The Cloud

Moving your organization's data to a cloud server might be a good idea at this time.  There are several advantages to working off of a cloud server and a few drawbacks. Some advantages to going to cloud computing:

Accessibility is generally improved through cloud storage.  You can access data from anywhere that you have internet access.

Security on cloud storage services is up to the standard of where ever you have your cloud.  Google and Amazon have some of the best experts on digital security in the world for instance and using a cloud operated by them gives you a greater degree of safety for your data.

The Capacity of cloud storage is very flexible and is expandable with comparative ease.  The fact that cloud storage servers will never need to be upgraded or replaced does save you capital expenses as well as man hours.

The downside:

You don't own it and you have to play by someone else's rules.  If you are using a smaller company, please, make sure to check out their backup plans, security measures, and records regarding downtime and maintenance schedules.

It may be hard to use cloud servers with certain types of databases or other programs and as such may present an integration issue (ticketing systems, development programs, etc).  Make sure you have a plan to get the information from point A to point B if necessary.

In event that you don't have access to the internet you are completely cut off unless you back up to a physical source onsite.  It can be distressing for obvious reasons if your internet service goes sideways and you end up with multiple idle employees until it is restored.

Are you really my friend? The Facebook Portrait Project

I went to elementary school with her- confirm request. He is the son of my mom’s friend from work- confirm request. She’s a friend of a friend that also likes Amos Lee, Portland, Maine and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, but we’ve never actually met- confirm request. The word “friend” is now synonymous with Facebook and its meaning has been redefined to incorporate relationships formed as loosely as in the situations above. Regardless of how intimate your real world relationships are with your newest virtual “friends,” they receive the same amount of information and become privy to the innermost private details of your life through your Facebook activity, statuses and photos.

Yes, you can “poke” others on Facebook, but Maine photographer Tanja Alexia Hollander, has discovered through her own Facebook friendship odyssey that Facebook cannot replace human interactions

Social media has become a fundamental part of our society in the 21st century. Its convenience allows us to instantaneously communicate and share a level of intimacy with those we know well and many we don’t know at all. Despite its presence in our lives today, social networks cannot replicate human interaction. It is arguable, however, that the online environments we’ve created and the resulting reduction of human interaction have an impact on our relationships.

Since the beginning of 2011, Hollander has embarked on a journey to meet (some for the first time) and photograph all 626 of her Facebook friends, traveling across the state, country and world to reach them in their most intimate and private space: their home. Hollander’s photographic and personal journey grew into the project and upcoming exhibit “Are you really my friend? The Facebook portrait project.”

More than just an exploration of virtual social networks and humans’ dual existence in a cyber space and physical, real world space, Hollander’s project and exhibition explores the evolution and modern-day role of formal portraiture, the meaning of home and the future of human interactions and American culture in an increasingly virtual world.

My project is an exploration of friendships, the effects of social networks and the intimate places we call home. Facebook seemed an ideal forum for this exploration. Though we are in the initial stages of understanding the effects of social networking on American culture and photography there is a pervasive feeling that it is changing our interactions with each other and building a false sense of community.

But do not misinterpret Hollander’s project or exhibition- she is neither defaming Facebook nor purging herself of it upon completion of the project. Quite the contrary, actually. As a result of visiting with and photographing each of her friends, Hollander discovered they do in fact pay close attention to her life online and wanted to follow up about what they saw or read. To Hollander, this gave greater merit and value to the relationships she maintains via Facebook and lessened the gap she was questioned between our simultaneous existence in cyber space and the real world.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Hollander before the holidays as she approached the final stages of preparing for the exhibition. Since her project has received wide coverage and media attention, I wanted to discuss Hollander’s relationship with social media as co-founder of the self-serving, fine arts photography studio, the Bakery Photographic Collective in Westbrook, Maine. As a manager and artist, Hollander is in the unique position of successfully managing the studio and doing so with a great sensitivity and passion for the arts.

Hollander is admittedly still overwhelmed by the possibilities, perks and opportunities of blogging and social media, though she now considers herself a Facebook expert (and if you have been following Hollander, the project's Facebook page and photographs, you would most definitely agree).

I asked Hollander specifically about the use of Facebook as both an artist and co-manager of the Bakery Photographic Collective

Now I’m obsessed with it. I’m learning as I go. It has been a process of realization of the perks Facebook offers. It has created an audience. Facebook is really important for an artist promoting their own work. In this down economy, artists can’t rely on galleries for sales- that model is shifting.

Hollander plans to turn her Facebook love loose on the Bakery Photographic Collective’s page once preparations for her February exhibit are complete. For Hollander, Facebook has helped her maintain 626 “friendships,” locate each person geographically and most impressively, create a virtual exhibit to complement her real world exhibit at the museum, as each of her photographed friends were asked to upload their portrait as their Profile Picture.

What started out as a personal documentary on friendship and environmental portraiture has turned into an exploration of American culture, relationships, generosity & compassion, family structure, community building, storytelling, meal sharing, our relationship to technology & travel in the 21st century, social networking, memory, and the history of the portrait.

The possibilities of Web 2.0 for artists as creators and managers promoting their work are endless- Hollander says

I am able to post work as I make it, have a dialogue with a global audience, and market - in one location.

Hollander's exhibit opens February 4th at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

(Photo Credit: Tanja Alexia Hollander)

All things 2.0: Web, Museum and Photo

Before I introduce Maine artist Tanja Hollander in a soon-to-be-published post, take a look at these persuasive and content-rich lectures addressing certain topics of Hollander's project Are You Really My Friend?: the impact, opportunities and shortcomings of web 2.0 for artists, museums, cultural institutions and art venues. Not sure what exactly Web 2.0 is or how museums can best use it? Start here, with Nina Simon’s informative and practical explanation of what it is, what it is not and how the museum exhibition can be used as platform for user generated content. Additionally,  the video allows viewers like you to leave voice comments following the presentation.

I believe that museums have the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing. I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions.

If you are well-versed and comfortable with Web 2.0, Andy Adam’s lecture explores the many possibilities for photographers through Photo 2.0 and the role of Photo 2.0 in redefining photography as a medium.

Photo 2.0 – Online Photographic Thinking / SPE Conference at Light Work from Light Work on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for next week's blog featuring Hollander and her upcoming exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine which celebrates, challenges and responds to the future of a Web 2.0 society.

Google+

Google+, the search engine giant’s new social networking site with 20 million users, has been getting a lot of press lately. There’s already some good advice out there for art nonprofits from the usual suspects (Devon Smith, Heather Mansfield). And artists are already exploring this new way of sharing their music and visual pieces. With technology this new, there is always a lot of experimentation by the early adopters, speculation by the commentators, and caution from the silent majority. But even at this early point in time, when the fate of Google+ is up in the air, there is one thing that I am certain of: that is that Google + represents a revolution in the integration of digital activity and the way we interact with the world around us. In this article, we’ll talk about what sets Google + apart, how it is integrated with other Google products, and what implications it holds for business in general and the arts in particular.

What is Google+?

Check out the Google+ intro video if you haven’t already:

There’s a lot of chatter in the blogosphere right now around the idea that Google+ is the ultimate content-sharing platform. The reasons given for this range from enhanced privacy controls making people more comfortable with sharing to the Sparks feature which allows users to find and share content without leaving the platform.

• Circles

One of the biggest things separating Google+ from the rest of the social media pack is its Circles. Instead of all of your contacts either being a friend/follower or not being one, they can be put into different Circles- friends, family, colleagues, etc. Then- and this is the kicker- you can choose who will view which posts. No more work colleagues or family members seeing your expletive-filled posts or pictures from that party.

Sure, Facebook has groups. But in a Facebook group, users choose to join the group--on Google+, you choose the names of your circles and assign who is in them. In Facebook groups, you can post on the group’s wall (which involves first going to the group page), but anyone who visits the page can see what you posted. With Google+, you can choose to share content only with certain circles, adding an extra layer of privacy.

• Enhanced Privacy Controls

Chris Brogan covers this pretty well in this short video. Privacy controls are more transparent and easy to find compared to Facebook.

• Sparks

Google is still primarily a search engine, so it’s no coincidence that they have an integrated search feature in the network. “Sparks” allows you to enter a topic you’re interested in (say, nonprofits), and every time you login, you can click that word to find many articles on the topic that you can then share with as many or as few Circles as you like.

• +1 and Search Engine Optimization integration

Even if you haven’t made a Google+ account yet, you’ve probably seen the little “+1” icons around the Web. It’s Google’s version of a “like” button. Unlike Facebook’s button, whose data Google doesn’t have access to, a +1 actually impacts search rankings. So, the more +1s a website, article, or video has, the higher it appears in searches, and the more likely people will find it and share it, etc.

If you want to learn more about the nuts and bolts, check out Mashable’s guide to G+.

While all these features may pave the way for Google+ to become the content capital of the interwebs, right now, companies, organizations and brands can’t directly participate in this content-sharing utopia.

Currently, the only way for brands to get their content onto G+ is through “real people’s” accounts- employees, constituents, secret admirers, etc. This makes it even more important that your organization has something interesting to say and compelling to share.

Integration

Imagine a world where the offers you receive are based on data not only from your activities, but your friends’ activities . . . where place-based businesses target customers not only by email and postal mail within certain zip codes, but by what street you are walking down, or which restaurant your friends have gathered at . . . This world, where social networking merges with mobile-based services and retail, is closer than ever to being a reality with Google+.

Already, Google Offers has been launched in New York and San Francisco, beaming coupons to customers based on their location and preferences. According to Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s VP of Commerce, Google Offers and Google Wallet (the company’s payment system) will be integrated into G+ as well as other Google properties such as Maps.

Edd Dumbill at O’Reilly Radar is calling this integration of social networks with other web-based applications a “social backbone” to our entire web experience, as opposed to the “walled garden” of existing social networks.

. . . social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web it today . . . Search removed the need to remember domain names and URLs . . . . The social backbone will relieve our need to manage email addresses and save us laborious ‘friending’ and permission granting activity . . .

All this integration, says Dumbill, will help computers better serve users.

Where does this leave business?

So the world may be changing. How should you prepare for that? Below are some tips from some smart guys at Social Media Explorer.

Jason Falls “Stay the course with what you’re doing. Wait for the brand-permissions and guidelines to come from Google on the Plus platform. Experiment with it for yourself to know how it works and how non-linear you have to be thinking to optimize the use of Circles.”

Mark Ivey Five questions to ask for starters, and to make sure you’re positioned for the G+ world:

• Are you in the game? Do you have a presence across paid (search, broadcast, etc), earned (events) and owned (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and now G+) media? These are your marketing beachheads, and you’ll need to work across the board to make sure you’re connecting with customers with your messages.
• Do you have a clear content marketing strategy? If so, you’re already using listening tools and engaging in related conversations. Adjust your strategy for G+-and stick to it. If not, better get one in order fast-I just met with two companies last week, neither had a content strategy, both are scrambling in catch-up mode.
• Is your content relevant? If you’re unclear on the role and importance of relevant content, read Michael Brito’s nice analysis piece on SME. Conduct a content audit, compare it to industry conversations, and judge for yourself. Is your content hitting the target? Are you involved and influencing industry conversations? What is your share of voice around key topics?
• Do you have a content engine and systematic publishing process? Then you should have apublishing model and be systematically chunking out content, carefully targeted to your key audiences. Run it like a publisher, with clear editorial direction, calendars, and hire editors to help you drive it- more tips here
• Do you have control over your destiny? Putting all of your eggs into one basket you don’t control is stupid. Why put all your resources into building Facebook Pages when you don’t own that real estate (No one knows how G+ will affect FB yet but the risk is obvious)? The same is true of Google+-it’s a marketing outpost, not your home base. Better to build your own blogs, communities and following, and diversify your investments across several platforms, along with following a carefully crafted plan. Build a defensible program that can weather any storm, since no one knows how this will play out (who would predict G+’s amazing launch?)

This is a great opportunity to step back, take a deep breath and assess your overall strategy and social media program. There’s no reason to panic.

Where does this leave the arts?

Ah- now THAT’S the interesting question, and it’s one our industry will probably be talking about for, oh, the next year or so. With G+’s emphasis on content and people (not brands), two conclusions jump out:

- Producing art that resonates with our audiences is vital, and

- People are our most valuable asset.

To be sure, these aren’t new ideas. What’s new, though, is that what our audience tells each other about our work now has as much or more digital presence than what we tell our audience about our work. The level of content-sharing that Google+ enables means that it is becoming easier for friends to share opinions about articles, art, politics, entertainment, etc at any time. Additionally, the more something is shared, the higher its search ranking. So getting people to talk about art online is more important than ever. Do you ask your audience what they think of your art? Do you encourage them to talk to their friends about it online, continuing the conversation long after they’ve left the building? Do you reward your super-fans who already post about your organization to their social networks? What about tying in the art you present or produce with trending topics?

A new social layer to the web means it’s all about giving ‘em something to talk about.

More cool articles on G+: The Social Layer: Six Thoughts On Where Google Plus Is Going Three Key Things Google Is Doing While We Focus on Google+ What the Circles Illustrate About Influence List of important updates coming soon in Google Plus

Developing Jazz and Classical Audiences with Technology

Technology in the Arts is pleased to present our new white paper Online Audience Engagement: Strategies for Developing Jazz and Classical Audiences, spearheaded by writer Tara George.

Many of you may remember critic Terry Teachout’s controversial Wall Street Journal article that asked if jazz could “be saved?” Teachout’s article, in response to the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, prompted a variety of reactions across the field. Despite much of the hostility directed at Teachout, his question and concerns seemed to be valid and worth exploring, especially since the survey indicatedthat audiences (particularly for jazz, classical and opera music) were shrinking and growing older at an alarming rate. An interesting twist came in 2010 with the release of the NEA’s Audience 2.0 survey. A key finding in this survey was that Americans who participate in the arts through technology and electronic media (television, Internet, handheld devices) were three times more likely to attend a live arts event. Much like Teachout’s initial article, this survey also prompted a round of discussion about correlation and causation. Despite the controversy and debate, it is undeniable that technology is one of the most promising tools that organizations can use to build a younger fan base.

This white paper explores the role that digital marketing is now playing in building audiences in the jazz and classical music realm. This report also highlights the work of several artists and organizations at the forefront of reaching and developing new audiences online. It’s important to note, however, that most of the organizations and artists here would classify their work and the music they present as a hybrid of multiple genres. Though that distinction falls outside the scope of this report, it’s an important trend to take note of that can have a direct impact on digital marketing. Finally, we have provided a concise 4-step guide as an example of how many organizations actually implement best practices.

Organizations Highlighted:

We hope that you find each case study in this report to be encouraging and inspiring! Here were a few of the organizations we featured:

• Mobtown Modern: was founded by Brian Sacawa in 2008. This organization fills a void in Baltimore’s vibrant music scene and serves as a catalyst for musical innovation and the creation and presentation of the new music of our time.
• New Amsterdam Records and New Amsterdam Presents: New Amsterdam Records is the for-profit record label subsidiary of New Amsterdam Presents, a presenting and artists’ service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by composers and performers whose work grows from the fertile ground between genres.
• Revive Music Group: serves as New York’s leader in conceptual and never-before-experienced live music productions—for a jazz and hip-hop celebration giving a unique aural exhibition of the undercurrents connecting the genres and ultimately fans of multiple generations.
• Search and Restore: is a New York-based organization dedicated to uniting and developing the audience for new jazz music.

Download this report today!

And please share with colleagues by clicking the "ShareThis" icon below.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 3

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy? This is part 3 of our 3-part series on social media analytics tools. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

The last part of our series concerns making management decisions based on data. Once you have the data, what do you do with it? As we come up with more sophisticated methods to track social media sentiment and reach, it becomes possible to track more accurately how people are responding to social media. This is especially important because social media can be a valuable part of your market research. It is like a 24-hour focus group, answering many of the questions you may have about your audience as well as the questions you didn’t think to ask.

As mentioned in Part 2, there are a variety of questions that you may have about your audience and a variety of tools that track different measures of success. Some tools are narrowly focused on one measure, while others give you a conglomeration of these measures. Some examples of the measurements of success include:

• Sentiment: Are social media users referring to my organization positively, negatively, or neutrally?
• Conversions: How many and which fans are buying online (or offline)?
• Spikes in activity or “buzz”: How are social media users responding online to campaigns?
• Impact: How many people is the message reaching and how much influence does the organization have? How many people are sharing posts?

When thinking about measurement tools and management decisions, the first question is often, when is it worth it to pay for analytic tools? As technology evolves to be able to track more specific and more valuable information, more paid analytics tools have come on to the market.  There are two basic instances where it’s worth it:

1) when you have a large customer base

2) when you need enterprise-level social media analytics

Firstly, if you have a large customer base or a large social media base (no hard and fast rule, but larger than 100,000) and you are literally having trouble monitoring comments on your brand, you need a tool that takes more of a summary view. Secondly, most paid tools are enterprise-level tools--tools that more than one person can manage or assign tasks to others and have other special features. If you feel you need this type of functionality, then paying for an analytics may be worth it.

Besides those two factors, a company should also consider the elusive “Holy Grail of Social Media,” return on investment, or ROI. Many organizations have found a “chicken and the egg” scenario of needing time and resources to show results (often, revenue), but needing results to convince upper management to spare the time and resources to devote to social media. This situation can be difficult; you might try proposing a pilot program or experiment with a cheap or free tool before proposing a larger investment.

One institution that has made a practice of using data to make decisions in social media (as well as investing in technology—check out their web and new media strategy) is the Smithsonian, under the guidance of tech guru Nancy Proctor. As one employee put it “why would you change anything without metrics and feedback?”

Once a company has the analytics tools in place it’s easy to observe your numbers of fans, interactions, and gauge the quality of those interactions. What’s more difficult is translating your observations into actionable decisions.

A simple example is that of David Horgan’s, eMarketing Specialist for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. David had experimented with linking ads to their Facebook page and their homepage. “We found that the ads that direct people to our Facebook page (rather than to our homepage) were about 3x more effective on a cost per click basis.” Management Decision: Direct more ads to the Facebook page than the homepage.

Another example is the blogathon on the Smithsonian Collections Blog that Rachael Cristine Woody worked on for American Archives Month. According to Rachel:

Until that time we had almost solely focused on collections content.  In October we shifted to also cover our profession and offer a more behind-the-scenes look at what we do/deal with, every day.  These posts became the most popular posts we’ve published so far, numbering in the thousands for direct hits, and to this day still receive at least 100 hits a week.  It was at that time that I think the blog truly found its most invested and engaged audience, and it helped to call attention to us that we should be covering more on our profession.  Management Decision: In addition to giving the collections exposure, engage and influence the professional community by providing transparency, advice, and support.

The National Museum of American History combined traditional survey techniques with data from analytics tools (Google Analytics and WebTrends data, click metrics from HootSuite, etc.), comparing the results of four closely-related surveys on each of four major communication channels (their blog, email newsletter, Facebook page, and Twitter feed). Although more complex, the results allowed Dana Allen-Greil to make decisions regarding how the Smithsonian communicated with patrons:

At the National Museum of American History, we’ve long had a hunch that our Twitter feed should focus on conversational and educational content, rather than marketing in-person events. If our followers aren’t local, do they really want to hear about events they can’t come too? Click metrics from HootSuite plus data from a survey of our Twitter followers gave us solid footing to make the case against Twitter as a platform for driving foot traffic to the museum.  Less than 25% of responders reported planning a visit to the museum after seeing a message from us—this is compared with over 55% of email subscribers who said they did.  Even more to the point, less than 10% of Twitter followers reported attending an event compared with over 30% of our email readers.  We discovered a similar trend with our Facebook fans and have altered our content strategy accordingly. Management Decision: Use Email (not Twitter) to Promote Synchronous, Location-Specific Events.

More info on Dana's Twitter content strategy can be found here.

So there you have it. As much as social media can seem nebulous, there are specific things to measure, to think about and analyze, and then to make decisions that you can feel confident about. When you develop your social media strategy for your next season, mix things up a bit with some new questions about your audience, new tools, and a new perspective on the art of social media analytics.

Special Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this series: Michael Edson, Brian Hinrichs, Maggie Johnson, Katryn Geane, Kristin Garbarino, Devon Smith, Lindsay O’Leary, and Crystal Wallis.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 2

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy?

This is part 2 of Tech in the Art’s 3-part series on social media analytics tools. Check out Part 1.

This part of our series is based on a simple question: As of today, what are your options for social media tracking? Let's take a look at some popular analytics tools and how to evaluate them given your organization’s more specific goals.

The Next Level

So let’s say you help determine social media strategy for your organization. If you’re like many organizations, you have Google Analytics, you look at your Weekly Facebook Update, you respond to comments on Facebook and/or Twitter. Your workload is, for the most part, tenable, and your social media presence is flourishing.

First of all, great job!

How can you take it to the next level without spending an inordinate amount of time or money? Get serious about analyzing your efforts and seeing what’s working. Using an analytics tool, you can begin tracking your efforts formally over time, just as you probably have a formalized system of tracking ticket revenue through sales reports. Some analytics tools offer a sort of moment-in-time snapshot. Others track over time as well.

So, as you endeavor to improve your tracking, which tools are for you? Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Exactly how much time per week or month am I able/willing to devote to researching our followers/fans and the analysis of our data?

2. What am I interested in knowing about my social media presence? Examples include:

a) Who are my fans? (donors, members, subscribers, employees, artists, etc)

b) How much of an impact am I having? (Am I reaching key influencers? How far are my posts being shared?)

c) How much of a return I am seeing on my investment of time or money?

4. How much money (if any) am I or my department willing to spend and what do we expect for that money? (See Question 2)

5. On a related note, how much buy-in will you get from senior management/the board? Will data provided by these analytics aid your case in advocating for future social media campaigns?

6. Who will be maintaining a regular schedule of analyzing the data? Yourself? An intern? Someone else?

There are hundreds of tools out on the market, and more emerging everyday. Since there is no way for this list to be comprehensive, here is a list of our favorites at Technology in the Arts. If you know of other useful tools for tracking social media, please comment on this post.

Disclaimer: For the sake of limiting the project in some way, we have included only 3^rd party social media sites—that is, mainstream social media sites that are set up for external relations with the general public, like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We will not cover basic brand management tools or web analytics tools like Google Alerts, except that in terms of tracking conversions from social media.

Free tools

bit.ly used in conjunction with Google URL Builder/Google Analytics

If you’re already using Google Analytics for your web analytics, one of the smartest things that you can do is track click-thrus from social media to your website. Here at Technology in the Arts, we do this through Google URL Builder and bit.ly. Earlier this year, Tara gave us an in-depth look at Google URL Builder. Basically Google URL Builder equips you with the ability to tag any URL you link to in your social media posts. You specify the campaign, medium (Twitter, Facebook, feed, etc) and a few other details about the link and, voila!, you can track click-thrus from your social media platforms.

Using Bit.ly gives you the added bonus of shortening the links and creating QR codes as well as tracking of any link, even those you’re not tracking through Google, with registration (free).

Think up

This program stores all your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook in a database that you can easily search, allowing you to analyze and export the data.

What’s unique about this is that it puts the data directly in your hands rather than giving you the results of the analysis. This means you can slice and dice any way you like, beyond any restrictions the program might impose upon you.

Flowtown

“If social and email had a baby, it would be called Flowtown.”

- Dylan Boyd, Vice President, eROI

When I first started researching social media analytics, I held a focus group with social media experts, one of which was Devon Smith of the 24 Usable Hours blog. She suggested Flowtown, which she reviewed in detail last fall.

The concept is that it helps you manage your email list in the context of social media. Flowtown is currently renovating the tool; however, you can sign up to be notified when they are accepting new users.

Social Mention

Social Mention analyzes interaction from across the social media universe--Not only Facebook and Twitter, but other social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, YouTube. It gives you a snapshot of how your social media presences are faring. One of my favorite features is the focus on sentiment. A common feature for paid tools, you get information on how your brand is perceived—in a positive, negative or neutral way—for free.

Klout.com

Klout is one of the most comprehensive systems for social media analysis. The tools help you track your presence over time, measuring things like influencers, reach, the probability for the message to be amplified (shared), and more, all of which contribute to an all-around Klout score. Another useful feature is the ability to compare yourself with other organizations.

TweetEffect.com

Tweeteffect is helpful in finding out which tweets are most “effective”, specifically by finding out which tweets cause you to lose and gain followers.

TweetPsych.com

Tweetpsych is a tool which tells you simply who you are to the people who follow you. The platform describes itself as creating a psychological profile of the twitter account, which is done by comparing how often you tweet about a particular topic in comparison to the “average” Twitter user. For example, techinthearts tweets about work, media, and learning more than the average Twitter user, and about the past, anxiety, and self-referencing tweet less than the average user.

Facebook Analytics

The only consistently good free option for tracking Facebook is the Facebook analytics tools.  The tools are a lot better than they used to be, especially with the recent upgrades that let you see how many impressions each of the items you post on the wall receive from your fans. However, Facebook tools don’t have the same capabilities as the Twitter tools to give an accurate picture of who is being reached.

Paid tools

Radian6 ($500/mo)

Radian6's philosophy is pretty simple: Listen, Measure, and Engage. And by "listen," doesn’t just track Facebook and Twitter—they monitor across blogs, forums, news, and more. You can track topics by keywords, basically listening to the conversation about why your customers come to you in the first place rather than just monitoring your own brand name. So, monitoring internet chat about string quartets and classical music if you are a Chamber Music Society.

Radian6 offers tons of ways to measure all the data you've "listened" to. It allows you to slice and dice data of social media on par with Google analytics and more, such as identifying key influencers and tracking the lifecycle of buzz around your campaign or brand. Another thing they measure is Share of Conversation: how often is your brand (say, MoMA) mentioned in the conversation about the general topic (arts in New York)?

Finally, this tool facilitates engagement with customers with integrated workflow, alerts, and sentiment monitoring. You can assign different people to be the Community Managers for different topics or audiences who respond to those constituents personally. Radian 6 also advocates contributing to the conversation by contributing white papers or other research to the topic.

Coremetrics (price varies)

If Radian6 looks at the big picture, Coremetrics (IBM's answer to analytics software) drills down to the individual customer level. Its main strength is that it is a comprehensive marketing system, integrating different channels and even offline information to convert and retain customers online. They also have a three-step philosophy: anticipate what your customers want based on cross-channel historical data, automate an immediate response to customer actions, and syndicate personalized content to the customer via the right channel at the right time.

Coremetrics puts all of your data--social media, CRM database, etc--into one application and measures it with the same metrics. This allows you to segment your customer base according to any and as many characteristics as you want to create the ultimate personalized experience.

BONUS: Coremetrics publishes informative white papers on analytics that you can download in exchange for an email address.

ComScore (price varies)

ComScore is another "360-degree" tool. Like Coremetrics it unites web analytics and social media data. The difference is that ComScore uses a consumer panel of approximately 2 million consumers worldwide to measure people's behavior in the digital environment. ComScore's Social Analytix tool is powered by Radian6, but when combined with ComScore's other tools, you can integrate social media measurement with other analytics tools. ComScore’s analytics toolbox is vast and covers a multitude of different needs, including ad effectiveness, search marketing, mobile, and cross-media measurement.

Twitalyzer ($30/mo)

One of my favorite free tools is now a paid tool, but it is still affordable to many non-profits. At only $30 a month, Twitalyzer not only tells you what is happening with your Twitter account in terms of reach, impact, and the other metrics we’re familiar seeing in association with social media, but it give you concrete recommendations on how to improve your outcomes based on more successful Twitter users. For example, I did a social media analysis for a client last year and Twitalyzer told me that:

If @"ClientName" is interested in having a more measurable impact in Twitter we recommend the following:

●     It is moderately important that you find more followers ●     It is moderately important that you find a few more people to follow yourself ●     It is moderately important that you engage others in conversation more frequently ●     It is very important that you write more frequently

Few tools on the market actually connect the dots by analyzing data and then telling you what you should be doing. If you can afford it, it's a good tool for those starting out as well as those re-orienting their social media strategy.

Next time in Part 3: Basing management decisions on the data you find with these tools (in case you aren't using Twitalyzer), including when it is worth it to pay for an analytics tool and examples from the Smithsonian on the concrete actions their staff has taken based on social media data.

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 1

Summer is the “off-season” for many of us in the arts world. Why not take this time to refresh your social media strategy? This is part 1 of our three-part series on social media analytics tools.

This is your brain on social media. Image from Your Social Move.

Social media marketing is an artistic endeavor as well as a scientific one. We use the right side of our brains to create the perfect message that will engage our audience and the left brain to crunch numbers on views, comments, etc. We know instinctively how to talk to our audiences, but we don’t always know how they are reacting to that message beyond a peripheral “feel” of the importance and sentiment behind the comment or action. There is often not an obvious way to categorize or quantify reactions to gain insights into your audience’s thoughts and feelings and to chart your own impact.

With the economic situation as it is right now, nonprofit employees are under more pressure than ever maximize their productivity and capacity. With technology, and social media in particular, as the most nebulous, mysterious, and constantly shifting elements of an organizations’ marketing/PR operation, it can be frustrating to track social media interactions and to gain resources from management for social media. Often initiatives face “death by delay” or end up being based on assumptions rather than data. At the Center for Arts Management and Technology, it’s one of the issues we talk about most often amongst ourselves and to clients.

It’s not just the arts, though.

In the non-profit arts world, we have the tendency to think that we are insulated and that our problems are due to a lack of time or resources. Some of these questions are ones that the social media field as a whole is trying to answer. While in the Masters of Arts Management program, I participated in a Social Media Analytics class where we had real-life clients. My team was working on the account of a major sportswear manufacturer. At first I thought that the questions that this company would have about social media would be very different than the ones that I worked on at the Center for Arts Management and Technology for our mostly non-profit arts clients. However, the more we worked with our client, the more similarities I noticed in the questions they asked about ROI, tracking, and analysis of social media initiatives.

Throughout the research that I’ve done and the conversations that I’ve had, I’ve heard social media right now described it as “the wild west”. Like web analytics was in its infancy, we are just now building the hallmarks and benchmarks for social media analytics. It’s an exciting time, and an extremely fast-paced one. If you have been keeping up with how businesses are using social media for the last five years or so, you’ve seen Facebook dominate MySpace, then Twitter edge its way in. As we moved to mobile, a slew of geo-location platforms arrived on the scene and now we’re trending toward game-based platforms.

As much as social media trends change, it is imperative to have a social media strategy, not just to spend your marketing dollars most effectively, but also to get to know your audience better. How do you get a social media strategy? You need information first. That’s where analytics come in. There is a wealth of information about your patrons hidden in their interactions on social media—like your own on-going focus group. But (A) how do you get to that information and (B) how do you draw conclusions from it?

A. As of today, what are your options for social media tracking? There are thousands of analytics tools out there and more being developed every day. Nonprofit arts organizations are faced with a dual bottom line: to serve the community and to create, present or preserve great art. Which tools are most useful to a nonprofit arts organization in gauging how they meeting the dual bottom line? In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take a look at some popular analytics tools and how to evaluate the tools out there given your organization’s more specific goals.

B. How can you use analytics data to make management decisions? There are many ways to slice and dice the data you might get from those tools. What are some strategies for using the current tools available? How can you make a confident decision about what is essentially a moving target? Given the tools and tactics in the above questions, when is it worth it to pay for analytic tools? In Part 3, we’ll address the problem of structuring your social media tracking efforts to find information relevant to your day-to-day decisions.

Arts and Technology Round-up: Museums and the Web Edition

Happy Friday everyone! For this arts and technology round-up we decided to try and hone in on a few of the awesome projects that we saw at the Museums and the Web conference last week. Up first are our picks of some of the best and most innovative projects. After that, the winners of the Best of the Web 2011 awards from the conference.

Technology In The Arts Picks

Zooniverse - This group marries together the researching needs of the scientific/historical communities and the power of crowdsourcing. By creating a series of interactive web portals, Zooniverse creates communities of "Citizen Scientists".

PhilaHistory - Philly based GIS firm Azavea worked with the City of Philadelphia to create a platform for linking historical photos of the city to their real world locations using geo-location and augmented reality.

One To One with the Artist: Ai Weiwei - A simple idea with a great effect, this project from the Tate allowed museum visitors to record and upload a video in the gallery and have a video dialogue with the artist Ai Weiwei.

The WALL - The Museum of Copenhagen's giant multi-touch multimedia screen installed in one of the central squares of Copenhagen.

ARTfinder - A new recommendation engine for artwork, this site works very much like Last.fm, taking your current interests and using them to introduce you to new works.

The Collective - Sounding a little bit like a bad 50's sci-fi flick, The Collective is the Denver Art Museum's interactive website/online programming space and a new way of connecting and bringing in the Denver community.

MoMA Learn - An extremely in-depth arts education web portal, the Museum of Modern Art's education department went all out on this one.

ARtours - The Stedelijk Museum's innovative augmented reality program.

The Best of the Web 2011

Education & Best Overall: The ACMI Generator

Mobile: The AB EX NY iPad app

Exhibition: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

Social Media: One to One with the Artist: Ai Weiwei

Innovative: Nationnaal Historisch Museum / Museum of National History

Museum Professional & People's Choice: Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy Wiki

Long-Lived: Exploratorium.org

Research/Online Collection: Portable Antiquities Scheme

Audio/Visual/Podcast: Access All Areas podcast

Project by a Small Institution: ASI: Archaeology Scene Investigations in North County Louth

Museums and the Web 2011 - Thomas's Recap

The 2011 edition of the international Museums and the Web conference wrapped up this past Saturday and was a 4-day whirlwind of presentations and workshops. Presentations covered many of the exciting new technology projects currently in place and coming up from museums around the world. Topics at the conference ran the gamut from mobile technology to augmented reality to ways of creating interactive communities of constituents online. All of the papers from the conference can be found online at the Museums and the Web’s conference website. Here are just a few of the themes and tidbits that stood out to me from the 4-day conference:

I

Crowdsourcing - Now in 6 delicious flavors!

I attended an unconference session, roundtable talks with topics proposed by conference attendees, that aimed to crowdsource the idea of crowdsourcing. The overall feel I got from the discussion was that many museums are taking crowdsourcing very seriously these days. The talk brought up a lot of cool new projects, ranging from including constituents in collections and archives work to new ways to display crowdsourced material.

Johan Oomen, Head of Research of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, presented his ideas on how crowdsourcing can now be defined in 6 distinct ways:

Correction & Transcription

Contextualization (Adding to wikis, telling stories)

Complementing the Collection

Classification, Tagging

Co-Curation

Crowdfunding

Out of the Museum, into the streets - taking advantage of geo-location

Geo-location was a popular theme, using GPS and mapping to take information and media from the museum and attach it to a location. Many presentations touched on how this idea could really help visitors build a strong connection to the history and importance of objects and sites of a community.

Some notable projects included PhilaPlace and the Rock Art Mobile Project.

I

Access, access, and more access

There was a lot of discussion around how to not only get more content on the web, but also make that content easily accessible. The types of content being made available on the web, for free, ranged from things like online collections to projects like online teaching portals. There was a general call to standardize access to this content and data and to use more open systems to encourage data sharing among organizations.

I

Intuitive design - What's the point of building it if no one can figure out how to use it?

The conference featured a variety of opportunities for museum professionals to gain feedback on their projects, one of the most popular being the Mobile Crit Room. A reoccurring theme of these critiques was the emphasis placed on the user experience, how easy was it for someone to use your mobile app/website? The Rock Art Mobile Project led the charge, along with a few others, in insisting that any project's user experience needs to be designed in a way that is both intuitive and immediately easy to use. Building around this concept will ensure that users of all ages and skill levels can take part in a project, not just the tech-savvy ones.

Check out the range of mobile projects from the conference’s Mobile Parade.

IIII

So now you want to build an mobile program? Better be up on some of the new business models.

One of the most informative presentations I attended was the “Getting on (not under) the Mobile 2.0 bus”. This talk featured case studies by MoMA, SFMOMA, Balboa Park and the Smithsonian on the new business models that now exist for developing a mobile program.

Some of the subjects from the presentation included: Digital retail (app/download sales), Donations (e.g. by text message), Sponsorship and ad-supported content, Monetizing data from mobile social media and Using mobile to support membership and other revenue channels. The full paper is available here.

I

The Rise of the Mobile Internet

Kristen Purcell, from the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project, gave the opening plenary of the conference. Kristen presented on some of the changes in technology from 2000 to 2011. Some pretty surprising stats were thrown up during the presentation. Among them:

• 1 in 3 adults do not have broadband Internet access.
• 69% of Internet users watch online video content, 14% of Internet users upload/create video content.
• 85% of adults will own a cell phone by 2011, making 2011 really the Year of the Mobile. (Purcell stated respondents had difficulty being able to distinguish between what was and was not a smartphone, so that statistic was not available)
• Mobile usage varied among different ethnic groups, Latinos and African Americans were shown to be in the highest percentage of users actively engaging with mobile content.
• 11% of mobile users use their phones to make charitable donations. (These numbers may be skewed by mobile donation drives for large natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquakes in Japan)
• 35% of adult mobile users have apps on their phones, but only 24% use them.
• The 90:9:1 rule for understanding the level of engagement on social media. It states that 90% of social media users are lurkers, just observing content and never really interacting or contributing. 9% are regular contributors, the ones who often like, retweet or comment on online content. 1% are the super users - always online, always engaged.

These were just a few highlights, for me, of the conference. Coming up, Molly will do her recap on what she found interesting at Museums & the Web 2011. Definitely go to the Museums & the Web conference site to check out all of the presented papers from the conference.

Mobile Audience Participation with Jonah Bokaer and the Ferst Center

Audience interaction has become a pretty major trend this year and arts organizations around the country are experimenting with different ways to engage their audiences. But how does one go about making their experience a participatory one? Artist Jonah Bokaer and the Ferst Center for the Arts at Georgia Tech decided to approach the issue using mobile technology. Jonah Bokaer is an award-winning choreographer and media artist participating in the Ferst Center's first ever year-long dance residency program, ARTech. Jonah worked closely with students from the Georgia Tech Music Technology Program to develop MassMobile, a smartphone app that acts as an interactive platform for audience members to participate by affecting the stage in different ways. On April 2nd, MassMobile will premier with Jonah's new work FILTER at the Ferst Center.

I had to opportunity to speak with Jonah as well as Stephen Garrett, one of the graduate students on the MassMobile development team, and dancer Adam Weinert, who can be seen in the sneak peek video at the end of this post.

Where did the idea to include the audience in the performance, through a mobile app, come from?

Jonah - Well, in 2004 I made a work called RSVP, which planted 12 cellular devices in the audience. We used those devices and their ringtones to create the music for the piece. And that was engineered from offstage by the composer. But, when doing some initial research down here and planning this production called FILTER, I wanted to put forward the idea or the proposal that there could be interaction or intervention even, with the show.  And maybe Stephen can take it from here, but we spoke with Jason Freeman and the Ferst Center and this relationship started.

Stephen – Yeah, and I think Jason’s idea, who is my advising professor on my master’s project, was to create a system that allowed for a rapid deployment of audience interaction devices through peoples’ mobile phones. So the idea came from Jason through some previous mobile development work and with several other projects, to create an iPhone and android application that will allow any type of input that the phones will allow. Whether that be an accelerometer, motion data, text messaging, touch data, drawing…anything that the phone will accept, to try and incorporate that into the performances in some way.

What are some of the direct ways that the audience is affecting the performance through MassMobile? Does it affect the lighting or are there sound elements that change?

Jonah - Well, one thing I just want to clarify is that this production will premier in it’s full form here in Atlanta on April 2nd. So we’ve had a six or seven day production period in Avignon France and we premiered the choreography, but MassMobile and these technological components have not yet been unveiled and actually this week we are holding a workshop with invited public to interact with it further.

So in terms of how the audience affects the performance? We’ve identified four ways for potential interaction. In particular I wrote in one section of the performance which is very much open-ended and is a 9 minute section which can basically be reconfigured a bit.  Specifically the lighting is influenced. We worked closely with Aaron Copp, who is my lighting designer, to integrate that into the performance.

Stephen – And certainly MassMobile itself, the way that the app can interact with a piece, is not set in stone. It’s a creative conversation that is always happening. But specifically for this piece, for one of the sections that involves interaction during the pre-show, the audience is quite literally plugged into the lighting board through their app.

The actual technical details of the connection is that the mobile app is connected through a client server relationship to one of our servers here at Georgia Tech. Then there is a laptop that sits in the lighting booth that constantly pulls for information. Based on what items people have selected in the app, the laptop is connected directly to the lighting board and will instantly turn lights on and off. You can change color palettes and things like that pretty much instantly.

Did you build MassMobile specifically for this performance or is this a platform that could be used for other performances/performers?

Jonah – I would almost say that it is still in progress. But, you know, Aaron Copp and I have known each other since 1999 and have been building work together for a long time and often in our creative discussions we would say, “Is there some way to interface or interact?” As opposed to working with just video or with sound, lighting is so integral to these performances that MassMobile seems like a natural fit. I think that for light and choreography I am working in very particular ways. For larger applications of MassMobile I know there are many options.

Stephen – So MassMobile itself is the platform and the app, and is still in pretty active development. Working with Jonah and his FILTER has been a great way to beta-test the app and see it grow to more of its current capacity. My professor Jason Freeman already had the plan to use the application in a live music notation work with saxophone where the audience could directly affect the notes that the performer is seeing onscreen. So there are other uses for MassMobile in the arts imaginable.

Could you speak to the importance, for you, of having participation from the audience?

Jonah – Well, I should say that my degree is not in choreography, it is in media and visual arts. For my thesis I focused on the myth of interactivity and focused on a lot of mid to late video work in the 1980’s and 1990’s. My sense was that there is a certain parallel between what we could call this myth with interactivity with video, but also with performance.  Just because it’s time based, it’s not necessarily interactive. This is one area of focus of mine in terms of creating performances.

I guess the impulse to say that an audience could interact, is still pretty much in progress. So far, at least in this stage in the piece, we’ve only had pre-show interaction. It’s kind of an open question.

I think some major conventions of theater are called into question, for example having the phones on during the show, the light of a cellular device on in the theatre. Some artists would consider this distracting, but in this case we are actually inviting it.  There are certainly questions of attention and attention span. We’re sort of walking into this project and saying that it is assumed that this will be unusually structured.

So why create such an unconventional performance? Well really, the participation is a part of why we wanted to open this out. Because instead of really disrupting or undermining a performance, we wanted people to be able to engage and help the author.

Stephen – The way we’ve enabled that interaction is a very direct and literal effect the audience can have with the lighting of different parts of the stage. [The pre-show] is an opportunity for people to come in and the curtain is open and they can see the initial set and it gives them a chance to explore. Our hope is that creates a deeper and more meaningful bong throughout the rest of the performance. That [the audience] has really explored the set and can experience it on a different level.

In addition to the interaction between the viewer and the stage, do you think that this program will cause the audience to interact with each other?

Jonah – The way that we piloted MassMobile was to have six mobile devices distributed internally to members of the creative team, producers and close colleagues over the course of a few days. I did note, on a couple of occasions, the social interactions that would occur person to person. Maybe Stephen would like to address any interactivity within the platform itself.

Stephen – We did see people that were using the app that were sitting next to each other sort of communicating in person and coordinating their efforts, but at this moment that’s not something we’re doing. [Interactivity within the platform] is something we are looking at in the future of MassMobile. More specifically looking at how do we enable or make sure that people have their own voice in their interactions with the performance.

From a performer’s perspective, what is it like working with something like MassMobile?

Adam – From a performer’s perspective, I think what excites me most about this kind of initiative is that as a performer we’re always looking for new ways to engage the audience and make each articulation of the performance event unique and special and fresh. I think that MassMobile can be a unique way to do that.

The other thing I really appreciate is how we’re using this mobile technology and multimedia to make more personal the performance. Which I think is rare and hard to accomplish.

If you live in the Atlanta area I highly recommend heading over to the Ferst Center for the premiere of FILTER on April 2nd. You can find more information about performance times and tickets at the Ferst Center's main website here. Until then, he is a sneak peak of dancer Adam Weinert and MassMobile.

MassMobile App Sneak Peak from Ferst Center on Vimeo.

Twitter by Example: Our Favorite Tweeps

Why are some Twitter users so effective at getting your attention while others fall flat?  What can you do to make your tweets stand out in a crowded feed?  By taking the time to reflect on some of the engagement techniques you see cropping up amongst your fellow Tweeps, you can invent your own ways to harness the power of Twitter for your organization. The Technology in the Arts team thought it might be fun to highlight a handful of our favorite Twitter users from the arts sector.   Check out these Twitter streams to see illustrations of successful, interesting, and unique ways to use the platform ...

My favorites:

@SFMOMA I love the tone of San Francisco MOMA’s tweets – they do a great job of blending humor with behind-the-scenes photos, museum happenings, and random things like wacky art historical facts.  They actively participate in dialogue with not only other orgs but also their Twitter audience - and sometimes they even project their audience’s Tweets on their museum walls…now that’s some serious tweet integration.

@TheSoapFactory With a staff of only five people, this Minneapolis nonprofit gallery proves that small organizations can make a big impact via Twitter.  Their tweets are conversational, friendly and often funny – and they actively tweet their support & enthusiasm for local arts happenings and the artists they work with.  @TheSoapFactory loves shout outs, and always takes the time to publicly say “thank you” to volunteers and interns in their tweets.  Their warmth and graciousness on Twitter creates a personal connection with their audience – which goes a long way in the tweetosphere, despite their relatively small size.

@yokoono With nearly 1.9 million followers, Yoko’s got a worldwide Twitter audience, and she keeps them engaged in a variety of innovative ways that other artists and arts organizations can learn from.  Each week, she posts a series of responses to questions that are tweeted to her – showing that she really cares about engaging in dialogue with her fans.  Her own tweets are powerful in their simplicity and she’s always got a positive message to share.  She encourages followers to participate by creating their own positive messages, too: the Imagine Peace Tower, an art installation located in Iceland, lights up a few weeks each year with tweeted "wishes" related to peace and love.  So far, over 1.3 million wishes have been sent via @IPTower, and it's happening now through March 26.

Amelia's favorite:

@SUEtheTrex at Chicago's Field Museum.  "Hi. I'm Sue, I'm a Leo, I like meat, Chicago, the movie Jurassic Park, and what else? Oh yeah, I'm the world's greatest apex predator." This tagline says it all about Sue the T-Rex--she's sassy, hilarious, and about 2 million years old. That doesn't stop her from having conversations with present-day life forms, tweeting about current events--everything from Thanksgiving to Women's History Month--and educating about the T-Rex. A great example of employees personalizing an institution.

David's favorites:

@artfulmanager Andrew Taylor, author of the Artful Manager blog and Director of University of Wisconsin’s MBA in Arts Administration, always provides great resources for arts managers.  His retweets tend to pull from sources that I may not be following – which opens me up to new content that I might not otherwise stumble upon.

@travisbedard Travis Bedard, Artistic Director of Austin’s Cambiare Productions theatre company, provides a great combination of humor and informative posts from the theatre community.

@Brandinyourhand International arts consultant Roger Tomlinson always offers thoughtful information and insights from across the Pond.

@JamesUrbaniak New York stage, screen and voice actor James Urbaniak is a subversive pleasure.  Witty, sarcastic and irreverent – a wonderful 140-characters-or-less chucklefest.

Tom's favorites:

@MuseumNext is one of my favorite sources for finding out not just what is going on with museums now, but in the future as well. Through their blog, publications and their conference, MuseumNext highlights the ways museums are using technology to become more participatory and engaging for audiences. Plus, these are the folks that brought us the wildly popular twitter campaigns Ask a Curator, Follow a Museum and most recently Picture a Museum Day.

@MuseumNerd Oh, the Museum Nerd. That Brooklyn-based lover of all things art. Museum Nerd is an anonymous persona who tweets about his/her experiences as they weave through different exhibits. Besides the color commentary, Museum Nerd is great at engaging both visitors and museums on Twitter while exploring exhibits and other art world happenings.

@NancyProctor The Head of Mobile Strategy and Initiatives for the Smithsonian Institution, I feel like Nancy Proctor is the Queen of museum mobile tech on Twitter. I check her feed for the latest developments in museum mobile tech, thoughts on best practices and to find who is experimenting and how. You can usually find her dropping some mobile tech knowledge with the hashtags #mtogo and #simobile.

Tara's favorite:

@atane Atane O. is one of my favorite music and audiophile nerds to follow on Twitter. He's currently a blogger for the Elements of Jazz blog, and always has cool pictures, videos and music clips to share via his Twitter stream. He also has an amazing vinyl collection (and great turntables!).

Now, it's your turn: who do YOU love on Twitter, and why?

Museum crowd-curation and the way we live now

Should more museums follow the Brooklyn Museum’s lead?

Recently, I helped curate Split-Second: Indian Paintings, a show for the Brooklyn Museum.  To do so, I simply visited their website and participated in an online activity.  It took me about ten minutes, and it involved briefly looking at images, clicking on those paintings that I found most intriguing and rating other paintings on a sliding scale.

My participation in this process got me thinking not only about Indian art, but also about how my own perceptions of art in general might be shaped, and how my aesthetic tastes might compare to the sensibilities of the general public.  Even more interesting to me was that this experiment in crowd-curation felt like the inevitable extension of the movement towards a more participatory culture.

What is it?

Museum crowd-curation enables the general public to become a part of the curatorial process by helping to determine, through an online platform, the artwork to be included in a physical exhibition displayed in a museum’s gallery.

The Brooklyn Museum pioneered crowd-curation three years ago with its photography exhibition Click! . First launched through an open call for artists to submit photos related to the theme of “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn”, the artwork was then made available online for anyone to curate.   Perhaps most interestingly, the Brooklyn Museum staff took a transparent and scientific approach to the experiment, publicly sharing data and thoughtful analysis every step of the way.  Check out Brad's Technology in the Arts podcast with Shelley Bernstein from 2008 to learn more about Click!

Selection of photographs from Click! by the Brooklyn Museum

Now, Bernstein and the folks at the Brooklyn Museum are offering a new spin on crowd-curation by injecting theories of connoisseurship to Split-Second: Indian Paintings. Based on ideas from the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Split-Second seeks to explore how our first impressions might affect our perceptions of art as well as the production of a museum exhibition.  In the end, we’re left with an engaging viewer/curator experience that subtly mixes the professional with the amateur.

Why is crowd-curation so intriguing?

Increasingly, we are becoming a culture of curators, especially in the virtual world.  We spend our time organizing media according to preference, grouping our memories into online photo and video databanks, and “liking” and commenting on things that other people share.  What this means is that arts audiences are coming to the gallery with a newly emboldened sense of organizing and presenting content.  Arts organizations therefore need to play an active role by creating opportunities for meaningful engagement.

Screen shot of Split-Second's crowd-curation process by the Brooklyn Museum

Organizations that are at the forefront of online audience engagement are presenting ideas that go beyond simply offering information about programming.  Instead, they are experimenting with different ways that audiences can become co-creators of content, which can then lead to a sense of ownership in the institution.  But crowd-curation should not be simply a matter of presenting art works and having a voting contest in the sense of American Idol.  Rather, arts managers need to envision a place of meaningful dialogue between their organization and their audience.

Crowd-curation is exciting because it is a clear illustration of the changing dynamics of the audience/museum relationship.  It takes creative online participation and literally translates the collective online vision into physical space.  Along the way, it can stimulate creative thinking by:

• Getting the participant/curator to think about her own internal perceptions of art, and perhaps inspire her to dig even deeper through self-reflection. What struck me most in my experience as a curator of Split-Second was how successful the exercise was in getting me to think about not only the art in the show but also my own understanding of visual culture.

• Creating discussion, based upon the collective decisions of the audience, about big-picture questions, like: How is artistic value determined? Is general consensus achievable in determining artist merit?

By putting the internal and collective processes together, crowd-curation has the potential to achieve multiple levels of meaningful contemplation.  Of course, arts managers may feel like they are taking a significant risk.  They may fear that the artistic content chosen by the masses will not constitute a “quality” exhibition in the traditional sense.  And, perhaps worse, if crowd-curation IS able to produce a quality exhibition, then what is the point of having all of these professionals around?  However, as sites like Wikipedia or perhaps the “comments” section of any website have shown, opening up the production of content to crowds is precisely the time when professional, articulate viewpoints are needed most.

This is not to argue that crowd-curation methods should or will replace traditional curatorial models.  In fact, it doesn’t make sense for all art museums to try it (based on a number of factors such as the nature of the audience, resources available, the nature of the exhibit, etc.)  Even so, crowd-curation is an innovative approach to breaking down the barriers between art museum and audience, and it’s a fascinating reflection of the way we live now.

Philanthroper: A New Daily Deal Site for Non-Profit Donations

A new daily deal site launched this past month, but this site doesn’t offer a deal for a spa trip or half off dinner at some posh restaurant. New site Philanthroper offers a non-profit story a day, a daily solicitation for a non-profit doing some good, and asks visitors to give just one dollar. Launched by Mark Wilson, reporter for Gizmodo and Esquire, Philanthroper aims to make donating a daily habit for the internet culture. The idea behind Philanthroper is very similar to dynamite daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social. Each non-profit gets front-page realty on the site, but just for 24 hours. Instead of a daily discount, Philanthroper shares the stories of non-profits, from local to global, and gives visitors the opportunity to donate a dollar. When the 24 hours come to an end, a new non-profit goes up and the previous day’s organization receives their funds within about a week.

Why just a dollar? As the site states:

So you can donate another $1 tomorrow. And another the next day. Use Philanthroper daily, and we guarantee, you'll donate more over time than you would have otherwise plus it won't sting your bank account so badly. Use Philanthroper every day and you'll be on the right track to give more, more easily. If you're compelled to make a larger donation, fantastic. We always link their site. So go for it.

Philanthroper restricts the amount you can donate to just that one dollar and limits visitors from donating more than once a day. The idea here isn’t to solicit a major gift, but to create a culture of daily giving. Donating a single dollar can be a pretty tempting request. Personally, I spend more on a cup of coffee or downloading an app that will make my phone sound like an air raid siren.

The financial cut Philanthroper takes from each donation is the biggest thing setting them apart from other crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and USA Projects. That’s because the amount Philanthroper retains is zero – you read that right, zero. Philanthroper states right out that they will never take a cut of your donation, although the site’s payment service mPayy will take a whopping 1% of each donation – a penny.

This is how Philanthroper can offer that minimum donation level of $1, whereas other non-profits are often forced to ask for a minimum of around $10 due to the processing rates of current payment services. Support for the site comes from advertising, so as website Arstechnica puts it “…only your eyeballs, and not your charitable gifts, are paying to keep things going.”

How does a non-profit get a daily deal? The site selects only official 501(c)3 organizations, with a special interest in those that bring in less than $1 million per year. The main focus is on those non-profits that are young and growing and could use every single extra dollar. Religious non-profits are not promoted on the site and individuals raising funds will not make the cut. Think you know a non-profit that’s perfect for the site? Philanthroper invites site visitors to suggest tips for non-profits out there worthy of their own daily deal.

Creating a habit of daily giving in our current internet culture is a pretty exciting idea. Philanthroper is taking advantage of the impulsive nature of users of sites like Groupon and Living Social. If the popularity of the site can continue to grow, there is a possibility to make a huge difference for many small non-profits. Visit the main site here and check out what today’s daily cause is that you can throw a dollar towards.

Instant Encore: Classical Music goes Mobile

Margo Drakos, co-founder/COO of InstantEncore

Margo Drakos is a woman on a mission. The co-founder and COO of InstantEncore wants to take classical music directly to its audience via a host of online services, including a digital strategy package for powering custom websites for organizations, a website builder for artists and the development of mobile apps. Recently, the company has been busy building custom mobile apps for Android, iPad, iPhone and all smartphones. InstantEncore’s mobile apps have previously been featured on this blog in Tom’s article 10 Arts and Culture Mobile Apps from 2010.

InstantEncore currently powers about 100 iPhone apps and 50 Android as well as hosting mobile web apps, which make an organization's website functional on a mobile phone. Their platform powers the app for the popular YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which, at over 125,000 downloads, and beats both the Taylor Swift and Linkin Park apps by about 90,000. Instant Encore also hosts the apps of notable organizations like the NY Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Cleveland Institute of Music and Houston Grand Opera.

I talked with Margo recently to catch up on Instant Encore's latest endeavors.

What is InstantEncore? InstantEncore.com is a classical music platform that enables artists and arts organization to harness the power of technology to connect with their fans anywhere, any time. We are the infrastructure! We have created the only classical music-specific digital asset management system that essentially allows our Partners from a broad spectrum of the performing arts world to enter digital content – event listings, ticket selling, audio recordings (streaming, download, public or private), video (live or on-demand), news, blogs, and photos - one time, and have all of their content published in real time to their own website, mobile apps, Facebook or Twitter accounts.

How did the idea for InstantEncore come about? Two things happened: I was playing cello for a living and I had sort of grown frustrated with the disconnect between musicians and the audience, where the field was going, and how technology was disrupting the traditional models. I felt passionate about re-personalizing the concert experience without losing artistic integrity.

An InstantEncore concert card offering a music download.

Meanwhile, I had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful engineers and they had a really powerful search engine specific for classical music that resulted in a high-end jukebox called Maestro. It had originally been created to help catalog vast CD collections, like that of our chairman/CEO. I was talking to them about how sometimes as a performer you would go to a live event and afterwards people would say “I loved the concert. How can I hear it again? How can I get a recording?” And of course I was always trying to sell some unrelated CD. So I talked to these engineers about this predicament that a lot of musicians always find themselves in, and so we actually created this concept of the “Instant Encore”—where you can take a card at the concert, go home, and download the content that you just heard.

How has InstantEncore evolved from the days of concert cards to now? Instant Encore started with a very powerful search engine that had organized and standardized all classical music meta data, and our objective was to build the tools that would enable fans to connect with the music and artists they love, in a personal, immediate way. We wanted to leverage technology to extend and enhance every aspect of the live concert experience. We are committed to providing the 21st century tools that will save organizations time and money by automatically or quickly powering their digital assets to connect with fans and engage sponsors.

How does the Instant Encore component fit in with an organization’s existing social media presences and organizational website? Our goal is to streamline redundancies and save resources. Right now, you have a lot of people that are trying to update their website, spending a great deal of time developing a content management system internally instead of spending development time and resources on the front end. Then there is the mobile space--if an organization does not have a good web-browsing experience from a smartphone, people will close the site. Then organizations are manually pushing content that is often a PR push to Facebook and then to Twitter as well. So there’s a great amount of time and effort in trying to maintain all these very necessary social network platforms.

Obviously details about classical music can be a nightmare to organize or for data entry. We have a very standardized way—unless it’s a world premiere, it’s all in our search engine’s system. For example, if you start to type in “Beethoven Symphony No. 5”, it’s going to have the opus number and the key and all the movements and you just click on that and it’s automatically transferred. So, you’re never entering all that information yourself, which is 1) time-saving and 2) tagged at the most specific level, which allows people that are not looking specifically for you to find you and you that already know you and want to find you to customize their experience.

Our system is set up so that you as a Partner can enter an event listing in moments in our secure Control Panel. By that one simple event creation in our content management system, it updates in your website with our webbuilder or more advanced API (Application Programming Interface—see the end of this entry for more information). posts to the partner’s social networks, mobile apps, etc. You can do a host of different things—tag your YouTube channel. You can manually upload music for streaming or download purchase. Or you can create a private download code campaign for donors or concertgoers. One of our most valuable features is this web crawler that goes through hundreds of RSS feeds and finds articles specific to arts organizations and tag any article from newspapers or blog. This can automatically appear in your app or website as the latest news, so you’re not having to physically manage your app or site but your content is current.

The music player feature on InstantEncore's Android app (left) and the events feature on InstantEncore's iPhone app (right).

So basically it’s just a one-stop shop. It’s a digital asset management system where you come to enter your content in one place and it goes to all the platforms that you’re using. We’re just an aggregator and publisher of that content… Our concept was that it should be something that a two-person organization can use our tools and manage and have a very robust, beautiful integrated social media presence or an organization with a budget over 10 million can use the same tool.

Regardless of all the features you offer, many organizations might have trouble getting the rights to use pieces of music or convincing players that a mobile app is somewhere the music should be. What are some of the arguments you can make to convince them that this is something worth doing? I come from the musician/recording side of things, am a current member of the AFM and as a child was a member of AFTRA and SAG, so I certainly appreciate where the musicians are coming from. What I think is important is that, fortunately or unfortunately (however you want to perceive it) we’re in a new period that is such disruptive change, brought on in part by technology and change is always painful. There are new great opportunities but the existing models and the days of residuals in the way that we used to know it, at least right now, are not there. I think it’s really important to actually be very upfront about this. Artists are highly intelligent people and creative people and have wonderful ideas to bring to the marketing and development side of the business. I think it is so important that everyone be a stakeholder charting this new world together.

I think part of this is taking a holistic approach and saying that there are certainly a group of people that are going to want a physical CD’s and there’s people that are going to want to download content. But there’s a certain group of people know who just want what they want, when they want it. We see from our stats that music or videos are increasingly having a very short shelf life. People will often want to hear a new live recording over and over and then they move on and that is it. I often say to my friends and colleagues that you have to have some faith and work together to try things. Every community and every audience is different, but if you don’t have the tools to even explore or try things, that’s very challenging. I think mobile is so essential. People will be accessing the internet via their mobile devices more than from a computer within the next few years. If you don’t have a good user experience to access your content via mobile or any content in it, in my opinion, I think it will be very, very challenging.

You mentioned that you are focusing your research efforts on return on investment in digital media and how orgs can get sponsorship for their technology initiatives. Can you tell me more? Why should anyone care about social media and an integrated digital strategy? Why should anyone care about having a mobile app? I’m a very “nuts and bolts”, frugal person. When I look at some of the organizations that I work with and see how much they’re spending on print material and yet they don’t want to spend a few thousand on a mobile presence, or want to wait a few years to see where this mobile thing goes, I think it is quite alarming. Showing people the return on investment is critical for them to care.

Many arts organizations' apps are sponsored by corporations or foundations.

Many organizations we are working with have packaged a digital or mobile sponsorship package and in many cases, new donors or people who were not previously interested in sponsorship at a significant level, are excited to be part of new technology, sponsoring live video streaming on websites and mobile platforms and much more.

It’s built into our platforms—ways for people to feature sponsors, going through their audience to create new audiences, etc. What I’ve found is that I’ve been pushing organizations to think outside of their printed program with a printed logo and think, how can we think outside of the box and take the old ways that we used to monetize and seek corporate sponsors and take this into the digital space? Some organizations have come up with some fabulous things. Whether it’s embedded streaming announcements featuring sponsors, ad spots with sponsors, getting grants to cover new educational and audience development initiatives—various things. They’ve been able to monetize this in new ways, from new sponsors (not cutting out of other things).

I am very excited that Telstra, the telecom company in Australia, hired us to create a premium custom app for the Sydney Symphony that will include live video streaming of ten concerts in their mobile apps and website. This is a win-win for everyone.

How should arts organizations approach technology? There are so many platforms out there, there is so much information and everything’s changing so rapidly. I remember launching the app with the New York Phil and at that time, apps were still—people thought “what the heck is that?” So, the most important thing is to integrate digital media strategy into organizational strategy—into every aspect of decision-making across all departments. It involves PR, it involves marketing, it involves development, it involves operations, the audio recording department, musicians—absolutely everyone. I think that buy-in is essential. I think one of the most important things is just to start small and get permission to try something. If it doesn’t work, don’t let it validate that “this is never going to work” and if it’s a home-run, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to work the next time. It’s important to look at just getting started but with a clear, integrated strategy approach. And really, actually, there’s a lot of fear sometimes when it comes to technology and I think part of what’s been fun to see is that oftentimes, it’s a lot more fun than people necessarily anticipate and I think that that’s been a really rewarding part of what we’re doing.

When Thomas Hampson made his recital available for download and Performance Today, Minnesota Public Radio, and European Public Broadcasting Union announced it on air. We read the comments from people from around the world—from United Arab Emirates, to Germany to California to Wisconsin—about how that music impacted them and how grateful they were for that. I was very honored and proud that some of our tools could be helping to connect the power of his voice and his artistry globally in a way that’s never happened before. I think that’s really what it’s about and instead of feeling more protectionist, as scary as it feels, to embrace democratized access in this engaged age.

More info on Maestro API:

The State of the Mobile - The 2011 Museum & Mobile Survey

Image via intomobile.com

This past month the results came in for the 2011 Museum & Mobile survey. The survey is part of an ongoing research project focused on the uses and trends of mobile technology in museums.

The survey launched last September and had more than 700 responses, with professions ranging from museum employees to mobile technology vendors and researchers.  The effort was international, but the majority of responses (80%) were from the United States, with the United Kingdom (5%) and Canada (4%) as the next largest group of respondents.

The survey points to some interesting trends that are cropping up with mobile development for museums. There is a ton of information in the survey, but here are some of the interesting things I pulled from the presentation:

• Of the 738 survey respondents, 30% already have some form of a mobile program in place and 23% planned to develop one. 36% of institutions had no plans to go mobile and the remaining 11% were responses from vendors and researchers.

• When asked which terms best described their current or planned mobile program, the most common responses were: Some sort of audio tour, free for visitors, and visitors were expected to provide their own hardware (i.e. smartphone, iPod).

• The goals for the mobile programs were most commonly described as providing supplementary information and diversifying the visitors’ experience. Personally, I loved that the next two most common goals were an emphasis on experimentation and creating an interactive experience.

• What was most challenging for museums with mobile programs in place? Encouraging adoption among visitors, producing the content, and keeping that content up to date.

• The largest challenge for those planning to develop a mobile plan? The implementation costs.

• Looking ahead five years, most institutions said that implementing in-house content development was a definite goal.

• And what is least likely to be implemented in the next five years? Institution-wide WIFI, real time location services and augmented reality.

• What I found promising was that respondents to the survey had a strong desire to see more research done, even among those who had no mobile plans at all.  The most requested areas of research were: Guidelines for user experience design, methods for conducting visitor evaluations and analysis of different technology systems.

So beyond these points, what are some of the larger takeaways from the survey? Well, for one, the survey goes to show that mobile technology is more than a fad. Mobile programs are becoming more common and less of an anomaly among museums. The survey also provides a snapshot of some of the concerns about development and adoption of a mobile program.

It was a little disappointing to see that among the technology being definitely implemented in the next five years, new tech like RTLS and augmented reality were the bottom two. Personally, I would not underestimate the possibility of this technology becoming an expectation among visitors, even within the next few years.

Also, the survey pointed out that 50-55% of respondents consider having a mobile-friendly website as something that should be definitely implemented in the next five years. An organization’s website will often be the first portal of entry for a mobile user, and having a website that is optimized for mobile platforms should be a higher priority.

Overall, I think the biggest takeaway of the survey is that the future of mobile technology in museums will not be just some flashy app. Throughout the field, serious thought is being put into how these programs can be developed in a way that are both substantial and engaging for the user. It was awesome to see institutions describe the goals of their current or planned mobile programs as experimental and interactive.

There were a lot of interesting results from thus survey, the above points were only a few that jumped out at me. For the more in-depth results of the survey visit Museum & Mobile’s website to view the full presentation.

Tumblr Is Headed For The Creative Community, Should Arts Organizations Follow?

A vast repository of pop culture memes & internet humor, the blogging service Tumblr has grown significantly since its launch in 2007. With over 12 million blogs and with the recent raising of $30 million in funding, some see Tumblr's future as taking on blogging services like WordPress and Blogger. The site’s hallmarks are its streamlined posting dashboard and reblogging feature. Add on likes and short replies, and this gives the site a familiar feel to social networks like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

So this is all well and good, but how does Tumblr relate to the arts? As mentioned on mashable.com recently, Tumblr is going to focus more on developing the growing creative communities on the site.  As Tumblr’s founder David Karp stated:

“You look in fashion, creative writing, photography, music, so many of these creative circles,” said Karp, “and we have these really substantial communities that now live on Tumblr.”

Should arts organizations take advantage of Tumblr’s new direction and add it to their group of social networks? Before getting into that, take a look at Tumblr’s differences when compared to blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger. I’ve used tumblr myself for a personal blog and here are a few of the features that stood out to me and made it feel more like a social media site:

The posting dashboard. Image via tumblr.com

• The Dashboard Streamlined for different types of media, the dashboard contains buttons that takes bloggers to posting forms customized for the content. This speeds up the posting process and makes posting media content such as audio, video and photos, a lot faster than traditional blog platforms.

A typical submission form on tumblr. Image via tumblr.com

• The Submission Feature: This feature is especially driven towards community-oriented blogs, where the author can invite his community to write and contribute their own content. Posts can be submitted by followers to their favorite blog through a built-in form and since the posts are automatically formatted, all the author of has to do is hit publish. This is probably the feature I feel would be most attractive to arts organizations, since it asks the constituents to not only read and comment on the organization's blog, but be a driver of content as well. x
• Reblogging: Probably my favorite feature of Tumblr. This works almost the exact same way that a re-tweet does on Twitter. Pressing the reblog button will instantly re-post someone’s post onto your blog. The feature is impulsive and probably the number one reason content spreads so quickly through the site.x

An example of the tumblr dashboard and update feed. Image via tumblr.com

• The Update Feed Imagine the feed of updates on Facebook or Blogger, Tumblr operates in the same way, aggregating all the Tumblr blogs you follow into one stream. All of the posts appear in a uniform format with the options to like, short reply or reblog.

Tumblr’s features make it easy and accessible for the individual blogger, but that doesn’t necessarily make it great for organizations. Here are a few issues I saw with how the site operates that might be irritating for some arts organizations:

• Tumblr is a Clique: While a Tumblr blog can be viewed by anyone, features like reblogging and replies are only available (and visible) to someone signed into a Tumblr account. This is true of many social networks, but since Tumblr is essentially a blogging platform, there is an expectation that the level of engagement should be available for all visitors. Organizations can lose out on connecting with non-Tumblr visitors who cannot “like” or comment on a post that really engages them. x
• Kept Out of the Conversation: Another problem for engagement on the site is the system for comments - it's extremely difficult to create a conversation. Tumblr users can leave short replies, but there are no systems in place to let authors and other bloggers reply to that comment. What follows is a mess of reblogs and screen captures of comments in an effort to make a threaded conversation. Some Tumblr bloggers have tried to solve this problem using a service like Disqus, but then a problem is created for the Tumblr community. Visitors outside Tumblr can engage, but the comments will not show up in the regular feed or be accessible for Tumblr users through their accounts, and the two communities remain disconnected from one another. x
• Customization on the site can be tough: The options are limited and those options change completely based on which theme you have installed. Some themes severely limit your options for color choice and background image, making branding difficult. Other themes do not allow for visitors to have a reply option, even within Tumblr. x
• Remember all those reblogs, short replies, and likes? While these show up in your update feed, there is no built-in way to track them. It’s an exciting experience to see a post go viral and get re-blogged multiple times, but tracking that effect through Tumblr over time is extremely difficult. x
• Managing the Archive: Managing past posts is difficult and while a mass editor exists, this just gives a visual overview of your posts over time. It’s hard to track a post from more than a few months back and there is no way to export your archives.

So should an arts organization take advantage of Tumblr anyway? If you have an existing, integrated social media strategy and primary blog in place, it may be worth a shot. Tumblr has a fairly clean interface with Facebook and Twitter, and could be a good way to provide content to an ever-growing community of bloggers.

If your organization is thinking of making this their main blog, I would hold off since it will be harder to manage in the long run and success metrics would be a pain. It will be interesting to see how Tumblr is going to improve the site to focus on the creative community and what effect it may have on how people interact with blogs in the future.

Social Media Spotlight: The ToonSeum

Welcome to the fifth installment of the Social Media Spotlight, our monthly feature focusing on arts organizations’ social media strategies.

How to allocate time and money towards both social media engagement and online marketing is different for every arts organization. To get a different perspective Technology in the Arts decided to talk with a smaller organization, the ToonSeum, about how they achieve their social media and online marketing goals with a limited staff. I had a chance to chat with Joe Wos, Executive Director of the ToonSeum, about his approach:

So Joe, what is the ToonSeum?

The ToonSeum is Pittsburgh’s Museum of Cartoon Art. It is one of only three museums in the country dedicated to the cartoon and comic arts. We offer rotating exhibitions covering all aspects of cartoons and comics, from animation and anime, to comic strips, comic books, editorial cartoons, illustration and much more. We also offer ongoing workshops, screenings and lectures.

It really is one of the most unique museums in Pittsburgh. Every city may have a version of a children’s museum or traditional art museum, but there are only three cartoon art museums! New York, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. We take great pride in our unique place in Pittsburgh.

What kind of marketing and PR challenges does the ToonSeum face?

Our number one challenge as with any small non-profit is budget. We are a small museum up against juggernauts! We are up to the challenge.  If anything, budget limitations have led to creative thinking. You aren’t going to see us investing a lot in “traditional” advertising.  Being a smaller museum also eliminates a lot of the fear of change you see from larger venues. We don’t have a huge investment in outmoded technology or ideas, so we are more inclined to let go and move forward to embrace new ideas in both marketing and tech.

We have been very lucky, the media both locally and nationally has been very supportive.  Part of that attention is because of our approach to marketing. We use online marketing to create interest in “real world” experiences. We innovate new ways of reaching out. How many museums can say they had their own beer? Illustration Ale was a great success. We didn’t mail out postcards we used facebook.

In February we will launch our own themed hotel room in partnership with the Wyndham Grande downtown. It’s all about immersive experiences, translating virtual experiences we enjoy in gaming and through cartoons into the real world. That’s the kind of creative thinking we embrace.

A limited budget forces truly creative thinking.

Why did you choose to go with social networks/online marketing as a solution?

We are a fan-based museum. It’s a new approach to museum management, marketing and even exhibitions. Comic and cartoons by their very nature, are a fan-based medium. We embrace that. Just look at San Diego Comic Con, why is every major movie launching there? Because of the power fans have via social networks. We tap into those same fans. We are a geek museum, and proud of it. Our audience is very tech savvy, early adopters who can market virally better than anyone.

We know that the ToonSeum is a real world extension of a fan based virtual world. We are a museum of characters, icons and avatars. We want to become a real hub for comic and cartoon fans, and the only way to do that now, is through creating online connections and then inviting them to join us at the ToonSeum. Once we get them here, we know, they will tell their friends, strangers, tweet, blog, post, and tell the world about us.

We also recognize that it can’t be just virtual, you have to take it to the fans! We have booths at major Comic Cons, from San Diego to New York. We also host Blogger events and Tweet Parties at the ToonSeum. If we can get the word out to them about our exhibits and programs they will help us spread the word.

Beyond the standard social media efforts, such as a Facebook page and a twitter account, what other types of online efforts are the ToonSeum trying?

I worked for twenty years with a museum that had a real aversion to technology, it took a decade for them to come around. The ToonSeum is the opposite. We want to be the first. We were the first museum in Pittsburgh to have an I-Phone App. We may still be the only one! MailChimp, EventBrite, every new social marketing tool that comes out we give it a try. We were among the first to participate in KickStarter (we were even featured in the New York Times in an article about it.) I attend the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas just because I know we need to stay at pace with the public. The technology in most museums is outdated, kids can do more advance and exciting interactions at home. So we reach out, we are a Beta Test museum. We put ourselves out there to new technology and say, let us try this out first!

We have an ipad docent at the entrance. Any guests who wants to experience more online while in the gallery can use it as a tool.

For light up night we launched lights in our windows that can be controlled from the outside via an iphone. The guest has control over their experience before they even enter the door.

I am a self-professed geek and nerd, I attend the Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas every other year, I attend the Toy Fair in New York. I bring those innovations and ideas back to the ToonSeum and find ways to integrate them. So the ToonSeum has a giant screen projection in the center of our ceiling that loops cartoons. It is of course blu-ray 3d as well.

We have worked with Behar-Fingal to integrate QR codes into all our exhibitions. This allows guest with smartphones to link to additional content online. Whether it is a wikipage entry on the artists, or video we provide of the cartoonist at work. This is a great tool to take our exhibits beyond our walls and is also cost effective. People are walking around with access to all the information they need. In the future museums won’t need placard after placard of explanatory text. They will just need to provide a link. Their curiosity will take them beyond your walls. Each and every work of art is a potential jumping off point to a world of discovery in the world wide virtual museum.

We know that the traffic has to flow in both directions. A museum should be a destination from those on the web looking for real world experiences, but a museum must also be a gateway to curiosity that can be infinitely explored in new and exciting ways online.

Despite our using technology in so many ways, the ToonSeum is still ultimately about art on the walls. Because we have integrated ways to put the technology in your hands we don’t have to use a lot of monitors and computers. It makes it an individual experience, which is something we learned from social marketing. Everyone wants to interact on their own terms.

I know you operate on a small staff, how does this affect how you manage your various online efforts?

We have a social marketing intern whose only job is to tweet and post. That’s a must! The museum has to have a presence online that allows for immediate interaction. So we respond to every tweet that mentions us, every facebook post. It’s time consuming but it is the most important aspect of social marketing… being social!

All of our staff also has access to post to our various accounts. So we are updating daily. More important though is the fact that our fans are out there, retweeting and posting everything for us. It gives us a much bigger presence.

They also know to speak with the ToonSeums voice. It’s always connected to our mission and not personal. I have seen top-notch museums whose official facebook page has post about their kids getting the flu! Unless there is an epidemic of every kid visiting your venue getting the flu, how does a museum have kids that get sick? It doesn’t. Your venue has to have a virtual identity, a voice that your fans can interact with and it has to be consistent.

This is all easier to accomplish with a small staff. There are no committees, no approval process, no budget meeting, we identify what needs done and do it!

Does your staff size affect how you track the success of all of your online projects?

Every guest that comes in is asked how they heard about us, and their zipcode. We track every single opened email and clicked link. That data is all placed into a matrix we use to measure our success. It doesn’t take a big marketing firm, it just takes a commitment of a few minutes each day.

Can we talk about the Bloggers Blast? What is the event and why focus on bloggers?

I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas and attended about 5 after parties. What impressed me was they were all geared toward bloggers and social media. I knew this was something the ToonSeum had to do in Pittsburgh.

Traditional press is great, we love them! But today even they are pulling content from bloggers. Bloggers have fans, just like we do. It comes back to embracing a fan-based culture. So we wanted to let those bloggers get a sneak preview at our upcoming exhibitions and programs for 2011. We have special guests, a preview of the art, prizes and every single blogger will get a flash drive filled with all our press releases, promo art and more. If you are reading this and are a blogger, contact joe@toonseum.com for your invite.

We will be following this with tweet parties, where everyone is admitted free if they tweet about the exhibits.

You have mentioned that the ToonSeum was one of the first Pittsburgh museums to develop an iPhone app. What does the app do and what was the development process like? Has there been a good response?

Going to back to my previous experience with another museum, I was often frustrated by the phrase “we’ll look into it.” I began to realize that phrase meant, we don’t know how to do it and aren’t willing to learn. Forget the yellow pages, the phone book is dead. It’s all about web and apps. We knew we needed an iphone app. It provides immediate access to enhance the guest experience. It also goes a long way to legitimizing you to tourist. It’s one of the first things I do when I visit a venue in a new city, I check them out online and then download their app.

Creating an app can be an expensive prospect, thousands of dollars. That was out of the question for our budget. So, I just learned to do it myself. I applied for an apple developer license, found a great site that would allow me total control over the creation of the app, submitted it for approval and that was it. Total process took about five hours, not counting waiting for approvals, which took three weeks. I used rss feeds so that info on our hours and events could be changed on the fly. I created a framework that would allow our youtube videos to be viewed from within the application. As a cartoonist it was easy to do most of the graphic design work myself and there you go. It’s done. Our social marketing intern can update it from anywhere. I can even update from my iphone when I am out of town.

If I am going to run a museum I should know how to do every job. I better know how to market, run the register, curate an exhibition and even mop the floors. I can then have a better understanding of how difficult a task is and more important I can lend a hand when it is needed.

I am working on an android app right now and we are doing a complete web overhaul in spring.

We are geeks, we love this stuff.

Top Technology Trends: What’s Ahead for Arts Marketers in 2011

This post also appears as a featured article on artsmarketing.org, hosted by Americans for the Arts.

In this tough economy, most of us have encouraged ourselves and others to look ahead to brighter times. But, what exactly lies ahead in the next year for us? How can we make the most of our future?

In 2010, technology influenced our field tremendously. Some predicted trends, like Google Wave and Google Buzz, failed to take off, and many unexpected trends, like group-manipulated pricing and Ask a Curator, flourished. The following are some major trends that have gathered momentum in the past year and/or are poised to take off in 2011:

Group discounts and group-manipulated pricing Group discount sites exploded in popularity in 2010. While many organizations have a group sales manager or special deals for groups, these sites allow people to opt in to a deal that will only go live if enough people opt in, encouraging people to sell to their friends. Groupon now boasts 35 million subscribers and 18 million Groupons sold in North America. However, marketers question their ability to attract repeat visitors. Now that the initial novelty has worn off, hopefully the knowledge we’ve gained will result in smarter offers. I recently heard from a colleague about a ballet company that didn’t cap their Nutcracker offer and lost revenue on their offer.

Since the advent of these group-buying applications, many variants have cropped up. For example, Uniqlo’s Lucky Counter makes clear to the consumer the advantage of group buying, by lowering the price on the offer in real-time as more people sign up. Arts organizations also started implementing dynamic pricing, similar to the way in which airlines price their tickets.

iPhone sunset in the Andes by Gonzalo Baeza Hernández via Flickr.

Go mobile or go home: mobile app development and mobile ticketing In 2010 Wired reported “The Web is Dead”, meaning that the way people use the Internet is moving away from web access on a desktop or laptop computer to mobile applications. Arts organizations have started asking themselves if their website is mobile friendly and, along with companies like InstantEncore and Pop Media, have started to develop apps.

Pop Media has developed Cloudtix, which uses Tessitura to sell tickets in real time through mobile apps and download a scanable ticket to their phone.

Bill Predmore of Pop Media compares the rise of mobile apps this year to website development in 1997.  “Arts orgs started out with a ‘brochure site’ and slowly began to evolve as they realized their capabilities. Things will happen a lot more quickly this time.”

So if the web is dead, which is worth more investment: mobile websites or mobile apps? And if you are going to develop an app, which platform do you develop it for? While Apple’s iOS devices (including iPad, iPhone, and iPod) still outnumber Android devices, Android phones have overtaken iPhones in terms of market share.

Predmore advises companies to begin to look into all three: iOS, Android and mobile websites. “Things are changing rapidly and it’s difficult to know what’s going to be there a year from now. For this reason, many organizations are reluctant to make an investment. But patrons are going to expect you to be there and if you’re not, there’s a problem.”

Changing media consumption At the same time that Internet usage is shifting to mobile devices, the way audiences consume entertainment is changing. The introduction of tablet-style devices like the iPad  and 4G-capable phones running on Android means more people are consuming mobile entertainment, especially video , than ever before. iPad users are also more likely to complete video ads (63%) than desktop video viewers (53%).

In the past several years, performing arts organizations have started taking their performances outside of the theater and concert hall with initiatives like the Met’s Live in HD, San Francisco Opera’s Opera in the Ballpark, and most recently, L.A. Phil Live. In 2010, we saw a shift to more online streaming video. Sites like Tendu TV and classicaltv aggregate video of performances. Streaming on platforms like Livestream has become more commonplace, notably Chris Elam’s efforts with Misnomer Dance Theatre.  Recently YouTube announced that it would offer live streaming to its content partners, several of which are arts organizations.

Are you in the cloud? Photo: James Jordan via Flickr.

The privacy debate Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of how they are being tracked by marketers. At the same time advertisers are under more pressure than ever monetize their online investments as they cut offline budgets. Last year was notable in that two major companies have made privacy faux pas: Facebook over profile information and Google over Buzz. These controversies as well as the rise in location-based apps and ever-nichified Facebook ads have made people more aware of exactly how much information marketers have about them. (If you want to know how much personal information marketers know about you, check out rapleaf.com .

How does this apply to arts orgs? At the same time these privacy concerns have surfaced, arts organizations are being persuaded to move to shared service models, in which databases may be shared by multiple organizations, or have started using other platforms which use cloud computing (where the organization’s data is stored on outside servers). As patrons become more aware of where their information is stored, employees also worry about the security of cloud computing. At the same time, they wonder how secure their database was in the first place. Bottom line: arts organizations should remember that it is crucial to be transparent about their privacy policies to patrons.

Rise of location-based social media No discussion of arts and technology in 2010 would be complete without mentioning location-based platforms like FourSquare, GoWalla, Facebook Places, and Google Latitude. Foursqaure was up 33.2 million users in 2010 from 12.3 million users in 2009.

Arts organizations, most of which position themselves as serving local community, are starting to understand the potential for hyper-local platforms like this. Location-based applications are increasingly attracting young, urban influencers with disposable income—precisely the audience many arts organizations are trying to attract. People connect to geolocation apps primarily to “get informed” and “obtain promotions” rather than “to compete” to become mayor of their favorite locations.

2011 will likely determine which “check-in” application will dominate. As of November 2010 Facebook Places had 7 times more users than FourSquare, but Places users utilize the service less frequently. So, which platform will win out? Independent companies like GoWalla and FourSquare, or platforms emerging from established networks and services like Facebook and Google?

What do you think were the biggest trends in arts marketing in 2010? What do you see ahead for 2011?