Looks like VO made a new friend! And we LOVE making new friends.
Opera and music blogger Purity McCall of se vuoi pace gave us a shout out and some really fantastic kudos on her blog.
“…The new media age is one of great challenges for traditional live entertainment. The challenges are likely to be even greater for a part of that entertainment world that has in many cases forgotten that it is entertainment and imagined itself something akin to medicine – ‘it might not taste or feel good but it will do you good so bend over and be an obedient patient there’s a dear!’. Consequently, I love it when an opera singer has gone that extra mile with their website, or hear of folks in the business working really hard to figure out how to make opera more accessible to people like me, or (most especially) opera companies that are really pushing the boundaries.
Given how often I end up in Seattle or San Francisco it’s irritating that I never seem to have time to get to Vancouver, as the opera company there has been on my radar for a while. I love what they have been doing to ease the stick out of the opera arse (to get Euro-trashy for a minute). And they seem to be really rising to the challenge of the new media/post-crunch era, speculating to accumulate recently with the appointment of a social media manager. I’ve seen too many companies who play around amateurishly with social media and then announce that it’s all a con and won’t work. Vancouver are bucking the trend and taking this seriously, creating posts to tackle the area professionally. And they’ve been consistently working at this for a couple of years now. They have blogs coming out of their ears, a fun and frequently updated Facebook page, and innovative ideas erupting faster than latex clad super-numeries in a Calixto Bieito production (speaking of people trying to shift that stick!). So PAMs (potential audience members) can stumble into their ambit from lots of different parts of cyberspace, and once there the impression is of a decidedly fun, newbie-friendly gang who love opera and want you to love it too. So congratulations Vancouver Opera for striding out on to the cutting edge – and reminding me that I really need to engineer a work trip to Vancouver one of the these days! And good luck VO social media manager Ling Chan – not that I think you need it judging by things so far.”
Aw. Shucks.
No Comments