…so you’re cup-sizes that cappucino is served in now?

Many thanks for stopping here and explaining. I wont add to the suggestions already made. I’m sure you would most like to know this is behind you so you can get on with all that organising! Good Luck to you and also all the people who volunteer. Hopefully many more of us are now subscribed to your blog.

http://www.artsfest365.wordpress.com/

So, not that we need to make a defence for ourselves, but for the record we thought you might like some OFFICIAL ArtsFest views on the subject and an official response to your comments:

If we were to set up this kind of account we wouldn’t have automatically sought advice from the existing local community simply because it wouldn’t have even occurred to us that there was any required ‘etiquette’. I’d say for us the approach would have been one of common sense and our instinct would be to approach only relevant people and therefore contribute to real growth and sustainability within Birmingham’s arts community (after all sustainability is what we shed blood, sweat and tears for in the office so why would we throw all of that out the window and jeopardise the credibility of the festival by spamming?!).

In any case, as I said before we don’t have time to monitor this effectively and so don’t have the capacity to sustain a twitter account – and to be honest to come in this morning to all these enlightening (and however well intended messages) just reiterate this decision for us. I know it might sound defeatist but to put it in perspective for everyone there are about 50 artists that could have been confirmed in the time it has taken us to read these comments and respond today! Yes, social networking is great, but not if it stops us actually organising the festival!
For us the priority at this stage has to be actually organising the festival and that isn’t going to happen on its own (I can’t begin to stress how much work we have to do between the 3 of us (and our life saving volunteers). So although it is with great regret that we’re not taking part in twitter JUST YET and we do understand that there is massive potential for partnership development and word spreading to be done by ArtsFest through Twitter – I hope you appreciate that we wouldn’t want to take part half heartedly! Also, I hope that this ‘storm in a teacup’ shows why we the team have to be able to manage web promotion/networking and cannot let volunteers take something like Twitter upon themselves without us monitoring content being put out there as ‘officially ArtsFest’.

On another note as a family friendly festival we would certainly want to have some control over the type of people we were ‘friends’ with (or whatever the twitter equivalent is). There is no way in this world that we would want to encourage unsolicited approaches to our ArtsFest supporters (again I’m only guessing that this is a possible consequence of making friends with the whole world). I certainly don’t agree that we shouldn’t be communicating with people from other countries – I think we all agree that we should be shouting from the rooftops about the greatness of Birmingham (or else what are we in this for?).

I have no idea what it’s like to be spammed by twitter so I can only apologise to those of you who were offended. So, final thoughts… maybe we should hold this idea until post September and instigate twitter for 2009 … one step at a time for 2008… check out our blog http://www.artsfest365.wordpress.com which will be where you can be first to find out announcements of this years programme before the publicity brochure is available!!!

And final final thoughts … we really are sorry to anybody who found themselves personally insulted through an attempt to make constructive criticism about the ‘ArtsFest’ Twitter yesterday. These comments were in no way representative of the views of the ArtsFest team! We do think Aidan was only trying to help but shouldn’t have taken this upon himself without running it by us first or expressing any personal views on behalf of ArtsFest.

Now, maybe its time to forget about all of this. We have deleted the Twitter page for the time being.

Thanks for your time

Kate & Emily

(Oh and great ideas Stef – we do appreciate them and will be looking into this with our web host and trying our best to find a way to do some of these – but please remember –500 artists, 26 venues, 6 stages and just 3 staff … we do try and be wonder woman but have to sleep sometime!)

How about:

* Sending twitter messages for programme changes
* Make your own programme? Tick a box next to each event and subscribe to those events that you want to go to in advance. Then get twitter updates just before they are happening so you can walk there
* Organise flashmobs. Eg. “Flashmob at the IKON now and wait for further instructions”
* Have a “question and answer” service where you can send a message to them via twitter like “Where was the breakdancing happening today again?” and get “Breakdancing happening in Centenary Square at 7.30pm today” back
* Umm – loads more I’m sure…

In light of this, I would be so interested to see what Aidan has to say now. He’s gone awfully quiet, you know.

I wouldn’t overstate how important my tweet was and how much I cared about the whole thing at the time. I like your burst ketchup packet analogy – something minor happened that I found a bit icky, I made a verbal roll of the eyes and, but for this, I’d have moved on.

So let’s try and turn this into a positive – http://www.createdinbirmingham.com/2008/07/06/artsfest-need-volunteers/ There, that’ll pass the message to 1000+ mainly local, arts-interested folk and perhaps some good will come of this discussion.