The Art of Participatory Culture - Learning to Play WITH Our Audiences

This article was originally a speech for TEDxMichiganAve delivered by David Dombrosky on May 7, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Confucius. He said, “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” This quote has become one of my touchstones because it reminds me that: life is experiential, and the most resonant experiences in my life were ones in which I was an active participant. The first time I sang a solo for a public audience. Writing and performing a solo theatrical performance in college. Learning how to tango earlier this year.

If the arts community agrees that we want audiences to have deeply resonant experiences with the arts, then the question arises, “How can artists and arts organizations go beyond telling their audiences about the work or showing the work to patrons and actually INVOLVE them in the work?”

Technological advances over the past decade have propelled us into a highly participatory culture, wherein individuals no longer simply consume culture, but they now actively produce and contribute to culture. In 2006, media scholar Henry Jenkins and his colleagues published a white paper entitled Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture in which they described five defining elements for participatory culture.

Jenkin's 5 Traits of Participatory Culture. Image from OpenParenthesis.org

With this article, I would like to address the question of how artists and arts organizations can involve audiences in their work by highlighting how a number of artists and organizations exemplify the defining elements of participatory culture.

#1 – “A participatory culture has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement.”

We see evidence of this every day. The number of free web tools and mobile apps that have been released over the past decade is astronomical. With each successive release, the barrier to artistic expression and engagement is lowered that much more.

One recently released, free tool called Broadcastr allows people to record 3-minute audio segments and pin them to specific locations on a map that is available on their website as well as through their mobile application.

Many of you may know the Neo-Futurists, a theatre performance group originally established here in Chicago. Their New York City chapter has a show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind which contains 30 plays performed in 60 minutes. Earlier this year, they used Broadcastr to create 30 plays in 30 blocks. So if you go to Second Avenue in Manhattan, you can walk from Houston Street to 29th Street and experience 30 location-specific, interactive pieces of audio content. Some of them direct you to do things, some of them are little songs, some of them are plays with multiple voices, and some of them reference their locations very directly.

The technology required to do this? Either a computer with speakers and a microphone OR a smartphone. That’s it.

#2 - A participatory culture has strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

Over the past two years, choral composer Eric Whitacre has worked with singers from around the world to create “virtual choirs” for the performance of his compositions. Participating singers download a PDF version of the sheet music for their vocal part. They watch a YouTube video of Whitacre conducting the music, record their vocal tracks, then send the tracks to Whitacre for final editing. Whitacre and his producer then combine all of the vocal tracks together into a single audio composition and syncs it with a video featuring a virtual riser with the floating faces of each of the singers performing the piece.

His most recent virtual choir composition entitled “Sleep” features 2052 singers from 58 different countries. As of today, the video has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube. His 2009 virtual choir composition “Lux Aurumque” has had over 2.4 million views.

#3 - A participatory culture has some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

One organization which exemplifies this element is the San Francisco Symphony. With their Community of Music Makers program, the symphony serves amateur adult musicians and promotes active participation in music-making and lifelong learning. Community of Music Makers includes workshops and events for amateur vocalists and instrumentalists in symphony’s performance hall, where participants are able to improve their skills. They also receive live and online coaching sessions from the symphony’s musicians and artistic staff. A chamber music convening service serves as a clearinghouse to help individual players and ensembles connect each other and identify performance opportunities in the local community.

The lesson here? Learn to love amateurs as they are likely to be a strong core from which to further develop your audience.

#4 – In a participatory culture, members believe that their contributions matter.

The Brooklyn Museum pioneered crowd-curation in 2008 with its photography exhibition Click! First launched through an open call for artists to submit photos related to the theme of “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” the artwork was then made available online for anyone to curate. This year, they are taking another spin on this concept with the exhibition Split Second: Indian Paintings, which invited the Brooklyn Museum’s online community to participate in a project that will result in a small installation of Indian paintings from the Museum’s permanent collection in July 2011.

The first stage of the project explores split-second reactions: in a timed trial, participants were asked to select which painting they prefer from a randomly generated pair of images. Next, participants were asked to write in their own words about a painting before rating its appeal on a scale. In the final stage, participants were asked to rate a work of art after being given unlimited time to view it alongside typical interpretive text. Each part of the exercise aims to examine how a different type of information—or a lack thereof—might affect a person's reaction to a work of art.

Once the exhibit opens in July 2011, visitors will be able to view a small selection of the paintings that generated the most controversial and dynamic responses during the evaluation process, accompanied by a visualization and analysis of the data collected.

With both of these experiments from the museum, the online participants had a clear understanding of how their contributions would matter to the overall project.

In April of this year, choreographer Jonah Boaker debuted FILTER at the Ferst Center for the Performing Arts at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. FILTER explores how the audience can serve as a collaborative filter for the performance through the use of a mobile application.

Interview eith Jonah Bokaer about FILTER.

Boaker worked closely with students from the university’s 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. Boaker’s approach to participation actually allows the audience to co-create the artistic experience in real-time.

#5 - In a participatory culture, members feel some degree of social connection with one another

Okay, so my absolute favorite exemplar of this element is the MP3 Experiment created and hosted by Improv Everywhere in New York City. Begun in 2003, the concept is quite simple. Improv Everywhere puts an original mp3 file online (usually around 45 minutes long) that people download and transfer to their iPods. Participants then: synchronize their watches to a clock on the organization's website, venture out to the same public location, and blend in with the crowd. At the predetermined time, everyone presses play. Participants then carry out coordinated instructions delivered to their headphones via narrator “Steve,” and everyone around them tries to figure out what in the world is going on.

In 2010, over 3,000 people participated in a MP3 Experiment in Midtown Manhattan. The event started in retail stores and progressed to Bryant Park for the narrator’s surprise birthday. The event ended with a massive toilet-paper-mummy dance party.

The next Mp3 Experiment in New York is scheduled for July 16, 2011. Stay tuned to the Improv Everywhere site if you're in New York and wish to participate.

Something to consider about all of the artists and arts organizations that I’ve mentioned here is that they all invite the audience to play.

As an industry, we have spent so much of our time playing FOR the audience or playing TO the audience. In order for our sector to thrive in this participatory culture, we must now invest a significant amount of time and energy exploring ways to play WITH the audience.

Tech tools for your arts job search

After two years writing for Technology in the Arts, I am leaving the Center for Arts Management and Technology. The unfortunate part about being a graduate student is that you will have to leave a place you love after a certain number of years, and my number is up! Special thanks to David and the rest of the CAMT staff for making the last two years amazing, educational, and memorable. I am very excited about my new position with the data-driven arts and entertainment consulting firm TRG Arts. I have been hired as the Strategic Communications Specialist, which means I will serve as a writer and editor for the firm’s consulting projects, Data Lab research and analytics projects, and a contributor to TRG’s knowledge center online.

Before I leave Technology in the Arts, I wanted to share some of the secrets I learned during the last few months of looking for arts jobs, mainly at non-profit organizations. Because nonprofits usually begin their fiscal year in July, new positions at these organizations are often posted in the summer. That means now is the prime time for you to find your new dream job in the arts.

Here are my favorite tech tools to help you find that job:

Changedetection.com

Arts jobs often need to be filled quickly, which also means the time you have to apply is limited. We’ve all had the experience of finding a great—no, perfect—job and finding out that the “apply by” date has passed or being informed after you’ve submitted your resume that the company had already extended an offer to someone.

Changedetection.com comes in handy when you know that there is a company (or companies) you’d love to work for. Obviously you aren’t going to check in on the employment page of their website every day. Better that you just be notified when they post a job, right? Well, through the magic of technology, you can find out when that employment page changes. Changedetection checks the page every day, week or month (you specify which) and sends you an email when there has been a change.

If there is a specific geographic location you know you’d like to work in, changedetection can help too. For example, I was looking for jobs in Portland at the beginning of my search. I looked on the arts council website and there wasn’t a job board, but I wasn’t going to let a silly little thing like that stop me! What the arts council site DID have was a listing of all the arts orgs in Portland. I put a changedetection on the employment page of each organization I was interested in and got on with my search.

The downside of tracking all these pages is that you might have to sort through some jobs that aren’t for you. For example, I looked mainly at full-time marketing jobs, but I was notified for ANY job at those companies, including development and box office jobs, and in some cases, internships. However, you can take this as an opportunity to build networks. If you see a great job in finance, maybe you have a friend who looking who also happens to be a finance whiz. Forward the job to her and not only have you strengthened your friendship, but also she may want to return the favor if she comes across a job that fits you.

I would recommend setting these up relatively early in your job search and keep adding as you find companies that are of interest to you. This way, you will also see which jobs come up and how frequently as well as important information like salary ranges and organizational structure information. (For example, will you be working for someone who is a new hire herself/himself? Is there a new Executive Director at the org?)

The interface for monitoring a page on ChangeDetection.com

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has attempted to tout itself as a job-finding service. However, at the early-career/emerging leader level, I find that is less helpful for finding jobs and more helpful for simply networking. There’s not that many headhunters out there for arts jobs, except in the executive level and maybe for IT people.

Anyway, how many times have we heard that the arts world is a small world? I use LinkedIn to see if there’s anyone I know who may know someone at the company I am applying to. If your relationship is good with that person, ask them to put in a good word for you.

Sometimes LinkedIn groups will have job postings; I haven’t found this to be true for most of the arts admin/management groups though. Please comment below if you know of a good group for this.

GuideStar

For non-profit organizations, it’s essential to check out the company on GuideStar. GuideStar is a free service that gathers and publicizes information about nonprofit organizations. Much of the information is geared toward donors and foundations, but there is a lot of useful information on it for the job seeker.

Once you register (free), you have access to almost any arts organization’s 990 tax forms, which means you can see what the organization’s budget size is and how they are doing financially. Note that for many organizations, the most recent year might be 2008 or 2009, so the information could be slightly dated or influenced by the recession—which is still important to know. The 990 serves not only as a way to see if the org has a record of keeping a balanced budget, but also as a historical snapshot of the organization, in terms of grants received, senior staff turnover, and capital campaigns and similar projects, among other things.

GuideStar is also extremely helpful to estimate salaries, especially if you are applying to a director-level position. The IRS requires non-profits to list the salaries of their five highest-paid employees. This is pretty valuable information, as the size of most non-profit arts organizations means that you aren’t likely to find very accurate information on that exact job at that exact organization.

Arts Jobs Sites

One of my friends posted a status update recently “wondering if CareerBuilder is really a builder”. I replied that all it had “built” for me was piles of emails in my spam folder. Personally, I’ve had a lot more luck overall with industry-specific sites, some of which can be used in conjunction with changedetection, as discussed above. (Bonus: The industry-specific sites manage to present you with jobs without asking if you want information from University of Phoenix every other time you go to look at a job. Just saying.)  Here are my favorites:

General:

• CAMT’s own ArtsOpportunities
• Americans for the Arts' Job Bank

By discipline:

• Playbill Job Listings (mostly theatre)
• Theatre Communications Group's Arts Search (need a log-in and password for this one)
• Association of Performing Arts Presenters Job Bank
• Opera America Job Listings (also available as an RSS Feed)
• Dance USA Jobs in the Arts
• Association of Children’s Museums
• American Association of Museums' jobHQ
• Chronicle of Higher Education (mostly faculty positions at colleges and universities)
• Also, Createquity will occasionally post interesting opportunities, so that is worth adding to your RSS feed if you haven’t already.

State and local arts councils may have a good job posting site, depending on where you’re looking to find a job. For example:

• Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance
• Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington (Washington D.C., not Washington state)
• New York Foundation for the Arts

Lastly, if you have an interest in development or program management, heads up! There are a few sites/ email alerts that I’ve found especially useful:

Philanthropy News Digest (A service of Foundationcenter.org)

PND has created a job alert system that will email you a daily summary of recent jobs in your area of interest. I cast my net wide by checking a lot of states and position types (communications, development, program management, etc) when I signed up for the alerts. I now get about 15 job postings a day. The fields of the organizations are quite diverse too. A recent email contained jobs from Napa Valley Opera House, University of Chicago, the Rainforest Alliance, and Vera Institute of Justice.

Chronicle of Philanthropy

Chronicle of Philanthropy posts mostly development jobs, which, like PND, you can sort by location, position type, and the field of the organization (education, health, museum, etc).

DotOrgJobs

It’s also worth mentioning that DotOrgJobs is good for fundraising jobs and other nonprofit jobs; however, I have not seen a lot of arts-specific jobs from them. You can subscribe via email or RSS feed.

On organizing email alerts:

You might be saying to yourself, “That’s a lot of email alerts to deal with.” I use gmail and have set a rule to have these emails automatically labeled “job search” and archived so that they don’t clutter up my inbox. Then I set an alert on Google Calendar reminding me to go through them once a week, so that I actually read them! This can also easily be done with Outlook.

Do you know of any other good sources for arts jobs? If so, please post them below!  Happy hunting!

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

1) when you have a large customer base

2) when you need enterprise-level social media analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of Social Media Analytics, Part 1

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

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

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

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

It’s not just the arts, though.

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

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

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

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

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

Museum crowd-curation and the way we live now

Should more museums follow the Brooklyn Museum’s lead?

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

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

What is it?

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

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

Selection of photographs from Click! by the Brooklyn Museum

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

Why is crowd-curation so intriguing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I

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.

I

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.

I

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.

Upcoming Webinar - Google Analytics - Boot Camp for Beginners

Google Analytics - Boot Camp for BeginnersTuesday, March 8, 2011 2:00pm - 3:30pm Eastern Register today for $25 Presenter: David Dombrosky

Google Analytics is by far the most widely used website analytics software, and it's free.  Yet many artists and arts managers pay little attention to what the analytics data is telling them about their websites.  Very few of us actually use the data to inform decisions about the design of our sites and the content that we post on our sites.

In this 90-minute webinar, we will:

• Explore the various types of data captured by the Google Analytics service
• Review methods for charting traffic to your site driven by your social media accounts
• Discuss what the numbers actually mean and their implications for your site and your visitors
• Articulate strategies for utilizing Google Analytics to make decisions regarding website design and content

David Dombrosky is the Executive Director of the Center for Arts Management and Technology (CAMT), an applied research center at Carnegie Mellon University investigating ways in which arts organizations can use online technology to more effectively meet their goals. He frequently presents technology and social media workshops for arts conferences – most recently for The Association of American Cultures, Performing Arts Exchange, Chorus America, Opera America, College Art Association, and Grantmakers in the Arts.

Do You Have Trust Issues? - Data Sharing and the Arts

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

I recently had the privilege of facilitating a roundtable discussion in New York City focusing on issues related to data sharing among arts organizations. As Tiffany Bradley, Development and Marketing Specialist for Fractured Atlas, recently wrote:

As more organizations lead collaborative efforts, the implications of sharing data come to the forefront. Data sharing – whether for marketing, ticketing, fundraising purposes – raises a host of issues. Does pooling information about patrons lead to greater revenues for all parties? Or do organizations risk a negative response from patrons?

Hosted by Fractured Atlas as part of their “Issue Brunch “series and streamed live on the Internet via Ustream, the conversation featured the thoughts and voices of six arts professionals working with arts organizations, including NAMPRadio’s Maris Smith. While the roundtable covered a lot of ground surrounding the benefits and challenges of sharing data between arts organizations, the issue of trust emerged as the bonding force at the heart of all data sharing relationships.

Let’s face it. The idea of giving our data to someone else is anxiety-producing for most organizations. How do we know that they will abide by our agreement and use the data ethically? Yet, if we never place our trust in others, thereby initiating the relationship-building process, then we will never reap the benefits that may come from a data sharing relationship.

Now before someone out there becomes paralyzed with data sharing anxiety, relax. You already engage in data sharing relationships based upon trust. For example, many of us utilize Google Analytics to track visitor interactions with our websites. When we agreed to use Google’s service, we also agreed to share our data with Google. We acquiesce that Google will use our data to contribute to the web traffic data they have aggregated over time and for particular types of websites. However, we trust that Google will never give our websites’ specific data to anyone else without our permission.

Okay, I can hear some of you out there saying, “But that is an example from a service provider; it’s different to talk about sharing data with another arts organization.” No, it’s not. Data sharing relationships between arts organizations should have clearly articulated agreements detailing the data to be shared, the limits of what may be done with that data, and what contributors of the data will receive in return. Yes, these should be written agreements – or at least electronic agreements executed with digital signatures.

And just in case you skimmed over the last item of things to be detailed in data sharing relationships, I’ll rephrase myself. Data contributors should receive something in return for contributing their data. We are talking about data sharing relationships, not data giving relationships. Now, the quid pro quo of a data sharing agreement may simply be that the data collecting organization will provide contributors with overall or customized reports. That’s fine as long as the data contributors have a clear understanding of what they will receive in exchange for adding their data to the larger pool. Far too often, organizations may feel pressured to participate in data collection initiatives and surveys. One of the most important ways that you can maximize your data sharing relationships is to make certain that it is mutually understood by all parties what you will be receiving as a result of contributing your data.

While trust must be given, it must also be earned and respected in order for any data sharing relationship to grow. For example, Elliott Marketing Group has been working on two data sharing projects with numerous arts organizations in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2004, they worked with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to establish the SmArt database linking patron files for arts organizations in the city’s downtown cultural district for targeted marketing campaigns. In 2007, they partnered with the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council to launch the STAR Direct Marketing Database, which allows smaller and mid-sized arts organizations in the Pittsburgh region to pool their patron data and utilize consulting services as well as “best prospect” lists for more efficient, targeted promotions.

The success of these data sharing programs did not happen overnight. The arts service organizations, the organizations contributing data, and the marketing group have spent years developing trust relationships with each other. Now, they have years of collaborative data, and the participating organizations clearly understand what they must contribute to the project and what they will receive in return. With each successive year, the data deepens. Correspondingly, the level of trust each of the contributing organizations has with the arts service organizations and the marketing group also deepens.

A final note on trust in data sharing relationships – don’t break it. Once trust is broken in any relationship, it rarely, if ever, regains its previous depths. For many of us, our data is a precious resource not to be taken lightly. So when a partner breaks our trust with them, our instinct is to take our data and end the relationship. When you negotiate the agreements for your data sharing relationships, always be certain to include an exit clause.

As I mentioned at the top of the article, the issue of trust is just one of many areas that we discussed during the roundtable on data sharing. To learn more about the roundtable, check out the preview video below or view the full discussion at Fractured U.

Data Sharing & Arts Organizations - Take Part in the Conversation

Our friends at Fractured Atlas are relaunching their Issue Brunch series and have asked me to facilitate a discussion on the benefits and challenges of data sharing among arts organizations. As Tiffany Bradley, Development and Marketing Specialist for Fractured Atlas, recently wrote:

As more organizations lead collaborative efforts, the implications of sharing data come to the forefront. Data sharing - whether for marketing, ticketing, fundraising purposes - raises a host of issues. Does pooling information about patrons lead to greater revenues for all parties? Or do organizations risk a negative response from patrons? Integrating the range of software that arts organizations use is also a problem in its own right.

This panel discussion will be streamed live on February 11, 2011 at 1:15 pm EST via UStream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fracturedatlas. Online participants will be able to engage one another in discussion and submit questions for the panel.

Panel participants include:

• Deborah M. Abramson - The Pew Charitable Trusts
• Joe Harrell - Alliance for the Arts
• Adam Huttler - Fractured Atlas
• Barbara Janowitz - Theater Subdistrict Council/City of New York
• Chrisopher J. Mackie, Ph.D - Open Health Tools
• Maris Smith - Situation Interactive

So what has your experience been like with data sharing among arts organizations?  What benefits have you received?  How did you approach the organizational and technological challenges?  Leave a comment below and be sure to join us on Friday for what is certain to be an engaging conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of Technology in the Arts 2010 -- David's Favorites

As we move into 2011, it's time to take a look back at my favorite articles and podcast episodes from Technology in the Arts in 2010.

My Top 10 TITA Articles (in chronological order)

1. Building Audience Diversity Through Social Networking - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 -- Amelia investigates why arts organizations use certain social networking sites but not others (such as ethnically specific sites like Black Planet) and what impact this has on their ability to use social networking as a tool for building diverse audiences. [Okay, okay...I'm counting this three-part series as one really looooonnnggg article.]

2. SEOoooo….what? Improving your organization’s search engine optimization. -- Corwin takes a look at search engine optimization: what it is; why it is important; and what you can do to optimize it for your website. [And it was published on my birthday, which makes it extra special.]

3. Micro-donations: Proving Size Doesn’t Always Matter -- Joe highlights reasons and tips for starting a micro-donation campaign for your organization.

4. Social Media Spotlight: Vancouver Opera -- Amelia kicks off our Social Media Spotlight series by interviewing Ling Chan, Social Media Manager for the Vancouver Opera, about her social media strategy and experiments.

5. Online Group Discounts and the Arts - Tara unearths some of the buzz around the use of online group discount sites like Groupon and Living Social.

6. Is your organization engaging older adults through social media? -- Molly questions our assumptions about social media sites as places to primarily engage younger audiences.

7. Going Mobile - Websites vs Apps -- Reprinted from Americans for the Arts' Arts Marketing Blog Salon, I break down the differences between mobile apps and mobile websites with an eye toward where arts organizations should invest their time and money.

8. The Handheld Guide: Experimenting with Mobile Technology in Museums -- Tom digs deeper into mobile apps by exploring how they are used by and within art museums.

9. Social Media Spotlight: The Guggenheim and YouTube Play -- Thomas interviews Guggenheim Associate Curator Hanne Mugaas about YouTube Play, a biennial celebrating creative talent in the realm of online video.

10. 7 steps to a Successful Facebook Ad Campaign -- Tara discusses the benefits of and best practices for creating Facebook Ads.

My Top 4 Podcast Episodes (in chronological order)

#66 – Google Wave, Google Buzz and the iPad -- A humorous (yet informative) conversation with Brad, Amelia and me wherein I make this ridiculous prediction that the iPad was not going to take off. LOL.

#70 – Discussion of "Theatre & Social Media in 2009″ with Devon Smith -- Pat interviews Yale Repertory Theatre's Devon Smith about her research report “Theatre & Social Media in 2009.”

#71 – Audience 2.0, Smartphone Apps and Tips for Working with Developers -- Brad, Jeff and I get into a rowdy conversation about everything from the NEA's Audience 2.0 report to smartphone apps for the arts.

#78 – Seven Digital Trends and Their Implications for the Creative Sector -- My interview with thought leader and arts consultant Brian Newman about trends in the technology sector and what they (will) mean for the arts industry.

Happy New Year to all of our fans, friends, readers and listeners! We'll see you on the flip side in 2011.

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.

Learning to Lead (and Follow) from Any Position

This article originally appeared in the Leading Creatively Blog Salon, a week-long exploration of leadership in the creative sector, hosted by the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture.

When I first entered the workforce after graduate school, I believed that leadership originated at the top of the organizational pyramid and flowed downward. My first two jobs reinforced this belief: the senior leadership set the agenda for the organization, provided directives to the staff, and neither solicited nor desired the input of the junior staff. We were solely there to follow…or so I thought.

In retrospect, I see that my professional life has always contained the simultaneous duality of leading and following. When I worked in entry-level positions, I followed my supervisor’s directives for actualizing the executive director’s vision in service of the mission. And I was happy to be doing it. Following the lead of the senior staff allowed me to learn a great deal about management and leadership in the arts. So where did I lead in those early days? In the organization’s blind spots.

Small and mid-sized organizations in the creative sector are often faced with human resource capacity issues. Everyone on staff tends to wear numerous “hats.” Correspondingly, there are always areas within these organizations in need of attention and innovation. Turning these blind spots into areas of opportunity takes three key leadership traits: vision, initiative and persuasiveness.

In my personal experience, the organizations that I worked with had significant blind spots in their technology infrastructures. Once I recognized this, I started envisioning ways in which the incorporation of new and/or different technologies could improve organizational efficiency, audience reach, depth of engagement, etc. Having the vision for change was not enough by itself, I had to take the initiative to approach the senior leadership and persuade them to pursue change via technology adoption.

As I rose through the ranks, those three traits remained pivotal for leadership. Now as an executive director, I have tried to consciously foster a working environment wherein other members of the staff are encouraged to lead. Obviously, this requires me to follow. When I first took on the executive role, I wondered if I would be one of those executives who just could not follow someone else’s lead. I mean, I was hired to lead, right? Wouldn’t choosing to let someone else take the lead in an area be shirking my duties?

Three years into the role, I know that the answer to this is “no.” We must embrace the duality of leading and following throughout our professional lives in order to foster and ensure the continuous development of our organizations and ourselves.

NAMP 2010 - Day Three - Chip Conley and Providing the Peak Arts Experience

To conclude the 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference, Chip Conley delivered an inspired closing plenary to encourage arts organizations to provide "peak" experiences based upon their audience's hierarchy of needs. Conley is the author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, an arts lover, as as the founder and CEO of the Joie de Vivre Hospitality. In his address, Conley shares his unique prescription for success based upon Maslow's classic Hierarchy of Needs. Conley illustrates how audiences are ultimately motivated by peak experiences and discusses how arts organizations can give those experiences to their audiences. Americans for the Arts streamed Conley's presentation live via Livestream. The recorded version is embedded below. (Skip to the 16 minute point to get to Conley's presentation.)

Watch live streaming video from 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference at livestream.com

NAMP 2010 - Day Two - Recap Discussions

David, Corwin and Amelia report out on Day Two of the 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference. Items discussed: disembodied panelists, Vimeo analytics, the Audience Engagement Platform, the value of quantifying intrinsic impact, and more.

NAMP 2010 - Day One - Recap Discussions

David, Corwin and Amelia report out on Day One of the 2010 National Arts Marketing Project Conference. Items discussed: keynote by Chip Heath, breakout sessions (pros and cons), designing conferences for people with varied experience levels, social media rock stars, and more.

True Personalization: Don't Get Filtered

Researchers from Georgia Tech University recently published their first annual Future Media Outlook, an interactive online publication through nxtbook. Future Media Outlook tackles the concepts of information, technology and media in the future by focusing on "the trends that will fundamentally transform how content is created, distributed, and consumed..." The publication focuses on six main concepts, one of which (arguably the most interesting) is true personalization - the ability to manipulate, personalize and filter a personal data stream. These manipulations change the information that is available or presented to a person based upon their previous actions and settings. True personalization will affect our consumption of products and services as well as how we spend our ever shortening leisure time. The click of a button or the modification of a setting could alter advertising, attendance, and data distribution for companies and organizations in incredible ways.

Due to the Data Tsunami created by the vast amount of information in this projected future, personalization will be required to focus content and allow people to navigate their own networks. Recommendation engines that compile our habits with our preferences will tailor our shopping, leisure and social experiences. People will know what events are going on, what food is being served, where meetings are happening, and where they most likely want to be at the touch of a screen. While this technology will show them exactly what they want to see, it begs the question : will they care about the information they are not receiving?

For arts organizations, this could lead to new levels of advertising, event management and customer service, but it will also require new levels of tech savvy and strategic media planning. Data is powerful and no organization wants to be on the wrong side of a filter.

Personalized recommendations, advertising, and marketing have already been implemented on sites like Google, Groupon, and Facebook. An individual's habits and data input affect the advertisements presented to them and the ways in which  services are provided. In the future, this technology will become even more sophisticated and less conspicuous. The digital wave of news and information will manifest itself in total customization and intuitively targeted marketing.

Data input and manipulation could become a new burden for many  institutions. In a world of customized lives and filtered data experiences, the arts will need to create their own space, partner with other industries and stake a claim in the entertainment and cultural markets. Being able to track events by location, recommend performances from purchasing habits and cultivate new donors from restaurant choices are wonderful concepts that could arise from this technology, but they will need to be created and managed by the arts institutions themselves.

A world with true personalization focuses on providing services to fill a customer’s needs. Having a clear understanding of the market, the service being provided and the correlations that must be made will be integral to navigating a world of filters and preferences. This new world of data will be based on research, correlations and the value of time and information.

Georgia Tech does a compelling job at forecasting the current trends and focusing on where technology is leading us. This trend is real, and I believe it will manifest itself in the not-so-distant future. A world where patrons require automatically updated calendars, events and performances synced with their Google calendars, and interactive donor plans is just around the corner. Recommendation engines, geolocation-based event maps and social event feeds are quickly moving from the future to the present. It will be interesting to see if these predictions become reality and how the arts and cultural sector reacts to this new world of filters and data.

Older Adults and Social Media, Part II: Talking with the Experts

In my last post, I asked you to think about the ways in which your organization’s social media strategies might be affected by the growing number of users over age 50.  While age diversity is just one of many factors to consider when thinking about your organization’s online audience, it can be used as a point of departure in order to examine broader ideas about how to foster audience engagement through social media. To learn more, I asked three experts to answer five questions about what the rise of older adults using social media might mean for arts organizations.  Below, you'll find insight from Ron Evans, Principal of Groupofminds.com Arts Marketing Consultants, Brian Reich, Managing Director of little m media and editor of thinkingaboutmedia.com, and Maryann Devine, founder of smArts & Culture and a host of tomorrow's webinar, "How to Make the Most of Your Facebook Page".

When you first began advising arts organizations in their social media strategies, how strong was the tendency to appeal to specifically younger audiences?  How did that translate into the content and tone of an organization’s social media identity?

MARYANN DEVINE: At that time, the desire to reach a younger, new audience was usually the primary reason for branching out into social media.  Most groups assumed that their older, traditional audience wasn't online, much less using social media, and that belief is still prevalent today.  However, most groups didn't get that social media spaces demand a different voice -- more personal, more human -- than the marketing and advertising materials they were used to producing.  They were reaching for a fun, hip tone; but in most cases, like your parents trying to be cool, they weren't very convincing.

RON EVANS:  Reaching younger audiences has always been the initial main focus for the arts organizations I've come in contact with.  I can't say that organizations were specifically writing content in a style to reach a younger audience (although that would be interesting).  For the most part, the content I see today is not age-specific at all.  And oftentimes the tone is still very institutional, where it should be conversational.  David Dombrosky just had a great quote over at the arts marketing blog salon that I agree with:  “When social media sites are used with a motivation for engagement rather than self-promotion, they often lead to those desired marketing outcomes of increased sales and brand awareness.”

BRIAN REICH:  The age of the audience has never mattered as much to me, and the people I advise.  Everyone's lives are influenced by technology -- and now the Internet.  Adoption was consistent across different age groups, but the usage patterns were very different, and that was where my focus has always been trained.  Rather than look at younger audiences and their willingness to do certain things online, I wanted to identify what opportunities were available in terms of engaging any audience and then advise organizations on what that means to their work, online and offline.

Do you find that organizations are beginning to understand the implications of strong social media engagement across demographics, or does it continue to be largely seen as a way to reach younger audiences?

B.R.: Yes and no.  I think there is significantly more willingness to experiment and explore what is possible online, and through social media, but most organizations still lack a deep commitment to what is required to fully engage and fully leverage what is possible.  Using the tools is not enough -- its how you use them that's important.  Most organizations still don't share enough.  More organizations still don't listen enough, or well enough.  Most organizations don't engage enough.  We have seen organizations integrate social media into their marketing and communications mix without changing the way they operate, organize, their staffing, etc.  I would argue that we need to shift and reset the way we do everything to make the kind of advances that are possible.

R.E.: Only now am I seeing that they are realizing that there are other segments who are using Facebook. The often-quoted statistic is that the fastest-growing segment on Facebook is women over 60. That's probably true -- Facebook is where all the photos from the grandkids and such are located now. But that may be all the people are doing -- they may not be playing Facebook games, writing on the walls of arts organizations, or even updating their own status. The statistics are still being gathered about their true activity, but since that age range has traditionally been great at supporting the arts, it makes sense for arts organizations to start talking to them too.

M.D.: My experience has been that most arts organizations, whose traditional audience skews older, still assume that they're not using social media. We haven't been effective in communicating to them research findings to the contrary. The Pew Internet & American Life project found that social media use by U.S. seniors doubled last year, and 13% of people 65 and older log onto a social networking site on a typical day.

Do you find that different age groups have different needs and wants from social media?

R.E.:  If you take email as the main form of communication as the base, you can look outside of that to see what people are doing. Email is still the primary way of communicating for business purposes. Some folks are just using it for that (sending an occasional email) and are mainly using Facebook for all peer-to-peer communications. Some people use Twitter for that as well, but of course, your messages tend to be much shorter.

M.D.: I think the one desire that unites people of all ages using social media is connection. Younger people are more likely to be creating and publishing original content online, and that likelihood goes down with age. Across the board, the people Forrester Research calls joiners -- those who join social networks, for example -- and spectators -- people who read blogs but don't comment, for instance -- are most prevalent.

B.R.: I think different people have different wants and needs from media generally, online and more traditional forms -- but it goes beyond age.  When looking at different audience groups there are four things that help to determine, from my perspective, what people want and need.  Demographics (which includes age), psychographics (what people read, watch on TV, the car they drive, etc.), technographics (their comfort with different types of technology or expectations when using a particular platform or channel) and behavioral info -- specifically what they have done in a certain context before.  Yes, age does impact how people get/share information and what they expect, but there are other factors that help to create a more complete and more interesting profile of an audience that we can use to consider how an organization might communicate.

Have you found that certain social media techniques are more effective for users of different ages?

M.D.:  Sure. As I said, different age groups use social media in different ways, so, for instance, it might be effective to connect to your boomer audience through Facebook or get them to join a private social network because they're likely to be joiners. But getting them to post comments, photos, or come up with a creative entry to a contest might be a stretch because on the whole, they're not big on creating and publishing original content.

R.E.: Currently, I know of no arts organization that segments to different age groups, because Facebook and Twitter do not make it easy to do this. You could set up multiple accounts of course, but that's pretty cumbersome to manage. I think this capability will be coming though...

B.R.:  I don't think it’s about the technique, but rather how the target audience gets/shares information, what their expectations are in a particular situation, etc. The same techniques will work, or not work, on the same audience depending on what the conversation is about, or the time of day or location of the interaction.  Its common for organizations to look to the tactics, or the tools, as the solution to a communications challenge - but that is a mistake.  The tools and tactics are what facilitates the engagement - and they are flexible enough to adapt to any situation.  What organizations need to really understand are their goals (and how to measure their desired outcomes/impact) and the strategy for meeting those goals -- how they need to approach the challenge.  What we do know is that every audience, in every situation, is fundamentally looking for the same thing: little m media... which I define as timely, relevant, compelling INFORMATION, meaningful EXPERIENCES that they want to share, talk to people about and similar, and/or STUFF that people value and want to have as a part of their lives.  If you can provide good information, experiences and stuff, the mediums and tactics can always vary and you'll still find success.

Are there any tools or methods that can help us target our various demographic bases effectively?  Any tips on how we can tailor our communication to specific audience segments while still maintaining brand consistency?

B.R.:  Again, you have to look beyond just demographics and really start to appreciate the psychographic, technographic and behavioral information.  There are lots of studies available, lots of free data that you can look at... and if you take different pieces and parts and mash it up you will find a pretty compelling profile of your audience form which will help you to make some choices about your communications efforts.  Pay attention to how people act.  Consider what people want.  Ask questions. Build deeper profiles of your targets, and members and supporters, and everyone else, by collecting information and determining WHY someone took a certain action or favored a particular opportunity.  If you can do that the rest will turn out to be much easier.

R.E.: Perhaps I can answer this best by telling you what's missing from Facebook. Facebook needs to offer a way to segment messages based on whatever grouping of people you want. As a patron, I should be able to be a part of different "clubs" that are connected to an organization's Facebook page, so I can segment myself into a club of my choosing. That club would have it's own status updates and leaders who would help the communication to happen around a shared sub-interest, such as "Opening Night Singles Club" or the "Matinee and Coffee" club. Right now, the one-size fits all of Facebook pages doesn't allow a whole lot of flexibility. I think this will get here eventually, and I think the capabilities to manage a social media presence inside an organization will also grow to be able to accommodate this new capability.

M.D.: Forrester Research makes a number of tools free and available on their site, including the Social Technographics Profile tool.  I think that, in tailoring your communications to specific audience segments, you should picture yourself personally talking to real people in each of those segments in different situations. For instance, you'd use a different tone in talking to your grandmother than you would in talking to your daughter's college roommate, but you'd still sound like yourself. It's the same with the voice you use as an organization -- you can adjust for the context of the conversation while still sounding authentically like you.

Are You Making the 5 Biggest Facebook Mistakes?

In preparation for next week's webinar How to Make the Most of Your Facebook Page, I asked Maryann Devine from smArts & Culture and Jacquelyn Kittredge from e-bakery social media to share with us the 5 biggest mistakes that arts organizations make on Facebook.  Here is their reply: 1. Using Facebook as a broadcast channel rather than interacting with your fans. If your aim is to become invisible to your fans, this is the way to go. Facebook determines where you show up in your fans' default Top News stream based on the interactions of the fans and their friends with your page, and the kind of content you put up. Less interaction means your page is less visible to your fans -- the very people you want to reach.

2. Using the same voice on Facebook (and other social media) as you do in your traditional marketing. Many arts managers have trouble making that leap, and it's understandable. They're used to communicating with their patrons in a particular style -- it's hard to shake that off. The reality is that using the same voice on Facebook as you do in your ad copy is just not going to work, and you'll likely be ignored. Social media spaces are more personal, like a backyard barbeque or the kitchen table, and you need to adjust your tone accordingly.

3. Forgetting that the page is for your fans, not for your organization. As Jacquelyn often points out, fan pages harken back to fan clubs. Fan clubs were all about giving special access and fan-club-only perks to the most loyal enthusiasts. Research shows that most people 'like' Facebook pages for discounts and special offers. Keep that in mind as your interacting with your group's fans.

4. Creating a personal profile or group for your arts organization rather than a fan page. Fan pages allow you to analyze stats on how people interact with your page AND the demographics of your fans. Personal profiles and groups can't do that. Fan pages can have an unlimited number of fans. Personal profiles are limited to 5,000 friends. Most importantly, Facebook is indexed by Google and your page can improve your Google ranking -- it may be easier to find your fan page through Google than your own web site.

5. Not having a Facebook Page at all because you already have a website. People are spending more time on social networks and less time on static websites, so Facebook allows you to meet your fans where they are already are.

In addition to addressing these common mistakes, Maryann and Jacquelyn's webinar will discuss:

Why your organization may be invisible even to fans of your Facebook page, and what to do about it.

Why it’s important to engage with your Facebook fans — beyond the usual clichés about ‘conversation’ — and how to do it.

What is a ‘landing tab’ and why it gives you an advantage.

How it’s possible for even the smallest organizations to use Facebook applications like contests and advertising without breaking the bank.

The webinar is on Tuesday, October 19th from 2pm-3:30pm EST.  Registration is $25. Click here to register today.