This is being written over 10 years after several theatre friends based in the UK and the USA Matt Boothman, Travis Bedard, ‘Old Bear’ and yours truly had been chatting for about a week on a site called Utterli – a kind of mini-podcasting application at the time. We’d turned our attention to the theatre’s use of social media for reviewing and marketing, as well as the way audiences might continue and even extend that time-honoured and very sociable activity, the after-show chat. What eventuated was a wide-ranging discussion ‘in our own voices’ then a novelty and before the podcasting era truly hit.
A bit later I posted my own take-away and thoughts on how social media – then so new to so many of us ‘early adopters’ – might be put to work to stimulate interest in our other great passion, the theatre. We’ve come a long way since in our thinking and usage of social media. Facebook was still relatively new and in Australia, at least, Twitter was starting to get some traction after those first couple of years of being almost wholly northern-hemispherically focussed. Since 2009, I’ve worked my way through several iterations and kinds of focus in my first blog: Groundling, but I still keep my internet handle ‘Dramagirl.’
Here’s what I thought about theatre’s use of social media as we knew it back in January, 2009.
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