to be so in lockstep, I think can only be a benefit.
And I absolutely agree with you that people should listen to what customers are saying. I think that would be a good practice, no matter what industry you’re in really.
But moving away from the pandemic for a second, the UK celebrated Pride back in July and it was a special year for the event as it commemorated 50 years since the first parade took part in this country.
I saw the ATG like many other businesses took part in spotlighting your support of this movement. So, I was wondering if you could talk me through how you were able to engage with the event across all of your social channels.
Chris: Yeah, of course. We’re very fortunate to have a great Pride network within the organization. So, the brilliant work that they’re doing throughout the year, but it’s especially obviously, visible and prominent during Pride Month.
So, we got together with them and the creative learning team. So, creative learning effectively helped bring people into the theatre through education and things like tours and stuff like that.
So, very really important part of our business, but they, and the Pride network, they were developing some content and some pieces that they wanted to do around Pride. So, bringing to life stories of queer joy effectively, so how can we talk to our staff and make them feel comfortable to share their stories?
And yeah, it was a lovely month getting not only to talk to people myself and get their stories and capture some images and share it and see it as a piece where it could be seen as — I know a lot of people say they just change their logos for the month and then they change back and we want to continue to tell these stories on an ongoing basis.
It’s not just a hop on LinkedIn and it’s a business thing. And showing that we have LGBTQI+ employees, sharing on Facebook, sharing on Instagram, sharing it on Twitter, on our venue channels and on our ATG channels, and consumers as well. And we support these people and they’re fantastic, and they bring so much creativity and energy and are such an important part of our company.
And I love being able to share that kind of the stories directly from our staff and our people, and then just inspiring the venues and telling them Pride is coming up and we absolutely want you to get involved in any way you see fit.
We also want to make it a place where our venues celebrate some stuff that they’re doing that they’re really proud of. And sometimes, it might make other venues want to do it and be inspired. It might make them competitive and say, “Ooh, that venue’s done that. And it’s done really well, I think we should do it.”
Pride in moments like that throughout the year, great opportunities to hop on Teams, chat on of some stuff that we are doing or applaud something that they’ve done.
They’ve all got younger, creative people within their building who do embrace channels like TikTok. They are really good at reels and stuff like that. And Pride was just a great example of them bringing to life the events that they were having in their theatre or Pride events in their community that they were taking part of.
Cat: I was kind of wondering, you’ve spoken a couple of times about inspiring the venues to be creating their own content. You have mentioned TikTok and reels. It feels like this would be quite a nice fit for you, but I’m interested. How does video fit in with what you’re doing on social?
Chris: Video especially in that kind of venue engagement piece that I want the venue to capture themselves and their stories and what’s going on in that building and around, we do get an abundance of content from producers.
Every single producer will have video content, photos, posters, production shots, it’s great stuff. It’s stuff that will help sell tickets. Yeah, when it gets to the venue, kind of trying to tell a story about themselves, I think video and especially fun little 15 to 30 second videos where they might still be selling a show, there’s so many talented people in these venues as well. They can sing, they can do these things.
So, it is that video content where yeah, it’s selling the show, but it’s them showing off their personality and the kind of creativity in that building through video or it’s, in Wimbledon, they’ve got a cute dog and it runs around the marketing office. They’ve captured some lovely video content through that.
So yeah, video plays a really key role. I think that’s obviously something where we’re talking about best practice working with the producers and working with the venues to go, if we had a reel of this poster, it might perform far better for us than paid social.
Or your trailer for your new show is fantastic, but it’s two and a half minutes long and no one’s going to watch it. So, can you give us a 15-second piece that we can push across Instagram stories for example.
I think there’s a lot of good stuff out there for sure. A lot of great producers, a lot great venues, but it is still, we have to kind of keep thinking about it. People are so time-poor on social media, whizzing past in the newsfeed or skipping in the stories that we have to stand out.
And a lot of the time, you’ll stand out with that video as opposed to your poster that maybe someone’s already seen; how can we go deeper? There is some shows and some tours where you just whack up the poster and people lose their minds, but that’s because it’s an iconic show.
For example, you put up the image of the Lion King Poster and say it’s coming to Manchester and that’s all you need sometimes. It’s an overwhelming response because people are so excited to see some of those iconic shows, but it’s the mix.
We want to make sure whatever channel we’re on or whatever audience we’re trying to reach, we have the right assets in order to connect with them. And video is a massive, massive part of that.
Cat: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I hadn’t even considered that. Obviously, if you do have a show that people … it’s kind of tried and true, like the Lion King, everyone’s going to jump to buy the tickets, but you need to make sure that the new shows that maybe don’t have that reputational heft of appeal, they sell out as well.
Wow. So fun though. I really am envious. It must just be so fun working with all of these different shows and different venues. Thank you for that.
Our final question that we’re asking all of our guests on the podcast is, if ATG had to delete all of the accounts that it follows on Twitter leaving only one behind, who would it be and why?
Chris: Yeah, I did listen to an episode and then I thought, if I do get asked this, it’s quite a challenge. So, you have lots of stakeholders, but a lot of the times, it’s the shows themselves and it’s the people who make the shows that are super, super important.
And one man who has always been supportive of theatre, has always been supportive of important wider issues and is just an absolute icon and legend is Ian McKellen. He’s done some amazing shows, not just in our venues, but obviously, venues across the country.
He also, when I was a student in Edinburgh, I went to a friend’s show and then he was collecting outside with buckets and I gave him five pounds and he kissed me on the cheek.
So, I think he’s an amazing guy. He’s very kind, very supportive. Yeah, such an amazing kind of supporter of the arts and theatre.
Cat: Yeah, that’s such a good answer. I’m so jealous that he gave you a kiss on the cheek. So cool that you’ve met him.
I think as well, one thing that you didn’t mention there about him is that he’s also a great crack. Like he’s really funny and like really mischievous. Anytime I see him, in something like he’s a fantastic actor, as you say, he’s a great patron for the arts and like protecting the value of theatre. Well, I love him too, and I’ve really loved this conversation.
So, thank you so much, Chris, for taking the time to talk to us today, it’s been so interesting and I’ve really enjoyed it. So, thank you.
[Music playing 00:25:17]
Chris: No, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Cat: You’ve been listening to Social Creatures with me, Cat Anderson. Many thanks to Chris of ATG for joining me today and to Sprout Social for making this podcast possible.
Make sure you catch the rest of the series by subscribing on your favorite podcast platform, where you can tune into a new episode every two weeks.
You can continue the conversation around today’s episode by getting in touch on our social media at Sprout Social or by sending your social media quandaries to our agony aunt Stacey by emailing soundadvice@sproutsocial.com.
Thanks for listening and catch you in two weeks.
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