The English National Opera's site for their production of Carmen is all 'Web 2.0' – they've made use of 'behind the scenes' video interviews and blog posts and there's also a Flickr group and Facebook profile. It's great to see this kind of experimentation, especially as it helps us all find out if there's an audience for this type of content and level of engagement, how sustainable that engagement is and on which platforms it works best. It also helps us learn how organisations react to this kind of direct engagement with their audiences – the comments on this post show that sometimes this can be a difficult relationship.
Interesource, the company who made the site said:
Carmen also features tagging, user comments and some beautifully rich video and audio that will turn the production inside out to provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes back story. We are also integrating with several external services such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook that provide users with additional ways of participating. We’re going to bring the production to life online using ‘people media’ throughout the Social Web.
As a Friend of the ENO, I've just arrived home after attending the dress rehearsal for this new production. I'm glad the publicity and background info are ground-breaking. Unfortunately so are the production and design, which appear to have set out to eliminate as far as possible any connection with Spain, with the tragic drama the opera is supposed to tell, with theatrical tension, and indeed with anything that makes sense and avoids banality. At least the audience only laughed inappropriately once.
Thanks for the comment, but I suspect it might be more useful if you said the same thing over on the ENO site.