Limelight Orchestra Ratings

Limelight magazine has gone all `My School’ and rated the six major symphony orchestras around Australia.  It did so using a panel of 15 judges who were provided with anonymous recordings of various pieces performed by the orchestras during 2012.

As you might expect, the smallest and least funded of the six orchestras (Tasmania) came in 6th, while the largest and most heavily funded orchestra (Sydney) came first.  However, that was where the relationship between Limelight rating and $ spent broke down, as this chart demonstrates:

Significant kudos accrues to the QSO and particularly the ASO for generating strong results from modest spending.

Orchestras and Social Media

Here’s where we currently stand on social media usage in Australian (+NZ) orchestras:

The Melbourne and Sydney symphonies may be duking it out over Twitter and facebook, but once YouTube views are taken into account it’s a massive win for Sydney.  One interesting facet of its social media presence is the relationship between facebook “likes” and facebook “talking about” – a mere 3%.  Analysts say that counting “likes” is a poor indicator of the success or failure of a social media strategy, as building this number is simply a function of how many iPads you want to give away (“Like us today and you could win one of umpteen iPads!”).  The “talking about” metric is presumably a better indicator of engagement, as opposed to the simple (albeit legally contested) clicking of the little thumbs up icon.

Another thing to consider about the Sydney symphony is the astoundingly bad results they get on the “Stupid Fight” indicator, which measures the stupidity and/or banality of the tweets offered up by fans and followers of a Twitter user, based on the incidence of various stupid abbreviations (ROFL, OMG), overuse of exclamation marks (ROFL!!!), inability to distinguish between upper and lower case, etc.  Here’s the results of a head to head battle between the MSO and the SSO:

Note that MSO fans score a highly respectable “smart as a whip” 20, while the SSO strays into “thick as two short planks” territory with an astounding 300.  Perhaps this is correlated with the number of facebook likes (OMG!! i won an ipad!!!). Mind you, trumping them all is the ASO, whose small number of Twitter followers have compiled a remarkable 315.