What do you get when you mix dance, dreams, a relational database, some web pages, good design and not a lot of money? I got an answer to that question recently at an event where a new website was unveiled. It shows how simple and well done use of technology can be applied to grow audiences and build support for dance companies and dance studios in my fair city of Chicago. It’s a great example of the impact of the Internet on audience engagement.

In the fall of 2005 SeeChicagoDance.com was launched to bring together dance audiences with dance performance companies. By 2007 it was discovered that about 60% of dance audiences are also interested in taking dance classes. So a website called TakeChicagoDance.com is now building on the momentum created by that first website. The synergies created are delivering the kind of growth that we business people yearn for. Website visitors and subscribers are starting to double in shorter and shorter periods of time.

Artists quickly learn how to get a lot done with small amounts of money and they learn where to use the little money they have to generate the best results. They have to be agile. They don’t have the funding to engage in lengthy studies of the obvious and repeated failed attempts to build overly complex solutions to simple problems.

These two websites are a great case study in “co-opetition”; they are being promoted by more than 200 different dance companies who otherwise view each other as competitors. Yet the companies are working together to load and constantly keep updating information about their individual performance schedules, class offerings, teacher and dancer biographies, and ticket prices. The collective result is that all of them look cooler and more interesting in the eyes of the public and each of them is easier to find by people who want to see their performances or take their classes.

Individually, each company struggles to promote themselves as best they can with the limited funds they have available. But collectively, they channel their promotion efforts through a pair of targeted websites and what happens is they all benefit from growing the size of the dance viewing and class taking audience.

This joint effort also demonstrates that amazing quality about information – that information exponentially increases in value as you combine it with other related information and make it easier and easier for people to search the resulting database for answers to important questions. This can only be done on the Internet; if you try to do it in print publications you have to keep printing and distributing all the information every time it changes and as the database grows you wind up with big, bulky phonebooks of data that become hard to even look at, let alone actually use.

If small and medium businesses in our economy have the best potential to grow and create jobs in the coming years, is there something they can learn from the example of these dance companies? Is it possible to grow whole new industries and the businesses in them by taking an approach like these dance companies in Chicago are taking to grow their audience?

I’ve participated in groups where we business folks teach artists how to run their organizations like businesses. We taught them stuff like how to do planning and budgeting and project management - the things that bring order and efficiency to (supposedly) disorganized artists.

But I’m beginning to think it should be the other way around. Artists need

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