With AI’s ability to automatically produce content and process complicated datasets with high accuracy, museums worldwide are exploring ways in which this innovative technology can help them better achieve their missions and advance accessibility efforts. Through case studies, learn about three applications of this technology: content digitalization, language accessibility, and visual description.
October was filled with new debates on AI policies, a halt to one of the most significant AI safety bills in the United States, and a host of new AI developments in video, music, and even podcasts.
Arts and cultural nonprofits often operate in multiple markets for earned and contributed revenue. With increasing attention on data-driven decision making, effective market orientation often depends on effective data use. This fundamental collection, transmission, use, and interpretation of data within an organization collectively contributes to what can be considered an organization’s data culture.
Museums have increasingly begun to volunteer their spaces as polling places, acting as a democratic vehicle for their communities and adding to the greater fabric of America’s election infrastructure. In doing so, they can support local democratic processes and prove to their communities that they are not unbreachable temples for the elite, but open platforms for the people.
As exemplified by the Hollywood strikes of 2023, we find ourselves in a new era of Artificial Intelligence in film and television. While studios are looking to cut costs, performers seek job security, and consumers seek quality content. Through research conducted in collaboration with facial motion capture technology provider Faceware Technologies Inc., Master of Entertainment Industry Management students at Carnegie Mellon sought to gain insight on how AI-generated content will transform existing industries, including how this technology could affect employment in the entertainment industry, content development, budgets, contracts, legislation, and privacy rights.
The successful future of the arts and arts organizations will include artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence operates in many spheres, from generative AI, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DALLe or VALLe, or OtterAI’s transcription tools to robots cleaning offices to machine learning algorithms. While the opportunities seem both endless and perhaps intimidating, strategic application of these tools can make a significant difference.
As arts institutions are in the midst of reopening plans, they are faced with new challenges as they seek to ensure the safety of their visitors, audiences, and staff in the COVID-19 era. The challenges and solutions differ depending on the industry, and whether it is a museum, performing arts institution, or film and television. Part 2 of this 3 part series explores the immerging reopening plans for the performing arts sector.
When implementing new technology, such as a new CRM system, many organizations have learned the basics of how to select a product or vendor. But what about after the technology is selected? It can be overwhelming to consider the unpredictable changes that will occur among the flow or your organization’s work and even among its culture. However, by taking steps to manage the change, new technology can be integrated into an organization much more smoothly.
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:
And please share with colleagues by clicking the "ShareThis" icon below.
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:
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.
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.
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 3rd 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.
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).
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.
“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 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 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 is helpful in finding out which tweets are most “effective”, specifically by finding out which tweets cause you to lose and gain followers.
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 AnalyticsThe 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on some of the latest updates to Foursquare's specials. To make the platform worthwhile beyond just a fun game for users, Foursquare has overhauled a lot of their services with version 3.0. This went beyond just specials, the location-based social network wanted to make using their platform a useful way for users to discover new places in their surroundings.
Boom, new algorithms that form a better recommendation engine for you and me. What does that mean for us non-techies? It means the 'Explore' tab, a new service that takes info from your check-ins, your friends check-ins and presents you with search results of nearby venues that are more relevant to your interests.
Hit the explore tab, type in something like 'art' or 'mexican food' and Foursquare will take into account all your and your friends past check-ins to come up with the most relevant venue. So not only will it tell you where a venue is, but why you should want to go there. In addition to searching, there are also buttons along the top focused on common venue types people are looking for. You might already be familiar with how recommendation engines work, it is how music sites like Pandora and Last.fm are able to suggest relevant material for their users.
So why should arts organizations care? Because this may be the simplest of all ways to participate in the location-based game. Claim your venue, add relevant information and start showing up in search results. Claiming a venue is free, gives you control over your brand, and will improve your search and recommendation results not only with Foursquare, but all of the apps and platforms out there using Foursquare's API (programming language and database) like Gowalla and hundreds of others.
While you're staking your claim with Foursquare, you may want to claim your venue on the two other big location-players - Facebook Places and Google Places. Google has some recommendation engines in the works and while Facebook doesn't offer one, claiming your venue there will still make you more visible to a very large group of users.
Claiming your venue on these three platforms is an easy and free way to take advantage of a fast-growing social media form. It's a simple step that may equal a return for your organization that a lot of other social networks can't offer - foot traffic.
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.
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.
Education & Best Overall: The ACMI Generator
Mobile: The AB EX NY iPad app
Exhibition: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
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
