Changing Up The Check-in Pt. 2: Recommendation Engines

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.

Image via blog.foursquare.com

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.

• Learn about claiming venues on Foursquare here.
• Learn about claiming venues on Facebook Places here.
• Learn about claiming venues on Google Places here.

Aluminum Foil Stage Curtains & Other Oddities

While cruising the net, trying to find the latest and greatest when it comes to arts management and technology, I tend to run across some pretty strange things. They often don't fit into the realm of the arts management focus of our blog, but dang it, they're just too awesome to keep to myself: I

The most stunning stage curtain, ever.

Artist Pae White has created for the Oslo Opera House what could arguably be the craziest main stage curtain to ever grace a stage. White scanned a piece of crumpled aluminum foil and then used a computer aided loom to weave the curtain out of different colors of cotton, wool and polyester. When standing up close, one can see the individual threads, but stand even just a few feet back and well.....well, just look at the picture below:

I went to Barcelona, and all I got was this crappy mini replica of myself.

BlablabLAB's Be Your Own Souvenir is a far cry from some of the cheap junk that you'll find at most souvenir shops. The group hacked a few Kinects, and with the aid of a 3-D printer, gave tourists on Barcelona's La Rambla Street the chance to scan themselves and create their own miniture statuettes. Check out the video below to see some of the results:

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Theater? We don't need no stinkin' theater!

Ok ok, I'm sure that was not the sentiment that Urbanscreen had when they set out to make WHAT IS UP?, a virtual site-specific theater piece. The piece is a pre-recorded performance, projected onto the wall of a typical dutch dwelling house in Enschede, Netherland. What makes this a projection a site specific piece, also called Lumentecture, is that the projection perfectly lines up with the architecture of the building. Using this technique, Urbanscreen creates an optical illusion of the building's walls giving way to a hidden theater within. Watch the trailer below to get the full effect:

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Social Media Spotlight: Telling Your Story With Broadcastr

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

So having some tie to location seemed like a good idea. If you think about the way that media works on the internet and has worked historically, you’ve got three major things: you’ve got content, you’ve got connectivity, and now suddenly you have context.

So content we know, content is the things we make and connectivity is a massive part of our lives now, whether that be through Twitter or Facebook or anything else. But context is brand new, because context not only means what content you’re consuming and how you are consuming it, but where you are when you consume it. Then it seemed to make sense, because good stories are married inherently to place and always have been. Whether you look in religion where you have holy spaces and the idea of a trace that was left behind by someone that was once there or an experience that once happened in a certain location.

It made sense, then, to have stories that were indexed by place and once we had that, we had the foundation for what became Broadcastr. Which is a simple way for anyone to record a story and pin it to a location, so that anyone in the world can hear that story, understand that place, and have a deeper and more meaningful connection with another person.

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So how does Broadcastr tie a story to a location? Do I need to be on a mobile phone in order for my audio to be pinned to that location?

Broadcastr is a way for anyone to tell their story, on any platform, web, android and iPhone, and then index it by location and category. You don’t have to be in a specific location in order to do that. So whether you tell your story into your phone or into your computer’s on-board microphone, you can place that story where it’s referencing in the world.

So for instance, if I told the story about going and getting my MFA in Brooklyn and studying with Michael Cunningham and that’s where I met Andy (Co-Founder of Broadcastr), I can then tell that story on any platform and actually pin it to Flatbush Avenue at Brooklyn College. It doesn’t have to be pinned at that exact moment.

So we teamed up with them in order to take the aural remembrances from cops, fire fighters, and families of victims, first responders and residents of downtown Manhattan. We actually took those testimonies and put them back into the World Trade Center site and we’re doing that of course through Broadcastr. So that on the ten year anniversary of 9/11, when you go to the WTC site downtown, you’re going to be able to actually walk through the memorial and Broadcastr will be an invisible layer that is part of the memorial. You’ll be hearing these voices that connect you to the real experience and the history the way that the people who were there remember it.

What we’re hoping is that it will do a couple of things. One, it’s very powerful, I mean when we test this thing and walk around the site now it’s incredible because instead of looking at a hole in the ground and thinking “ I remember when that happened.” It’s tough to grasp what the tone of the country really was then, but I remember it was a very, very moving moment. Instead, you can be brought right there so that the people who had the most powerful experience that day are going to be talking to you about it.

That does two things: One, it brings that space to life for people. But two, it creates a precedent for how we can start talking about these things in a public social space. Then of course, because Broadcastr is a two-way street, if you hear a story about 9/11 it will prompt you to remember your own story. You can immediately add that to the aural history that is growing in that site. You can just take your phone, click record and record your story right there on the spot. Over time what we are going to be doing is building this collective kind of rememberance at sites.

And we’re doing that all over the world with different organizations. So for instance, at Auschwitz you can do the exact same thing since we are working with the Shoah foundation. So you’ll be able to walk through Orca now, which was a death camp and instead of seeing a field, you’re going to be actually hearing the Holocaust survivors that escaped 60 years before. And that’s going to be a massive, massive change in experience for people that are younger and too young to be connected to events like that. Also for people that are really interested in how events are represented and who gets to tell the story, which I think is a very important change that’s happened with the advent of social media. The story no longer comes from the top down; the story can now come from the bottom up. The telling of this story and the agency to tell can be put back in the hands of the people that have had the experiences.

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In addition to listening to story as a user and contributing to Broadcastr as a storyteller, what are some of the additional ways that people can interact with audio posts?

Yeah, so you don’t have to be a passive listener or a active content creator in order to participate. You can actually be a curator or an aggregator of content. So for instance, let’s say you live in Milwaukee and there are 500 stories say right now in Milwaukee. And you’re like “Ok, these stories are pretty good, but you know what? There are ten of them that to me, really represent Milwaukee perfectly or represent my version of Milwaukee.”

You can take those ten stories, aggregate them into a separate playlist and I can share that playlist. So you can call from the collective, kind of dig in to the collective consciousness and pull out the little bits that you best feel represent some theme or some place. Then you can group those as a playlist and share that version of that place.  So you can imagine people creating definitive versions of different places by going through this aural record that we’re creating in real time.

Screenshot of the Broadcastr map and media player. Image via blog.bryantpark.org

Additionally you can share any item on Facebook and on Twitter and you can share it via e-mail. And you are going to be able in one week to embed it in a separate website, either as an individual item or as a little mini map that would be a subset collection of items. So  imagine, for instance, you’re writing a blog post about foreclosures in New Jersey. You can find five stories about people that have been foreclosed upon and actually embed their real voices into the blog post, just the same way you would embed a video from YouTube.

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When a lot of other social media platforms started to take off, some organizations were hesitant to adopt them out of fear of inappropriate, negative or even copyrighted content being recorded and attached to their organization is a public way. What are some of the ways they would approach a problem like this if they wanted to start using Broadcastr?

There are a number of things: One, just like on Facebook or on Twitter or on YouTube, you control your own username. So no one else is ever going to be able to upload content under your specific username, just like your Twitter feed is your own to curate.

That said, people can be uploading things and be talking about your organization for sure. Something that someone said to me recently in Austin, Texas at South by SouthWest is probably relevant here. When you go to talk to an organization and you ask them if they are on Twitter and they say “No, no, we’re not on Twitter. We’re not sure how to approach that, so we’re not there, we don’t have a presence there. We don’t think we have to be.”

Well, all you have to say to that organization is to go to Twitter right now and search the name of your organization. Because you think you’re not on Twitter, but I promise you, you are in some form. As soon as they’ll put in the name of their organization, what they’ll find is hundreds, if not thousands, of individual pieces of opinion that are part of, right now, a one-sided conversation about their organization. So just because the organization wasn’t there to engage, it doesn’t mean no one is talking about them on these platforms, they absolutely are. To me, it seems that an organization needs to embrace the place where people concerned with their organization are having the conversation and get involved.

That’s kind of the high level answer, the particular answer is that you can flag content on Broadcastr. So if something is actually slanderous, or would be considered something like slander or libel or hate speech or pornography, it’s up to you the community to police your space. So if you think those things don’t accurately represent your neighborhood or your place on the map, then you should flag them. And if they haven’t been rated by anyone and they’re been flagged, they’ll automatically be pulled from the service. So that allows for a level of self-policing.

Now additionally, items can be rated on Broadcastr. So if you’re engaged in the conversation and you’re creating great content and promoting that content, then hopefully other users will feel the same way and will rate your items very well. On Broadcastr you’re always seeing the highest rated items first for any given place. So it’s kind of up to those organizations to get involved and create content that basically best represents them and is the kind of content that their audience wants to engage with. That content will flow to the top, if in fact their assumptions are correct. I think it is important to engage in that way and to be part of the conversation and to respond as opposed to ignoring the crowd and the community and the opinions of the community.

There are other things too, such as if organizations are interested in embedding content in their own website, that’s a way that they can have a custom curated space. They can embed only a selection of content that they feel best represents them and that is a way to use Broadcastr to create a multimedia community-driven experience on another website that is more curated and in a way more restricted.

It’s tough to answer that question, because I was at an Ivy league school recently and their social media guy said that the school would not let them make a official Facebook page for this institution. He said the irony of that is that there are twenty unofficial Facebook pages for that school. All of those Facebook pages are putting out fallacious information about the school. So just because there is no official page and because there is 750 million users on Facebook, there is more ways for those 750 users to get that information within the Facebook community. So there is something a little bit backwards about the thinking there.

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On a more positive note, what are some of your favorite stories that have already been uploaded?

There is a bunch of great stuff. One of my favorite projects that we’ve been involved with is the Neo Futurists, which are a theatre performance troupe that originated in Chicago and now have a New York chapter. They have a show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and the show is 30 plays that get performed in 60 minutes. Every week they re-write a good portion of the show, so its been changing for however many the past few years that they have been doing it, but it always keeps the same format.

Image via waterdogmusic.com

They came to us early and said “We would love to do 30 plays in 30 blocks.” And Broadcastr, because it’s short form – a three minute maximum for most stories – is the perfect way for them to take their theater performance and use the world as their stage, as the saying goes. So if you go to second avenue in Manhattan, you can walk from Houston Street to 29^th Street and experience 30 location specific, audio, interactive, pieces of content. Some of them are directing you to do things, some of them are little songs, some of them are plays with multiple voices, some of them reference the location very directly, some more overtly. But it’s a curated experience that happens out in the world. So that’s been very exciting to work with them.

Broadcastr is a fantastic way to make literal this idea that you hear all the time, especially when talking with mission and message driven organizations, of giving the community a voice. People talk about that abstractly a lot, like “How do we give the community a voice?” or “What is the voice of the community?”

In this instance, as long as the members of that community can get to a computer or to a phone, and that computer might be at the public library, it doesn’t have to be a computer at home. But as long as they can get access, they can actually put their voice back into their community, in a very literal way. I think that’s very powerful because in a sense, by publishing your opinion and your memories and your reflections to Broadcastr, you publishing those things for the whole world to be able to hear. You’re representing not just your social circle, as you do when you talk on Facebook, but you’re actually representing a physical place.

I think that if Broadcastr succeeds, what it’s going to do is it’s going to show a person that in this age of social media and mobile computing, place is just as important as people.

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.

Changing Up The Check-in: Foursquare Updates Specials

Image via foursquare.com

Foursquare, the popular location-based social media platform, decided to shake things up a little at the annual South by Southwest festival last week. Rolling out their new 3.0 version, Foursquare has made some significant changes to their platform in the way it operates, most notably in the way it recommends venues and offers specials.

I'll be covering the changes to the recommendation engine in an upcoming post, but today I really want to talk about the new ways arts organizations can offer specials on Foursquare. A "Special" on the platform refers to an incentive that organizations and brands can attach to a venue that is unlocked when a Foursquare user "Checks In" and meets a certain criteria. Up until last week, these specials were limited to either the frequency a user checked in (1st time, 5th time, etc.) or if the user was the "Mayor", a title held by the user that checks in the most frequently at a particular venue.

While a great idea in concept, personally I felt the result was a little lackluster in practice. Becoming the Mayor of a venue is tough, requiring checking in at that venue a large amount of times to temporarily steal the title. While this may be easy to do for somewhere like a local coffeeshop, frequented everyday, it is unrealistic to offer this incentive for an arts organization. Then there is the average check in, some organizations have offered incentives like reduced ticket prices for having a certain amount of check ins, but this is often a one-time special. The hesitation to use a more tantalizing incentive may be the fact that organizations want a little more involvement than having a user hit a button on their cell phone once.

The game has changed with the release of Foursquare 3.0. More types of specials have been added and split up according to whether they are loyalty specials or customer acquisition specials. Plus, nearby specials now appear when a user hits the "Places" tab in Foursquare's mobile platforms, showing users which nearby venues are offering incentives for their foot traffic. Here's a look at how the new specials work:

Customer Aquisition

The Check-in Special - This is the run-of-the-mill, every-time-you-check-in kind of special. It allows organizations to attach an incentive that users can claim with every check-in and is the one most often seen on the platform. Many organizations may still want to take advantage of this by offering cheaper incentives, such as a dollar off admission, to encourage visitors to adopt Foursquare and take advantage of more rewarding specials in the future.

The Newbie Special - Most of the new specials say it right in the name and this is no exception, this rewards users only for their first time check-in. Organizations may want to take advantage of this for the same reason as the regular Check-in special, to encourage initial use of the platform.

The Flash Special - Now we start to get into some of the more interesting specials. The Flash special works like a flash sale, once a certain number is reached the special expires. It is first come, first serve. For example, say your special events are dragging a little bit for the first few hours, on average. A Flash Special can be used to create some interest in showing up first, such as "First 10 people to check-in unlock a private meet and greet with ______ !".

The Swarm Special - Swarm specials are all about building a crowd. Swarm specials are only unlocked if a certain number of users, set by the organization,  check-in at that organization's venue within a set three hour period. This can be a great way to reward a large crowd with an incentive that would be more attractive for a group event than for an individual. For example, an organization could  have a special encore from a performer if that night's swarm special is unlocked.

The Friend Special - This is by far my favorite new special. Users can only unlock this special by having a certain number of their foursquare friends, not just users that happen to be at the venue already, check-in alongside them. When paired with a great reward, this can be a great way to incentivize people to bring their friends along to your venue. The number of friends required to unlock the special is completely up to the organization.

Rewarding Loyalty

The Mayor Special - Hey now, we can't forget about the Mayor! This special works the same way as the old special, it is unlocked by the current Mayor of the venue. The Mayor is determined by which user checks in the most times in the previous 60 days and the check-ins only count once per day towards mayorship. This is so a user cannot stand in your lobby and just hit the check-in button over and over again until they have the mayorship.

Loyalty Specials - A little bit like the regular check-in special, this special rewards frequent visitors who are regularly checking in. One version of a Loyalty special gives users a goal of total check-ins to unlock a reward. Since you can set the number, organizations may want to pair this with a sweet reward for that user who visits over 100 times. Again, only one check-in counts towards this special per day. Another parameter organizations can set with Loyalty specials is the time that user has to reach the set goal, such as having a goal of 10 check-ins for one month. This type of special could be paired up with a more temporary event like an exhibition or a performance series.

It will be interesting to see if and how arts organizations take advantage of these new specials that Foursquare has launched. The biggest advantage to the service is that it is one of the few social media platforms out there that require users to physically be in the space. Coming up in a future post, I will go into some of the other improvements Foursquare has made to its platform, including the ways their new recommendation engine will help direct users to your organization.

Social Media Spotlight: Crowdsourcing Archives with Richard McCoy

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

Making the arts a more participatory experience is an exciting idea being developed by many arts organizations across the globe. Visitors to some institutions can now digitally tag artwork with their own unique descriptions or add photos of themselves to a community Flickr pool. Taking the role of participation even further, some organizations are turning to crowdsourcing, inviting the audience to help in the creation and documentation of art.

I recently had a chance to chat with Richard McCoy, Associate Conservator of Objects & Variable Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, about his use of crowdsourcing and public access tools to get the public involved in documenting public art.

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How did you get interested in documenting artwork online?

By 2008 basic versions of all of the tools that cultural institutions use to create, store, and share documentation about their artworks were freely available online (Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube), so I’d say my interest really got serious around this time.  I know it’s a bit nerdy, but I keep a pretty good record of my interests in documenting artworks online over on my Wikipedia User Page.  My basic thought was why not do it?  The investment is low and the potential for return is enormous.

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Why involve the public in the process?

To properly care for an artwork you have to care about an artwork; you have to recognize its existence within your community.  Many public artworks on display around the world are overlooked, their context and meaning forgotten on daily basis.  So to have the public involved is an important aspect of this project.  The more people that are involved in caring about and for public art and helping to document it, the better.

I think Clay Shirky has done a good job over the years explaining how the participatory web is radically different from our traditional notion of information sharing and collaboration.  His 2005 Ted Talk is still ahead of its time.  I agree with him in that we are just waking up to the notion of a large-scale participatory process that involves broad audiences using their “cognitive surplus” productively.

My interest has been more in community than public, though.  Documenting public art should be a community effort.  While it’s not the easiest thing to do, it’s a process that we have taught and developed with more than 40 IUPUI students.

We’re at a point where we can begin seeing that this is a project that should be operating on a global scale.  Right now there could be folks documenting a mural in L.A. and a small town in India.

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Where did the choice to use wikipedia as a teaching tool come from?

I first started using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in the fall of 2009 when professor Jennifer Mikulay invited me to co-teach an IUPUI Museum Studies Program graduate-level course, Collections Care and Management.

We created a project for our class to document all of artworks on and around IUPUI’s campus.  That semester our students created 42 new Wikipedia articles and uploaded 375 new images of the IUPUI artworks into Flickr. The result culminated in the creation of the IUPUI Public Art Collection and the beginning of WikiProject Public Art, which was first called Wikipedia Saves Public Art.

This year I taught the course by myself. I used WikiProject Public Art as a final project to document the artworks inside and around in the Indiana State House.  My students made 37 new Wikipedia articles and uploaded 272 images into Flickr.  We did all of the work within the confines of Wikipedia.  My hope was to model a project that could and should be repeated all over the country.

In addition to creating the Indiana State House Public Art Collection, I assembled all of the articles into in an easy-to-download book.  I wrote a summary of all of this documentation work in the article New Systems for Documenting Public Art on Liam Wyatt’s blog.

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I understand you and the class were recently recognized by the State of Indiana for this work.  What was that like?

We were tremendously honored to have both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the State of Indiana recognize our work with Concurrent Resolutions.  I’m most pleased about this recognition because it furthers the mission of the project: to raise awareness about the artworks at the Indiana Statehouse.

While  this recognition can be personally gratifying, the project is designed with the hope that the students will take ownership of it and its outcomes, as they are the ones who did the lion’s share of the documentation.

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Can you talk about the Public Art Documenter Project? How does it work and what are your goals for the project?

For a long time, I’ve wanted a mobile app that would allow for the easy documentation of public art.  The most basic component of any kind of documentation involved three components: location, photography, and the basic tombstone information about an artwork.  This would seem fairly easy to do with a mobile app.

Image via appbrain.com

When I found the mobile app creator, EpiCollect, which was developed at the Imperial College London, I was pretty excited.  With this tool I was able to quickly make the Public Art Documenter.  There are some down sides to this app, mainly in that it was developed with Google Apps, so it works really well on Droid phones, but not so well on the iPhone.  It’s also pretty tech-heavy, so it’s not all that easy to use.   I’ve been in conversation with the folks at Imperial College London who are in the process of creating the next version of this app which apparently will improve a lot of the iPhone bugs.

Also, with a number of friends, I’ve experimented with the potential for location-based applications such as Gowalla and Foursquare to serve this function.  With Gowalla, I’ve made a couple of “Trips” including the “Top 10 Public Artworks in Indianapolis” (http://gowalla.com/trips/557).

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Was there a specific reason you chose not to go through process of building an app of your own?

We’re really in an experimental stage with a mobile app.  We’ve considered applying for grants to develop and expand the project, including creating a mobile app.  But more than money, what the project really needs is a few institutional partners that are interested in using current technologies to document public art, or artworks in general.  While we’ve explored this with what would appear to be a few natural partners, including the Smithsonian Institution, who holds the archives for the important project Save Outdoor Sculpture!, we’ve yet to get anyone to directly support any aspect of the prospect.

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Crowd-sourcing archives is an exciting idea, but I can see some people arguing that it cannot compare to traditional documentation methods. How do you view your projects fitting in with current and past archival and documentation techniques?

This is a really interesting point to consider, and it goes not only to the storage of information, but the ownership of information and data.  When you work in Wikipedia you are applying a Creative Commons license to the information you create.  Also you are working collaboratively with a shared goal in a system that can be updated instantly by anyone in the world.  Because the information is built with this structure, it’s then actually owned by everyone and really no one.  This is a fantastic notion to consider vis-a-vis traditional documentation and sharing methods.

For example, compare our project to Philadelphia’s MuralFarm.org, Indianapolis’ Public Art Locator, or the Save Outdoor Sculpture! data. While this is all good data and information about public art, it’s stuck behind a website that is controlled by a very small handful of people.  All of these systems were designed to increase access to information about public art, but none are able to offer the kind of inclusion that’s possible with Wikipedia.

Plus in using Wikipedia you are actually invited to download the whole data set and keep it for yourself.  In fact, the information is licensed such that if you wanted to, you could use their book creator tool (the one I used to make the book about the Indiana State House Public Art Collection), create a book and then sell it for a profit, or just print it and have it on hand.  This is what the State House did with our information, so now they have the most complete records of their artworks in the more than 100 year history of the State House.

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Your projects all focus on primarily documenting public art, do you see these ideas and methods working well for other areas of the arts?

Of course! I recently had an intern working for me at the museum that developed an e-volunteer program that invites people to create Wikipedia articles about artworks in cultural instituions.  While we have a pilot underway at the IMA, we hope that other cultural institutions follow suit and invite their patrons to help document their collections.

Not only do many institutions lack the resources to basically document their collections, but few have recognized the value of incorporating a participatory audiences in the process.

The lack of cultural institutions with decently documented collections was famously spelled out in the Heritage Health Index Results, and reinforced in the 2009 Salzburg Global Seminar, “Connecting to the World’s Collections: Making the Case for Conservation and Preservation of our Cultural Heritage”, but few have recognized the need to open the doors and encourage a broad spectrum of participation.

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.

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.

Putting New Work on the Map

The ways in which we interact with maps and geography has changed dramatically in the past two decades. The use of interactive, online maps has become a commonplace activity, especially since the advent of Google Maps. The ability to visually discover and explore information is greater now than ever before. The technology of interactive mapping is now being applied to the arts. Two new projects are presenting exciting ways to visually explore and discover new works: With the New Play Map, visitors can visualize where new theatrical works are being produced in the United States and the ways in which they are connected. The website Hitlantis has created a sort of ‘heat map’ that lets users visually explore the new music being produced around the world. Both projects are fun to play with and the technology makes them extremely accessible and easy to use. Here is a little closer of a look at both these projects:

The New Play Map

Launched this past month, the New Play Map is a pilot project created by the American Voices New play Institute at Arena Stage. The institute began collaborating with web development company Quilted last spring to create a map that allows users to visually explore new theatrical works in the United States. The map gives visitors a visual snapshot of the new play sector and acts as a resource for those seeking out collaborators.

How it works

The New Play Map’s content is user-generated and visitors can explore and track new plays being developed throughout the US from information uploaded by the playwrights themselves.  The New Play Map is free to use and navigating the site will come naturally to anyone who has even a basic experience with a site like Google Maps.

To use the map, zoom in on a region of interest and click on one of three icons. Clicking an icon will bring up a sidebar with additional info and connections. The icons that look like people link to the playwrights, the calendar icons are the plays, and the building icons are the theatres themselves. Each icon’s sidebar includes a short bio of the playwright or synopsis of the new play. The sidebar also contains a list of related projects and affiliated organizations.

An example of the connections and sidebar menu that pop up when an icon is selected.

Red, dotted lines will also appear when an icon is clicked, showing the links between that specific work/playwright and how it is connected across the country. Each connection is numbered and corresponds to a description offered in the sidebar.

Filters can be applied on the map, and what sets this apart from something like Google Maps, is that the filters are not limited to geography alone. The filters are specific to the theatrical community with parameters such as operating budget, organization type and national membership affiliations. The ability to filter by special interest is also available, giving visitors a custom map of plays that are contemporary, experimental or focused on a specific multicultural group, for example.

Version one of the New Play Map is up and running with new plays being added everyday. Head over and check it out at newplaymap.org.

Hitlantis

Hitlantis, an internet startup from is a Helsinki, Finland, wanted to create an easier way for music lovers to wade through the multitude of new music online. Their solution is a sort of ‘heat map’ that visually groups and displays new bands based on their popularity. Users of the site can zoom in to their favorite genre and get a visual snapshot of what the hottest new bands are.

Movement on the map is based on a band’s popularity in the built-in social network of the site.  A band cannot just buy their way to the center of Hitlantis, they have to earn their visibility from the fans.

How it works

Popularity on the map can be read in two different ways, the proximity of a band to the map’s center and the relative size of that band’s icon. The closer a band is to the center, the 'hotter' they are, and this proximity determined by how often a song is played, ‘liked’, or purchased.  The better the music a band makes, the faster they move to the center of the map.

The band icons vary in size and the larger the icon on the map, the greater the overall visibility. The band’s icon size is determined by their number of fans, how much revenue has been generated by song purchases and the amount of audio the band uploads.

A closeup view of a band on Hitlantis and a typical sidebar menu.

All visitors can register with the site and set up a basic profile, but only the bands will appear on the map. A band’s profile contains biographical info, a comments section, a list of their fans, and most importantly, their music. Songs are played through a built in music player along the bottom of the map and the ability to create playlists is built into the player.

It’s important to note for bands that for all of the music they upload, they must retain 100% of the copyright. In addition to that, the music cannot have been previously published or be involved with any copyright agencies.

Registration is free or visitors can log in using their Facebook ID, but is not required if you just want to check out the site.  Hitlantis is free to everyone, but a monthly charge is required if bands wish to sell their music through the site. Try the map out for yourself at Hitlantis.com.

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These maps are fun to play with and aid in the process of discovering new work. The New Play Map may shape up to be a powerful tool because it offers many in the theatre community a easy-to-navigate resource for discovery of new works and sources for collaboration. Hitlantis is great because it aids up and coming bands with a free way to share their music and grow a fan base. Personally, I see the bigger takeaway from both projects being that both groups took advantage of a widespread and commonly understood visual format and utilized it in a unique way to fit their own missions. It's an interesting use of a tool and just begs the question, what other platforms are out there that we can leverage for the arts?

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.

Changing The Way You See With Augmented Reality

When looking ahead at what will be the most exciting technology for the arts in the coming year, augmented reality is bound to pop up in the conversation. You may be familiar with augmented reality already. The National Football League has taken advantage of this technology for years to project lines of scrimmage and game time information onto the field in real-time during television broadcasts. So what exactly is augmented reality (AR)? According to Wikipedia:

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics.

AR layers digital elements on top of our view of the everyday world. This overlay can be done in a number of ways: through the use of handheld devices like smartphones, through desktop computers with a webcam, by wearing specialized headsets, or by projecting a digital images/animations onto a real world location.

Since AR has the possibility to create such a unique visual experience, it naturally has attracted adopters from the creative community. Here are just a few cool projects taking advantage of AR:

DIY Day MoMA – Augmented Reality Art Invasion! On October 9^th, 2010, Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek decided they would circumvent the traditional art world and host their own exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art using AR. The artists took advantage of the augmented reality viewer app Layar, currently available only on iPhone and Android devices, to create a virtual exhibition of digital works. By downloading the Layar app and loading the “AR Exhibition” layer, anyone with a camera-enabled smartphone or mobile device can view numerous digital artworks throughout MoMA. This includes both 2-D and 3-D images and animations and an additional 7^th floor that only exists in the world of AR. The digital artworks have continued to be on display since DIY Day wrapped up in October.

The Virtual Public Art Project Also utilizing the Layar app, the Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP) takes the idea of AR artworks one step further by placing pieces around the globe. The artworks can be viewed in the round and from multiple perspectives, just as you would be able to with a real piece of public art. Check out some of the current works on display on VPAP’s website . If you’re interested in creating your own piece of AR artwork for the public, VPAP puts out multiple calls for submissions.               

The Macula Project – Mapping 600 years of history The Macula Project is comprised of a group of artists exploring the relationship between image, sound and the viewer. The city of Prague was searching for a way to celebrate the 600^th anniversary of the astrological clock tower situated in the center of the city and turned to the Macula Project for a creative solution. The artists at the Macula Project turned to AR for the project and projected this stunning work that took the audience through the 600-year history of the clock tower.  Macula was able to achieve this by digitally mapping the building beforehand and tailoring their animation so when it ran through a digital projector, the perspective lined up perfectly with the real life clock tower.               

The Getty Museum – Exploring the Augsburg Display Cabinet in 3-D If there is one frustrating roadblock shared across the gamut of art lovers, it’s the frustration over not being able to personally handle and explore a piece of art in a museum. The Getty Museum understood this burning desire and took advantage of AR technology to let their visitors have a more in-depth exploration of one of the pieces from their decorative arts collection. Using an online program launched within a web browser, a computer’s built-in webcam, and a printed out “AR tag”, an art lover can handle a 3-D model of a 17^th century collector’s cabinet. By rotating and tilting the AR tag, the cabinet will spin 360 degrees and various doors can be opened and explored.               

The University of Gronigen – Giving students X-ray vision Part of a permanent exhibit in their Hall of the Bernouilliborg, the University of Gronigen teamed up with Science LinX and Nanopodium to create a unique science experience for their students. The exhibit is comprised of multiple boxes covered with AR tags. By wearing a special set of glasses containing display screens and a camera, the boxes’ walls suddenly disappear for the user. The user can then tilt and turn the now ‘hollow’ box that contains various types of 3-D science-related models, such as a model of a chain of molecules.

The types of projects that are now possible with augmented reality are rapidly growing and the technology is some pretty exciting stuff to play with. But beyond the wow factor that comes with AR, what are some of the ways that arts organizations can use this technology in worthwhile and innovative ways? Can AR extend to projects beyond the visual arts? Are there ways that this technology can be used to engage with large audiences as well as the individual? I don’t think it is too far a stretch of the imagination to envision actors on stage reacting to digital props or musicians playing digitally created instruments. As with any new tech, it will be exciting to see how AR develops and continues to merge our reality with a digital one.

Google Apps: Cost Effective Tools For Your Organization

For smaller arts organizations and individual artists, buying various types of management software packages and setting up services for data back-up and storage can really eat into what may already be a tight budget. But having these software and services are essential to efficient, day-to-day management. This is where Google Apps could be a great, free to low-cost solution.

Google Apps is a suite of online software and storage tailored to the needs of organizations of different sizes. All of the apps (you can see a list of the core apps here) operate within your internet browser. This means that there is no software to be installed on your organization’s machines. This also means that updates and IT maintenance for the software will be handled for free by Google, though the service varies depending on which package you select.

If there is a more specialized need such as CRM or photo editing, Google Apps for Business comes with its own app marketplace.  Similar to the app stores for iPhone and Android, the marketplace has a variety of free, more specialized applications to add to your Google account. All of the apps are desktop applications, but many of them work for both desktop and mobile devices.

So using apps that run in an internet browser are nice, but where is the information saved? While you can save your information to a personal computer or device, data storage and back-up can also take place in cloud storage. One of the main advantages to cloud storage is that your data can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection. It is important to note that storage only comes with a Google Apps for Business account.

I will admit that some of these Google apps do not have the same depth and power as other software packages, like the Microsoft Office Suite, but they definitely get the job done and fill the majority of the needs for most day-to-day operations. If the specific utility you need isn’t available in one of the core apps, you can usually find what you need in the marketplace.

There are three different types of accounts :

• Google Apps (up to 50 accounts) - This option is free and allows your organization to add up to 50 user accounts. Comes with the basic core of google apps, but lacks some of the more specialized business features and support as the other options.
• Google Apps for Business - The business version comes with all of the amenities including apps, storage and support. The pricing of this version is based on how many users you have in your organization, each user added costs $50 per year.
• Google Apps for Nonprofits - While this option does not come with storage, it is more robust than the free version, plus customer support is offered. Google grants discounts (40%) to larger non-profits, of 3,000 or more, for the business version and offers smaller non-profits the education version for free.

So for many organizations that operate on smaller staffs and for individual artists, this is an extremely cost-effective way to get some quality management software and storage.

10 Arts and Culture Mobile Apps from 2010

Merely half a day away from the end of the year, today is a great day to reflect on all the different happenings in 2010. One of the big things I have been looking back on is the growth of useful mobile apps for arts and culture audiences and managers. Here is a look at ten of these apps from the past year selected by the Technology in the Arts team and you, our lovely readers:

The Florida Grand Opera | FREE

Available for: iPhone, AndroidThe Breakdown: A great app for the Opera lover in us all, the Florida Grand Opera app offers news about the company, events updates, listings of upcoming performances, and streaming audio of the 2010-2011 season. One aspect of the app I really enjoyed was the videos section, containing a multitude of interviews and performances from the FGO. The only real complaint I have about the app is the necessity to sign up for updates from FGO before being allowed access into the app.

Google Goggles | FREE

Available for: iPhone, Android

The Breakdown: Google Goggles is a visual search engine built into a mobile app. It utilizes your smartphone's camera to capture and scan an image, object, or landmark and perform a search online to provide information on it. This is a very fun app to play around with and can be very helpful when trying to identify an artwork without a clear label or an unknown landmark. The app is still in beta though and cannot identify anything that is not already currently online in some form.

The L.A. Phil | FREE

Available for: iPhone, Android, & Blackberry

The Breakdown: The LA Philharmonic app has a lot of same offerings as the Florida Grand Opera app in terms of news, media, and listings of events. What sets this app apart is the interactive Orchestra map, laying out the different groups of muscians in the LA Phil. When a user taps on a section of the orchestra, such as First Violins, they are directed to profiles of each musician with in-depth biographies. This app is packed full of great content and an excellent way to learn more about classical music and the people that perform it.

AMNH Explorer | FREE

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: The Explorer app from the American Museum of Natural History is a great guide for navigating a very large museum. The app acts as a personal in-museum GPS, finding your location and providing information on the exhibits within that area. The app can not only find your location, but provide turn-by-turn directions from one exhibit to the next. This may go against some museum purists love of getting lost within a museum, but on a busy day in a museum packed with visitors this app could be an incredible advantage.

Is This Art? | FREE

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: A fun app from the folks at Deeplocal and the Mattress Factory, Is This Art? is one way to win those age old arguments about what is and isn’t art. Users snap a picture of the art in question and open it within the app to test its validity in the art world. The explanations the app gives are often hilarious such as, "This makes me feel intellectually inferior, therefore THIS IS ART" and, "This piece is not accompanied by enough obtuse wall text, therefore THIS IS NOT ART". All of the images users put to the test can be uploaded to the project's ongoing blog.

Brooklyn Museum Mobile | FREE Available for: iPhone, Android, & Blackberry

The Breakdown: Another great app for a large museum, Brooklyn Museum Mobile has less of a focus on navigation and more on community and interaction. The app brings in aspects from social media by inviting users to add descriptive tags and/or "like" artworks from the collection. This acts as a recommendation system for other visitors and encourages a more participatory experience. The aspect I like about Brooklyn Museum's offering is that the app runs off of a mobile website, meaning that it is not device exclusive and anyone with a web-enabled device can join in the fun.

The Lighting Handbook | $4.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: This is a great app for all of you theater techies. The Lighting Handbook is exactly what it sounds like, an in-depth guide to all things lighting, conveniently in your pocket.

Chicago Gangland Tour | $2.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: Ever wanted to walk in the footsteps of famous gangster Al Capone? That's exactly what the Chicago Gangland Tour app helps you do, integrated with google maps to give users a handheld guide for a historical walkthrough of Chicago's mafia history. This app provides info on all the different sites historical relevance and invites users to add their own comments. My favorite aspect of the app is the drop-down menu where results can be sorted by subjects like murders, shootouts, and gangster hideouts.

At The Booth | $0.99

Available for: iPhone, Android

The Breakdown: At The Booth is a full-service app for attendees of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows in New York City. The main page updates with every launch of the app and includes the latest shows and theater locations. For each show the app provides info on the showtimes, ticket prices, discounts, synopses, links to reviews and videos, and nearby restaurants. Listings will appear with a pink undertone to let users know if there are long lines at the theater. The only real complaint I have about the app is that the listings are only viewable in list form, whereas a map option would really assist in seeing all that is available in the immediate area.

The Sundance Festival 2010 | $4.99

Available for: iPhone

The Breakdown: The Sundance Festival app acts as an online brochure for the annual film festival. In addition to offering videos and reviews on films being shown, the app gives festival attendees real-time updates as to what is happening with the film fest's various events and screenings. The one feature that this app lacks is a way to create custom schedules of screening times and events. This would be invaluable at a festival where multiple things are being offered at once and making the most of the your time requires a lot of planning.

Charitable Donations and the iPhone: What the App, Man?

As the year draws to a close and there is the last, big push for donations by non-profits, who wouldn’t love a one-click, donation button in their app on the iPhone? Well, Apple apparently. There has been some buzz lately over Apple’s policy towards charitable giving on the iPhone.

Photo from PC World

Apple’s policy is that charitable donations cannot take place within an app or through Apple’s app store. If users wish to make a donation, they have to be directed out of the app, through their web browser and may have to contribute additional information. While this may not seem like a huge deal, it does kind of ruin that wonderful impulse that a nice, big red “DONATE NOW” button would have.

So why hate on the big, red button? The answer from Apple has been that they do not want to be responsible for the charitable funds reaching their final destination. But as Jake Shapiro pointed out in a blog post on ars technica:

The excuse that “Apple doesn't want to be held responsible for ensuring that the charitable funds make it to the final destination” is a cop-out. Google Grants has tackled this already, and organizations like TechSoup and Guidestar do a sophisticated job of authenticating nonprofits and charities worldwide.

The  real reason may be that charitable donations are just of no interest to Apple. Apple receives 30 cents for every dollar spent in their app store and with a charitable donation, would only be able to claim a processing fee.

While companies like Google and Microsoft have been quick to point out that these problems do not exist with their mobile software, I don’t think this is about finding the one mobile software that perfectly serves the non-profit community. This current stink with Apple more clearly shows the importance of not putting all your eggs in one basket when it comes to developing an organization’s mobile strategy. If you want to voice your displeasure with Apple's policy, an online petition has been started over at care2 and it will be very interesting to see if and how Apple responds.

New Poll: What's Your Favorite App for the Arts?

As 2010 rolls to a close, Technology in the Arts wants to know: What were your favorite arts-related mobile apps of the past year? Which apps this past year were the best? The wackiest? The most engaging? Take a second and click the link below to let us know. Enter the name of the app, the platform you use it on (iPhone/Android/etc.), and why you think it's the best of the best. We'll be taking the most popular app choices and including your comments in our year-end app wrap. Created in 2005 as a grant-making and arts advocacy group based, United States Artists (USA) acts as an avenue for individual artists to find private funding for themselves and their projects.  Earlier this month, they entered into the foray of crowdfunding platforms with the launch of the USA Projects, a fund-raising engine that is specifically focused on funding individual artists and their projects through grassroots micro-donations.

Part social network, part fund-raising vehicle, the USA Projects site combines many aspects of other popular crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, RocketHub, and IndieGoGo.  While still in beta testing, the site has already garnered some major attention according to The New York Times:

In testing, the Web site attracted roughly 36,000 unique visitors and raised a total of $210,000, with an average of $120 from each of 1,500 small donors, Ms. DeShaw said.

Not bad at all for a recently launched crowdfunding platform for the arts. Still, there are some major differences between USA projects and the other crowdfunding sites out there. Here’s a look at some of the similarities and differences between USA Projects and its peers:

Similarities

• It’s all or nothing, baby – Like Kickstarter and Rockethub, USA Projects adheres to the “all or nothing policy” wherein projects must meet 100% of their stated fundraising goal, or the funds are returned to their respected donors.  Some people have seen this as a great motivator for their projects, while others claim it is a waste of time. This isn’t true of every platform though, IndieGoGo allows people to keep all funds contributed to their projects, even if the final fund-raising goal has not been met.
• The final countdown – As is common on crowdfunding sites, artists on USA Projects have three months in which to raise the money for their projects.
• Getting friendly – Most of the platforms out there have a social media element to them, and the USA Projects site is no exception. Users on the site can create profiles, follow artists and funders, send messages, leave comments, and view recent activity on the projects they have funded or have an interest in. This creates a more personalized experience as well as a stronger connection to the projects and the artists.
• Incentivizin’ – Crowdfunding sites mirror traditional donor campaigns in that different donation levels come with various perks and rewards.  Since the perks and rewards are determined by the artists, the endless possibilities are limited only by the artists’ capacity to deliver.  Rewards might range from a personal note from the artist to prints or video downloads of the resulting artwork, from private studio visits to the chance to sing back-up on the artist’s CD, etc.

Differences

• At what cost? - In order to meet the bottom line, sites like Kickstarter and RocketHub will charge a percentage of the final funds and for the credit card processing fees. These fees can amount from 5-8% of a project’s total funds raised.  Since United States Artists is a not-for-profit organization, there is no fee attached to the projects.

  [Correction: According to an FAQ on the USA Projects Web site: "81% of every dollar pledged goes directly to the artist’s project, and 19% supports USA’s programs for artists and the site’s administration." So with this information, it appears that the percentage of funds received by US Artists is two or three times the percentage received by other crowdfunding sites. -- Hat tip to Justin Kazmark.]

• Who gets to play in the sandbox? – Now we hit the major difference between USA crowdfunding and the other platforms out there: not just any artist can add a project to the site.  In order to appear on USA Projects, the artist in charge must have received a previous grant or award from a USA Project Partner or recognized organization.  Visit the main website here to view all of the recognized organizations and their award/grant programs.

This requirement for artists to have been granted a USA grant, or equivalent from a partner organization, in the past in order to pilot a project raises some interesting questions about this model of crowdfunding:

• Is the policy too exclusive? Requiring grants or awards in order to even start a project excludes a large number of artists right off the bat. And while there are a considerable number of organizations partnering with USA, they do not cover the full spectrum of creative professionals in the United States.
• Does the grant/award requirement go against the spirit of crowdfunding? One of the exciting aspects of crowdfunding is that virtually anyone can start a project and find the funders to make it happen.  So what happens to all the first timers? The energetic artists with a great idea and the will to make it happen, but lacking the professional background to make it onto the site? It can be argued that much of the success individuals have had on sites like Kickstarter can be attributed to the strength of the idea behind the project, not necessarily their past accomplishments.
• Will having “approved” artists act as an incentive for people to donate larger amounts? There is definitely a reassurance when donating to an artist who has had some previous success and support. But most existing crowdfunding platforms already have the reassurance of returned funds and set time limits, so how big of an impact will having pre-approved artists make?  Will USA’s stamp of approval result in more donations or larger donations for these artists?

It will definitely be interesting to see how the USA Projects platform grows over time and if the requirements for projects will stay the same or evolve with that growth.  Additionally, how might this model for crowdfunding the arts affect other existing platforms?

Planning for Engagement: Tech Strategy & the Visitor Experience

Earlier this week, the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum hosted a talk by Nina K. Simon, author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 blog. Simon works with museums throughout the country to develop programs for improving visitor engagement.

Simon brought up some great ideas about the ways in which museums could use programming to increase engagement and create meaningful experiences between visitors.  Might arts organizations be able to apply her ideas about museums when designing their own strategies with technology and social media?

Here are a few of her ideas from the talk and how I think they might be applied:

Museums should be seen as places for everyday use

Simon argued that many museums are seen as tourist destinations that have a long-standing stereotype of being a place to be visited maybe only once a year. This is also true for many other types of arts organizations.  Many of us would like to see that change and for arts organizations to become places that people consider frequenting practically everyday. Social media could be a strong tool for stimulating this impression. Offering frequent, engaging content online and creating a personal connection with our organizations’ constituents can help counter the idea that arts organizations are aloof and impersonal tourist destinations.  Social media offers an opportunity to communicate the frequent, sometimes daily offerings of your organization.

Museums should be trusted hosts for social experiences

Simon spoke last night about the success some museums have had with programs that involve voting, encourage competition, and prioritize face-to-face interaction between visitors.  Arts organizations could apply this idea towards utilizing social event sites like meetup.com, where the end result is a real-life, social interaction. Or this idea could be applied towards using such tools as real time tagging of artworks from any discipline or mobile device voting systems as a way to create conversation and interaction between visitors. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra went the mobile voting route when they had audience members vote, via text, to choose which encore the symphony performed.

Museums should be places for seeing and exploring as well as sharing and making

Another great way to engage visitors in a meaningful way is to encourage them to share their experiences of the organization with their friends and to create their own content. Social networking sites are centered on this idea of sharing experiences online and many organizations have taken advantage of this by encouraging their visitors to share photos and stories on the organizations’ social networks. The Vancouver Opera has a flickr fashion page that gives visitors who have “dressed to the nines” a place to shine online. The Mattress Factory’s iConfess is a confessional booth for visitors to express their ideas about the museum and publish those ideas directly to YouTube. Photos and personal experiences are definitely visitor-created content, but current technology can push this idea of participation even further. The success the Guggenheim had with YouTube Play, an online exhibition of user-created videos, and online projects like The Johnny Cash Project, where users re-interpret a Johnny Cash video by drawing over each frame, are two great examples.

As technology and social networks continue to expand and grow at a rapid rate, it’s hard to know which to develop programming for. These ideas presented at Ms. Simon’s talk can serve as great starting points to that conversation. As your organization moves forward developing technological programming, some questions should be asked, such as: Is the technology serving the end goal of bringing people to our institution? Is it helping to create a worthwhile experience for visitors, or is it just tech for tech’s sake? How varied of an audience can a particular technology or social network reach? Are there better, low-tech solutions to visitor engagement? New technology and advances in web 2.0 can offer powerful tools that can help expand audiences and increase visitor engagement, but remember to step back and look at which strategy best serves your organization's visitors and creates a meaningful experience.