e-liz

how to be an improviser on Facebook

Pursuant to my earlier “your friends are not your fans” link, I thought I’d expand a little further on what this means - or should mean - for those of us in improv and other semi-professional (to professional) performance fields.

My advice on this is from the perspective of someone who a) helps companies learn how not to be obnoxious on Facebook for a living, and b) has 700ish Facebook friends, of whom probably at least 500 are performers of some type. I am certain I am guilty, at some point, of having done almost everything I’m about to instruct you NOT to do, but you can consider the below as both a set of suggestions and a set of personal promises, from this point forward.

Stop Using Your Friends As Your Direct Mail List
What should be one of the cool things about people (versus marketers) is that they don’t automatically do all of the obnoxious things that marketers do. Like blather irrelevant messages in your face all the time, send unsolicited junk mail and constantly “call” an audience “to action.” And yet… there’s something about Facebook that has nightmarishly awakened these behaviors in normal humans. These are not okay behaviors! Marketers actually know this now - it’s regular people who need to catch up and get with it.

Spamming your friends is not only poor life etiquette; it’s also one of the least effective ways to promote your work and your shows. Because you know who’s receiving all of these notifications? ME. THE BUSY IMPROVISER WITH 500 OTHER IMPROVISER FRIENDS. You are tagging, inviting and notifying all of the people who are being tagged, invited and notified by every other improviser they know. They are currently invited to 22 improv shows taking place in the next week, and they don’t even live in the same city where half of those shows are happening. They are not RSVPing to these invites; I’d be amazed if they’re even reading them. Everybody’s over-spammed and nobody cares.

Chill The F Out With ‘Events’
Okay, we need to talk specifically about Facebook events. Stop inviting people to them. I am absolutely serious. You need to stop, right now.

Here is how to handle it when you have a show coming up:

• Create a Facebook event, if you must. This is not necessary, but I get the word-of-mouth appeal of having people’s news feeds say “Gordy LaChance and 3 other friends are attending Let’s Go See a Dead Body” or whatever. So sure. Create one.
• Copy the link to the event, and paste it into a status update. Include it in a wall post on your group’s fan page, if you want. Do this a maximum of two times for the same event, or everyone will hate you. You can do it three times if your first post is more than a week in advance of the show. But be cool, okay?
• You can “invite” people who are literally also performing in that show on that night, in order to alert them that the event listing is on Facebook.
• You can also “invite” people who you have already mentioned the show to in person, if they have asked you to remind them.
• Do not invite all of the fans of your page.
• Do not invite all of the people in your friends group you labeled “Improv.”
• Do not invite all of your friends. Why are people even doing this? What has gotten into you? Seriously, what in the shit? How do you think this is okay? Is it because everybody else seems to be doing it, so it must be acceptable? Have some self-respect! Do you still forward email chain letters and virus warnings to your entire address book? No? Then stop doing this!

What a Fan Page Is For
Conveniently housing information about your group all in one place, including show times, photos, press links, videos, jokes, etc. People can Like your page if they feel they legitimately need to know when new information and content is available from you, immediately when it becomes available. Most of your friends actually do not feel this way, BTW.

What a Fan Page Is Not For
“Suggesting” to all of your friends that they become fans, so that you can accumulate as many fans as possible, so that you can have a big giant Soviet-sized direct mail list to send spam to all day long.

The Worst Thing About Facebook
Is that most of the people you’re spamming aren’t even actually your friends. With Dunbar’s number falling somewhere around 150, if you’re doing something on Facebook that prompts a notification for 300 people, you are actually soliciting people who are neither your fans nor your friends. Maybe they could have potentially become one or both of these things, but now they won’t because you wasted an opportunity to legitimately connect with them in favor of subjecting them to your relentless and old-timey lead acquisition routine. What are you, the phone company?

All of This Advice, in Two Sentences
Just because technology allows you to be obnoxious and lazy and ineffectual, doesn’t make your actions suddenly NOT obnoxious and lazy and ineffectual.

Be cool!