Walnut Street Theater

Ralph Weeks sits at a cluttered desk on the third floor of America’s oldest theater, The Walnut Street Theater, stuffing envelopes and printing brochures. This is just a normal day for the theater’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations, whose job has certainly changed in the last few years.

“We’re becoming a search-driven society,” said Weeks. “People have to look for things rather than turning the page of a newspaper. So it becomes much harder to people to find out or discover new things.”

While the 203-year-old theater is active on social media, with a Facebook page and Twitter account, Weeks stresses that he does not rely on those ways of communication.

“We make sure to focus on things that work rather than things that are fun,” he said. “An email blast works for us because it reaches the demographic of the theater-goer more effectively than Twitter does. Twitter would probably reach a younger clientele and the normal ticket buyer in any theater in town is probably a little older. So you want to communicate in the way that they communicate, not in the way that you communicate.”