ARTSblog

Jessica Wilt

In January 2012 I started the New Year with an ARTSblog entitled So Many Resources, So Little Time. I wrote, “With endless emails, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds, I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed.” For the most part, that statement was true – except for one thing. I wasn’t using Twitter!

Of course after mentioning Twitter in the resources ARTSblog someone would reach out to me in an email requesting my Twitter handle. Uh oh. Once upon a time I had set up an account, but when I tried to remember what the original handle was and how to login? Forget about it. I had been caught red-handed!

Just what I needed, one more thing to add to what already felt like an overflowing plate. I couldn’t respond back with, “sorry, I don’t do Twitter” after mentioning it in my blog so I decided it was time to officially throw myself into the #Twitterverse. Hence, @JessicaLWilt was born.

Over the past year I’ve been teaching myself how to navigate and speak the language that is Twitter while building a truly authentic and genuine community. I don’t have thousands of followers – yet – but I do regularly interact and connect with a diverse group of people. Never could I have imagined how vast the information, people, ideas and life-changing events I’ve experienced through Twitter would enhance my personal and professional circles. Read the rest of this entry »

As you saw in a previous ARTSblog post, Brunswick Acres Elementary School in Kendall Park, NJ was very dedicated to winning the third annual “Art of Education” contest sponsored by KRIS Wine and Americans for the Arts.

Not only did this video help them jump out to an early lead, but it helped them score the top prize of $5,000 for their arts education programs:

Even more amazingly, they secured 16,000 of the 90,000 total votes in the contest!

Art teacher Suzanne Tiedemann plans to use the funds to support her recent “Shells for NJ Shores Program” for which students will create shell-themed art to raise money for those impacted by Hurricane Sandy late last month.

In addition, 15 other schools in 9 states will receive a total of $20,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Trudel

Everything we ever knew about the value of authentic engagement is louder, faster, and more challenging.

My partner, Rory MacPherson, and I spend a lot of time interviewing arts organizations about their use of social media to seek out best practices and learn from field exemplars. What I come away with after hundreds of interviews is that effective use of social media is building engagement on steroids!

The best organizations understand that your greatest assets are—to use a Facebook word—your friend relationships with audiences, visitors, fans, and patrons. You can mobilize these groups to help but you CANNOT make those friends in a crisis.

Friends are made on the frontlines through individual experiences that bring fans closer or push them away. We’ve noted 7 important elements of effective engagement which can solidify engagement and make social media mission critical for your fundraising:

1. Make it Personal + Concrete + Time Sensitive
2. Connect with Values and Value Connections
3. Listen and Respond
4. Answer the Audience’s Question: What’s in It for Me?
5. Cultivate Productive Partnerships
6. Measure What Matters
7. Involve the Whole Organization

Two outstanding examples:

• Georgia Shakespeare was facing a perfect storm of funding, facing possible closure. The managing director made a personal appeal—not unusual—but what happened next was explosive and exponential. A New York actor who got his start at Georgia Shakespeare sent out a birthday wish—“Don’t buy me a beer for my birthday, donate the price of one to my theatrical ‘birthplace.’” And donations flowed in—$325,000 in 2 weeks from more than 1000 people across the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Mikulski

CNN’s What’s Next blog recently published a list of current social media outlets/apps that could take over as the “next Facebook” if everything falls into place.

While there has been wild speculation in the past that other products would have replaced the big blue ‘F’ by now, it hasn’t happened; however, I’m pretty sure that I never thought MySpace would be replaced either (p.s. have you checked out what Friendster has become?).

So, here’s a quick rundown that CNN provided with links and my added commentary in bold after each description:

Highlight (number of users unpublished): This “social discovery” app was the buzz at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive, a conference in Austin, TX, that makes or breaks many tech start-ups. Essentially, the app aims to give people real-time information about the people all around them. “San Francisco is a city of 800,000 strangers,” Highlight founder Paul Davison told Time. “You sit on the bus next to each other. You stand in line next to each other. You go to bars and meetups to meet each other. You walk by each other on the street. And you don’t know anything about anyone you see.” This app seems move intrusive than Foursquare, so I’m not sure people will give it a shot.

Path (3 million users) Founded by ex-Facebooker Dave Morin, Path has a couple things going for it that Facebook doesn’t: It’s mobile-first, which is important in a world where people tend to network on their phones more and more than on their desktop computers; and it’s intimate. Path caps users’ friend lists at 50 people, ensuring that you’re actually communicating as the real you with people who you really know in real life. An app redesign won Path a new wave of support from the early-adopting tech public, but a privacy snafu in February, during which it was revealed that Path stored users’ phone contact lists, may have eroded the trust of some people. Morin apologized for that data slip, saying it was accidental and had been remedied. Privacy concerns aside, it seems like it’s what everyone intended Facebook to be—a more limited circle—and that could prove to be a draw for people like me who had to friend his entire high school class for reunion planning purposes. Also, there is an Instagram-like photo feature with Path that adds some value. This might be my pick as the next potential Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered if it’s worth your time to start that Pinterest page for your organization or business? Is it important that you know what Digg is?

Thankfully, OnlineMBA.com has pulled together a fantastic infographic that will help you determine if Facebook is better for your message or if you should hurry up and start that Twitter account.

By gathering social media demographic info and putting it together in an arts-friendly way (a solar system of social media info), you can take a quick look at the social media universe and then decide if you’re on the right path or if you should be heading toward another orbit.

Here are some facts I gleaned from the resource (as posted on Mashable):

• FACT: Facebook users visit the site 40 times per month and average over 23 minutes on the site per session.
• OPPORTUNITY: That creates an opportunity to really engage with Facebook users. If you can get an article or link to your site on a Facebook user’s newsfeed at the right time, you will have them hooked…for at least that day. A study covering 2007-2010 Facebook use says that the peak use time is Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. ET and daily it is at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m., and 8:00 p.m. ET.

• FACT: 82 percent of Pinterest users are female.
• OPPORTUNITY: The arts are already female-skewing, but if you want to reach out further into the demo, you’ll want to sign up for an account and try it out soon.

• FACT: 71 percent of Google+ users are male and 43 percent are single men.
• OPPORTUNITY: The arts are already female-skewing, but if you want to reach out to older, single men who may bring dates, girlfriends, and/or mothers to your gallery or performing arts center, you might want to dabble and see where Google+ takes you. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Borrup (center) and friends

Here’s someone who speaks my language!

In Creativity Will Change the Model, Bill Roper calls for new ways to engage people in re-imaging their communities, specifically to engage creative practices in how community planning gets done!

Just as quickly as we have young people – and people of all ages – paint images or make collages representing their vision (and I’ve done it many times), we also need Facebook, and other social media tools to spark discussions and the exchange of images representing spaces and activities that are important to people. These tools can get more people to engage in face-to-face community engagement, and enrich it, not replace it.

Until we have more experience with these tools, we won’t fully know all they can do for us, but we need to experiment.

I’m presently leading a major cultural corridor planning project in Minneapolis where one of the deliverables expected by the city is a pedestrian study. While they may balk at something other than a report from the same pedestrian consultant they’ve hired 20 times before, we’re crowdsourcing the study using Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

"The Art of Education" Facebook App

Nothing inspires that good ol’ American competitive spirit like the smell of fall. Football games, World Series fanatics, and chili cook-offs are around every corner and on every television channel.

And it’s always a good day when we can take that internal drive to win and put it towards something good – like raising money for arts education. Winning this game is even more important as students and teachers across the country continue to face record budget cuts that threaten arts education programs.

As part of its second annual “Art of Education” program, KRIS Wine is teaming with Americans for the Arts to award 16 schools in the United States a total of $25,000 to improve academic achievement through arts education.

Why does KRIS Wine want to make a difference?

Seventh-generation KRIS winemaker, Franz Haas, is passionate about the arts. He brings art to the exterior of his wines with labels designed by Italian artist, Riccardo Schweizer (1925-2004) who studied with both Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

From now until November 30, 2011, you can join KRIS Wine’s efforts to help support arts education programs in America’s K-12 public schools. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Reich

There is little denying that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is a genius. He created a site that not only attracts more traffic than any other on the web, but also influences behavior, business, and social norms at an unprecedented level.

He can sit down and build something that most of us could never even imagine existing with lines of code that almost none of us can understand. But for all that brilliance, I wouldn’t give him the task of running a nonprofit organization. And especially not an arts organization. He is not the right fit for the task.

But if Facebook were to commit its resources and energy towards supporting the arts, Zuckerberg would almost certainly assume a leadership role in that effort because of his existing role as CEO of Facebook.

Thankfully that is a hypothetical situation. But it happens all the time – an existing organizational leader is thrust into a position where they are not a good fit. They are asked to guide an effort, inspire a team, and help an organization transform itself to meet a new set of challenges, only to find out too late that they weren’t up for the task. That practice needs to stop. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura Kakolewski

If you want your brand want to win this war or survive this global phenomenon, it is time to relocate from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley.

Many of you have probably heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, video blogging sensation and social media savant. I can’t help but be attracted to Vaynerchuk’s notorious high level of energy as he discusses the shift from creating brand content to creating CONTEXT in his new video:

Let’s sum up Vaynerchuk : last week, Google+ grew 1269%, Facebook expanded its platform, and “Word of Mouth” became the buzz words in the marketing world again. Read the rest of this entry »

David Dombrosky

During last year’s Arts Marketing Blog Salon, I stated that an individual or organization’s motivation for using social media is a primary factor in forecasting whether or not their efforts will be successful. This remains true, but even those who are truly motivated to engage their audiences can derail themselves with their approach to content.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with a number of performing arts presenters, agents, and artists at the Performing Arts Exchange about their web strategies, use of social media, and engagement with mobile audiences. Throughout the course of these conversations, I noticed two important strategic elements for those experiencing success with social media.

Consider your content choices from the audience’s point-of-view.  
One of the most common issues I find in social media practice is that people often select content based on what they want to share. For example, one of the agents I spoke to at the conference had created a Facebook page with performing arts presenters as its intended audience. I noticed that a predominant number of the posts on the page were announcements for where her artists would be performing in the near future. When I asked her how this information is useful to presenters visiting the agency’s page, she was confused by the question. From her perspective, it was a no-brainer that anyone coming to the page would want to know this information. Read the rest of this entry »

Graphic: Mike Licht via Flickr

Having written about social media and its application in arts marketing for the last few years, I’ve become aware of a disconnect. I’ve written about specific social media tools and tactics, but I realize that I haven’t addressed how it fits in with overall marketing strategy, and within the media mix.

Think about the campaigns that have delivered the most revenue. For many organizations, subscription or membership campaigns are the lifeblood of their revenue each year (a good example of this came from TRG Arts client Arena Stage recently).

Direct-response renewal campaigns usually produce the highest sales volume as well as the highest marketing return-on-investment (ROI). On the other hand, social media has eluded our efforts to assign value to it since its inception. Social media is hard to track ROI on and even harder to monetize. On top of that, it’s nearly impossible to track social media users because doing so falls outside of the proprietary systems designed to protect their privacy.

You will not, repeat, NOT hear my colleagues and me advocating for abandoning your social media efforts. However, we do ask you to consider the question: Looking at your marketing strategy holistically, how does social media complement your most effective marketing campaigns? Read the rest of this entry »

The new Facebook profile

As we all have no doubt heard by now, Facebook is launching some major updates to the site.

Some of these changes are already being implemented; the others were previewed at the recent f8 conference and will be released in the coming weeks.

Many arts organizations have come to integrate Facebook and other social media channels as important parts of their overall communications plans.

While it’s too early at this point to accurately comment on the impact, if any, these Facebook updates will have for arts communicators (marketers, advocates, thought leaders, and the like), it’s worth at least some preliminary thoughts.

1. The new ticker feed could be a double-edged sword.

One of the hurdles for arts communicators to overcome when using Facebook is the algorithm which powers the news feed on the homepage. Facebook only displays updates from individuals and organizations that the user has interacted with recently or frequently. Thus, while an arts organization’s Facebook page may have several hundred fans, it’s possible that only a fraction of them are actually seeing the content that is posted. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Mikulski

I have now successfully attended four Americans for the Arts Annual Conventions (Philadelphia, Seattle, Baltimore, and San Diego) as a member of the staff.

In my previous two roles, I worked with the dedicated members of the State Arts Action Network while in the Government and Public Affairs Department and I managed the Arts Education Network under the Local Arts Advancement Department.

While in those positions, I was happy to attend conventions as a way to get to the know our members beyond email addresses and phone numbers, but it was through Twitter that I was able to network with my new arts education colleagues from across the country before I even met them.

It’s amazing what kind of relationships you can build 140 characters at a time. Read the rest of this entry »

Adriane Fink

Social Media. We know we need it. But are we really getting the most out of our Facebook accounts and Twitter feeds?

Corporations across the country are paying close attention to the online craze and have discovered that using social media to partner with nonprofits allows them to reach the broadest possible audience in a cost-effective way. The results show a stunning use of creativity benefiting the nonprofit world. Let me share a few statistics with you.

With over 500 million active users, one in every 13 people on earth now uses Facebook. Over 50 percent log in every day. 48 percent of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. Not to be left behind, Twitter has also rapidly expanded, with over 200 million registered accounts and 155 million tweets per day. Read the rest of this entry »