Hello, who are you?
That’s a difficult question to begin with! Do I consist of my name and function? Or do you want to know what my ‘big purpose’ in life is? I think I’ll just start with the basics. My name is Saskia Lammers and I work in marketing at Theaters Tilburg. Every year we host about 400 theater shows and concerts, which are attended by 150.000 visitors a year. As I love the work I do and can’t get enough of it, I’m also a board member at TAC, a cultural breeding ground for starting cultural entrepreneurs and artists.


So what’s keeping you busy lately?
Everyday I try to think about how we can trigger, inspire and involve our theatre guests. As I’m a cultural addict, I’d love to see the virus spreading across the region. Today I’m working on the concept and planning for the next theater season, which is always quite exciting to do!

How would you rate yourself as a Social Media Specialist, on a scale of 1 to 10?
I’m a generalist, so I will never attain a high score on any specialization… and certainly not in this one. But I do love innovation, new media, social media, so I’m definitely no specialist but a ‘trialist’.

How do you make use of social media / technical innovation for your work, or towards your customers? What’s the most important reason for doing so?
With social media we are still in phase one, I guess. We currently use hyves to interact with the younger target group, our director has a blog both for our guests and for the theatre community and I use Twitter to interact with guests and to collect and spread theatre news.
Last week we experimented with ‘cocreation’. We asked guests to help our programmer select the play offer. More than 200 guests reacted via Twitter, website and email. We now try to book at least the top five of this list! But there is still a lot to learn for us in the social media field.

When looking at one of the three subjects of this blog (social media, business models
/ strategies and technical innovation for cultural organizations), can you name an interesting development at the moment?
I’ve been cracking my brains for at least a quarter. Does that say enough? To be honest, I’m not a big fan of success stories, as I don’t believe in THE solution for problems.

And is there an aspects of these subjects shouldn’t we focus on anymore?
Please do exactly what you feel to! That’s what makes things really inspiring. People who speak full of passion of their own fascination. Even a blog of a poststamp collector can then be exciting!

What do you think is going to happen this year, what kind of developments can we expect?
In the next year, I think several social media projects will be starting on a national level. So maybe social media will help the cultural field to work together, finally!