Tweeting the Lullaby of Broadway

A couple of weeks ago we blogged about how the Royal Opera House in London invited its fans to collectively create an opera using Twitter.  Now Broadway is getting into the Web 2.0 spirit, with the production of the musical Next to Normal.

The producers didn't just promote the show using Twitter, which is not newsworthy in itself, but actually tweeted the script (PDF) to its followers in order to "go viral" and gather a head of steam (and sell a whole lot of tickets) ahead of the live performance.

Directed by the director of the enormously successful production Rent, Next to Normal is a musical about a suburban family whose mother is afflicted with bipolar disorder. It opened on Broadway in April but experienced anemic ticket sales (72 percent of the seats were filled, according to a blog post by FastCompany), despite high critical praise.

Meanwhile, the Twitter campaign began to take off and had 30,000 followers in late May, six weeks after the production opened. Lines from cast members and links to songs were tweeted at regular intervals, concluding on June 7.

According to the FastCompany post: "By then, @N2NBroadway had 145,000 followers. The show's ticket sales saw a huge spike, and the cast was performing to 99% capacity (which admittedly had a lot to do with the show's 11 Tony nominations, but the show's growing amount of followers doesn't lie)."

But anyone else who wants to use Twitter for a creative marketing campaign better strike while the iron's hot, as a cluttered "tweetosphere" eventually will drown out all but a few standouts once it's no longer such a novel thing.

Photograph courtesy of Aimee Tyrrell, via Wikipedia.