Arts Organizations and Artists 2.0: Social Media for Arts People

Friday Night at the Moma
Photo by Eggman

I recently lead a workshop called Social Media for Arts People. I've covered arts organizations and social media here and there over the past three years and last winter co-wrote a cover story article with Rebecca Krause-Hardie for ArtsReach. So, thought I'd take an opportunity to query my network viaTwitter and Facebook and see what's new and share it with you.

Everyone is a Curator

One of the best projects that illustrates the basic idea of Web2.0 - listening and conversation and stakeholderscreating their own experience with your organization - comes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. They're now running a compelling experiment in crowd-sourced exhibition creation and curation via the photography exhibition Click.

Here's how Nina Simon described it on her insightful post analyzing the tactics used.

1. The Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups, and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organizations.

2. On the web, anyone can evaluate the photographs in terms of aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme. All evaluations are private; all artists are unnamed. It's very easy to sign up and judge... and you can do so now by registering here.

3. The photographs will be installed in a physical exhibition running for six weeks this summer. The art will be displayed in order of the average juried scores. Visitors will be able to see how different subgroups (including art experts) ranked and responded to the art. The exhibition will coincide with programs about art theory, online communities, and crowd theory, providing a forum for public evaluation and discussion about the process.

Nina observes that the following makes this project really special:

• It is 100% community-based
• The internal team is led by a non-curator.
• They kept the interface simple
• They make it easy to evangelize
• They are sensitive to the artists who are being judged.
• They ask judges to self-define their art knowledge.

But as Nina notes, they are doing research from this experiment about the role of independence and influence in a participatory experience. Note that this is a research/learning approach that is key
to success of Web2.0 projects.

More at TechCrunch and Technology in the Arts Blog.

Another theme of web2.o is Transparency - and the best example of that is what the Indianapolis Art Museum has done with its pubic metrics on its web site.

Blogs

Elizabeth Perry, an artist in Pittsburgh and pioneer of "sketch blogging" reported that local arts organizations have been good at integrating
social media without having to create or maintain anything new. "They have begun inviting local bloggers as press to openings and events -usually they get in touch with Mike Woycheck or Cynthia Closkey, two of
the co-founders of Pittsburgh Bloggers, who then re-blog the invitation and spread it via Facebook or their own Twitter streams. Lindsay Patross runs the blog, and people get hold of her, too.

Similar strategy to what the San Francisco Symphony did with its blogger outreach event. ASOL gives a write up and some pointers for holding your own blogger outreach event.

What Should Artists and Arts Organization’s Blog about? An excellent question posed by Beth Dunn of Small Dots.

Most people are fascinated by the interior life of artists. Many people are
turned on by the chance to peek backstage at a theater. Almost everyone I know thinks they can curate an art exhibit. Are they right?

Artists: Write about your favorite kind of paintbrushes.
Write about where you go shopping for paintbrushes. Write about how hard it is to find decent studio space. Write about why you ditched that banker job to see if you could make it selling art. Write about
your crippling self-doubt and fears of failure. Write the truth. Not the press release.

Arts Organizations: Write about your insides — what goes
on inside a theater, a museum, a historical home? Not the tedious soap opera that will get you fired if you share - the cool stuff we’re all dying to know! Where do your staff come from? What brought them here?
How much fun did you have striking the set over the weekend? Can I help next time?

Artist Blogs

For individual artists, a blog can also help sell or promote their work. Here's some artists personal blogs that support their gallery sites where they sell their work -- A Planet Named Janet, Self VS Self, PaMdora's Box and Jen Lemen

Arts Organizations

Individuals from arts organizations do write blogs for professional development or a career blog like Museum2.0, and Im in Ur Museum Blogz. These are blogs written by an individual, not as part of the organization. The
content is focused on the professional area of expertise. Blog helps deepened expertise. Many early adopters in nonprofits got started this way - outside of the firewall.

Fresh + new(er) is an institutional blog from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney Australia
written by staff member Seb Chan. Interesting that this blog has evolved into one that serves the sector of museum professionals. (see for example the post about blogging policy).

The Academy of Vocal Arts has a blog written by Daniel Pantano. According to Maryanne Devine,
the staff member to go to for all the AVA gossip. "The writing is in his own voice, personal and authentic, and he's giving the patrons exactly what they crave: who won which competition, who just got
engaged, where alums are singing, backstage snapshots. He doesn't get much in the way of comments, but when he misses a few days, he gets lots of complaints.

Musematic is a group blog of museum technology professionals. The description: "Rants and raves on the latest trends in the world of museum informatics and technology. An
intrepid cast of experts from the Museum Computer Network and AAM's Media & Technology Committee share their insights, observations and tricks of the trade."

The Walker Blog was one of the first arts institution blogs. The idea was to give an inside view of the inner workings of the Walker. Different departments
or individuals came on gradually. (I wrote about this blog back in 2005)

The Brooklyn Museum's blog is another one that takes a group approach, also focuses a peak behind the scenes. As does Indianapolis Museum of Art blog.

Tate's Mobile Blog is collecting audience input on the new building design at the Tate - via mobile phones to blog - or mob blogging.

Over the next six months we’ll be inviting all kinds of people,
including designers, artists, young people, families, students and Tate
staff, to share their ideas. Why not send us your own photos and join
the discussion here at The Great Tate Mod Blog?

Finally, Rebecca Krause Hardie has some notes from a blogging workshop given at the Museums and the Web Conference earlier this month

Flickr

The Academy of Vocal Arts uses a flickr account to document organizational events/galas/benefits - good way to get started. Arts Northfield has well organized collections and sets of all organizational activities.

Brooklyn Museum of Art has a very active and successful group - notice the lively discussion board. MOMA has a group for its graffiti project.

This example of using Flickr for exhibitions - both in Flickr and on the web site. The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr. online exhibit developed by the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and Ideum.

Finally the Library of Congress community tagging pilot project on flickr. (Launched in Jan. (follow up here). Nina Simon has a good piece on why museums should use flickr.

Facebook

There are many museum professionals active on Facebook probably because step one is to create an individual profile and then go find your colleagues. The group Museum Professionals Unite Across Facebook has about 2,000 members and 89 discussion threads,
so there's definitely lots of places to talk shop on Facebook with peer professionals. There are a number of museums with official group and fan pages, like this one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As Nina Simon points out,
Brooklyn Museum of Art is the gold standard of Art Museums using social media and its projects on Facebook are no exception. (Be sure to check out Nina's Museum2.0 Blog for lots of great posts.

Brooklyn Museum of Art developed a Facebook application called Art Share. It lets Facebook users share works art from Museums
around the world on their profile. Artists can upload and share theirown work using this application. Participating institutions include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Brooklyn Museum, Canada Agriculture Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Powerhouse Museum, Royal Ontario Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, V&A, Walker Art Center, Walters Art Museum.

The application launched in November according to this progress report the usage stats as of February were:

• 1000 people using ArtShare
  on Facebook.
• 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works.
• Institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.

Some more on the metrics from the progress report:

On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut
shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.

I wanted to take a quick look at what the performing arts scene was like on Facebook.

Doing a quick search on the word "symphony" on Facebook turned up
more than 500 individuals. A few of these are Symphony orchestras
using their individual profiles (incorrectly and a violation of the TOS) for an organizational presence. (There are quite a few individuals with the last or first name symphony.)

There were about 70 Fan Pages that turned up including a number of youth and college symphonies. A couple of major symphony orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony with 1336 fans and the Boston Symphony.
The fan pages are like mini-web pages with the ability to add applications. The features on their Fan Pages include music player (filled with symphony selections), albums, photos, events, and videos. There is also a discussion board and the ability to post notes. The Boston Symphony has been doing ticket giveaway promotions.

While I focused on Facebook for social networking examples, there are examples on MySpace. Even found an artist social network that is called Dripbook.

Twitter

Twittours has a list of museums using Twitter. Looks like most are just learning how to use twitter and mostly tweeting about content on their sites. Using it like a newswire similar to New York Times Arts Section

Brooklyn Museum of Art is using twitter - mostly to point to blog content or web site content. Tate is also twitter, but hasn't really engaged yet - probably in the Twitter is the dumbest thing I've ever seen stage? But as the Field Museum notes on its
MySpace page status - still trying to figure it out.

Heard on Twitter a mobile poetry project on Twitter is in the works. (Poets.Org is already mobile)

Still more arts organizations on twitter found at TwitTours - this post about Alliance for Historic Hillsborough - tweeting about bites of information about its programs.

Beth Dunn has a great post on artists and twitter. It points over the Cycling Artist's post about the benefit and value of Twitter for artists.

YouTube

What is a Museum without YouTube? sounds like a riddle. I couldn't think of a punch line can, you? This was a response from a Twitter follower, Hans de Kraker who pointed me to this blog post (in Dutch). Looks like it reviews Museum YouTube channels.

I like Moma's Channel.
The videos that give a peek behind the scenes at the museum have the most views, like this one of another sculpture installation. Interesting commentary by viewers too. The IMA has a YouTube Channel too that uses a slightly different approach.

Anaheim Ballet has a YouTube Channel with over 130,000 channel views. Perhaps due to their MySpace presence? Another good example is Youth Speaks.

Do you know a compelling example of an artist or arts organizations using social media effectively? What makes it successful?

Beth Kanter, Blogher CE for Nonprofits and Social Change, writes Beth's Blog.

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Muppets + Digg + YouTube Commenters = FIRE! [VIDEO]

The Muppets are rapidly becoming socially savvy, and the result is one burnt muppet.

First they stormed YouTube with the Muppet rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1080p. Then they followed that up with an iPhone app and more videos, most of which have become viral sensations.

Now the Muppets, specifically Beaker, Statler, and Waldorf, are taking on YouTube commenters and Diggers with their latest clip, “Beaker’s Ballad,” which is well on its way to becoming a top YouTube video.

The clip pays homage to Internet speak, harsh and angry YouTube commenters, and Digg bait, all while Beaker sings out his ballad. Oh, and a house gets lit on fire.

Enjoy:

Tags: digg, fire, Muppet, muppets, viral video, youtube

Google Buzz: Will You Use It? [POLL]

You can also join the discussion on our official Google Buzz account.

-

Google Buzz has arrived. We’re all still chatting about and analyzing Google’s biggest move into social media yet — it’s a top trending topic on Twitter and the big subject in the blogosphere.

While we think a lot more time needs to pass before we know the true implications of Google Buzz, especially whether it will succeed as a product, we want to know right now what you think.

Today’s flash poll is simple: Will you use Google Buzz? After reading the stories and analysis across the web, do you think this is a product you’d use in your daily life or is it something you’ll completely ignore?

We want to know your opinion. Make your voice heard by voting in the poll below and joining the debate in the comments.

Google Buzz: Will You Use It?(trends)

Tags: Google, google buzz, poll

Associated Press Returns to Google News

After more than a month of proverbial radio silence, news stories by the Associated Press are back on Google News.

The AP and Google have been in talks to establish a new agreement that would allow Google to continue to aggregate and host AP content, but because the AP has adopted a hawkish stance with regards to controlling its content online, Google stopped posting new AP stories in anticipation of a fall-through in talks.

Today the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog noticed that AP stories were again appearing on Google News. We have confirmed this as well.

When contacted for comment, Google released the following statement:

“We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time.”

The AP also responded, simply saying that it had nothing to add to Google’s statement.

Last year, AP CEO Tom Curley said of online news aggregators, “We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost, to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.” He also said that he and other figures in the journalism industry “must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”

That attitude is obviously in stark contrast to Google’s standard of openness for web content. Even though the AP and Yahoo struck a deal just over a week ago that allows Yahoo to keep posting AP content, we weren’t sure whether or not a Google/AP deal would follow because Google is known for fervently holding the free information line.

If you’re curious what the AP or Google gave up to make the deal happen, you’re out of luck — no details about the deal have been made public yet. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.

Reviews: Google, Yahoo!

Tags: ap, associate press, Google, google news, media

The Location Implications of Google Buzz

GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable

We learned earlier this morning that Google Buzz adds a shared social experience — very similar to FriendFeed and Facebook — to your Google contact circle via Gmail. Google also made it very clear that the mobile component, especially around location, is important to the product as a whole.

Location plays a big role in Buzz — we saw this with the introduction of the snap, Google’s answer to the check-in.

That one key feature demonstrates how right we were when we predicted late last year that “everything points towards Google taking big leaps on the location front in 2010,” and that “Google is interested in further assimilating the Latitude and Place Pages products into a more full-fledged location and recommendation service centered around places.”

The assimilation is Google Buzz for Mobile, and the ambitious endeavor is Google’s attempt to catch up to the likes of Foursquare, centralize the location-sharing experience around Place Pages and collect valuable place data. Here we’ll explore Google’s second attempt at getting the location-sharing formula right, and what it means in terms of the bigger picture.

Mobile Feature Run-Down

The mobile experience supports all the following features and functionalities:

Menu: From the Menu page you can search, select Following and Nearby stream options, navigate to My Posts, and view who you’re following as well as who is following you.

Snap to a location: Google Buzz’s version of the place check-in is a snap-to-location feature that lets you associate your physical location in place form with a buzz/status update.

Buzz: The “Share what you’re thinking” buzz box is located atop the My Posts, Following and Nearby tabs, and it’s the quickest possible route to snapping your location.

Once you start typing your buzz update, you’ll notice that a location is automatically associated with that post. If that location is inaccurate, you’ll want to click the light blue box and select the appropriate location from the list of nearby options. At the very bottom, you can also specify if the post is public or private. Once you select a post mode, your buzz is snapped to that location, and shared with Google Buzz users that are following you.

Replies: Right now the autocomplete reply feature supported in Google Buzz via Gmail doesn’t exactly carry over to the Google Buzz for Mobile experience, which means you won’t currently be able to type official replies from your mobile device just yet. You can, however, view replies as they were intended. Also, clicking on the associated user URL will direct you to the mobile version of the user’s Google Profile.

Streams: In the mobile application you have two stream types: Following and Nearby. Both are straightforward stream options.

Buzz Maps: In the Nearby stream, you can click “Buzz map” to view nearby buzz on a map.

Buzz Threads: Any item in your Following or Nearby streams has the potential to become a thread featuring comments and likes. You can moderate comments to your individual Buzz posts. What’s especially interesting about threads is that your check-ins, a.k.a. snaps, can become interactive conversations. That functionality doesn’t exist in location-sharing apps like Foursquare.

Buzz Permalinks: Each individual buzz and its associated conversation has a permalink, which means you can share individual items. If they’re public, anyone can comment on or like shared buzz items.

Place Pages: Every place in Buzz for Mobile is associated with a Google Place Page. Navigating to the Place Pages is a tad complicated at times, but there are a few ways to do it. If you’ve snapped to a location, you can select “Show map” from the specific buzz and click the link for the location. In the Nearby stream view, once you select a location, you can click “More info” to navigate to the Place Page.

Search: You can search all Buzz updates from the people you follow or just those nearby by selecting the search icon.

Is it Foursquare Re-imagined?

The answer to that question is not a simple yes or no, but Google was clearly inspired by the check-in model that Foursquare made popular. Here we will focus on the primary differences between the two approaches.

Snaps are conversations, check-ins are sport: Google’s approach is conversation-oriented. To snap to a location you need to post a buzz, and that buzz becomes the beginning of a potential conversation with friends. There are no points, no leaderboards, no mayorships and no rewards, but that doesn’t mean those elements won’t be added into the mix in the future. Buzz updates snapped to a location will also appear on Place Pages, which will expose them to a much wider audience.

Location-based deals are place-specific, but not tied to snaps: One of Foursquare’s finer features are the official location-based specials and mayor deals offered by businesses to Foursquare users that check in at their locale. While business owners have the ability to create mobile coupons for their Place Pages and promote them, the idea of snapping to a location and discovering nearby deals doesn’t seem to exist.

Place buzz and chatter: Lately we’ve seen Foursquare become a hub of curated content via its media partnerships, which bring in content from respected restaurant review sites (like Zagat), city tourism offices, reality stars, celebrities and fictional characters to serve as a dynamic and pocket-friendly city guide that travels with you. Right now, Google’s not attempting to separate the venue-related chatter from buzz updates that are meant to be recommendations or tips. Buzz for a particular place is mix of all location-shares and could be perceived as lacking the same value as Foursquare tips and to-dos. As a product that aims to reduce noise, this feature doesn’t deliver on that promise yet.

Place Page Significance

One way to look at the location features of Buzz for Mobile is to see as it another way to encourage business owners to claim their Place Pages. Google has been pushing Place Pages since their launch, and Buzz for Mobile extends the value of those pages. Now all Google Mobile and Gmail users are a few clicks away from Place Pages.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google has finally found a way to support its own system for status updates and to tie those to physical locations in a potentially mainstream way. We’ve already seen that this data is incredibly valuable, especially to businesses and advertisers, and with every snap and its associated buzz, Google is learning more about what we’re doing and where we’re going.

Is Buzz for Mobile Too Ambitious?

While there are advantages to using the location-sharing functionality of Buzz, the mobile application is bloated with features and will be a challenge for the average mobile user to grasp.

The mobile application is certainly a nice complement to the Gmail experience, providing a convenient way to follow along and contribute to conversations. As a location service, however, Buzz for Mobile is overly complex. For those of you who have latched on to the location-sharing trend, the advantages to transitioning your check-ins from more niche apps with built-in rewards to Buzz are nonexistent at present.

Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, FriendFeed, Gmail, Google

Tags: Google, google buzz, location, Mobile 2.0

Google Buzz: What It Means for Twitter and Facebook

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So far, Google has failed to launch a successful social web product to U.S. Internet users. Orkut has taken off in including Brazil and India, but not in North America. Wave is a neat concept, but it has proven too abstract to catch on.

Is Buzz — Google’s new Twitter and Facebook-like social stream — the product that’s going to win Google a dominant — or at least prominent — place in the social web?

That all depends. Integration with existing social networks are critical for Buzz’s success — especially Facebook. I don’t believe Buzz can enjoy significant success without Facebook integration. When Google unveiled Buzz today, it announced that the app will share your Twitter updates with your Buzz followers. That’s great news, but you won’t be as thrilled to learn that (at least at launch) there will be no integration with Facebook at all.

We ought to consider the consequences of Buzz’s relationships with Twitter and Facebook. What are the relationships? Will Buzz, Twitter and Facebook co-exist elegantly or is this a zero sum game with a winner you can place your bets on?

Google Buzz and Twitter: Probable Peaceful Partners

When you post a new tweet using Twitter, Google can import that tweet and send it out to your Buzz followers with the rest of your Buzz updates. You won’t have to jump through any hoops or use any back-door methods to make it happen. Twitter is officially supported by Buzz — the same is true of Flickr, Picasa, Blogger and YouTube.

However, you won’t be able to publish out to Twitter using Buzz, which makes this all seem less useful. And since Buzz won’t aggregate tweets from your Twitter followers (unless you happen to be following them on Buzz and they also happen to be pushing their tweets into Buzz as described previously), you’ll still have to keep both Twitter and Buzz open to reach all your contacts across both networks.

That’s disappointing, but it’s no where near as disappointing as Buzz’s completely nonexistent relationship with Facebook.

Google Buzz and Facebook: Cold Shoulders

While Buzz and Twitter have some connectivity, there’s none at all between Buzz and Facebook. Buzz doesn’t import your Facebook status updates. It doesn’t post updates to your Facebook feed. It doesn’t display your friends’ feed updates. There’s no Facebook Connect integration at all. When asked about it this morning, Google said it has nothing to announce at this time.

Google is going to have a difficult time building a userbase when everyone who has a Facebook profile (that’s just about everyone who uses the social web at all now) is concerned that they can’t see their friends’ updates. They’ll have to keep using Facebook to stay in touch with their Facebook friends.

With more than 400 million users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network; Twitter by contrast has only 18 million or so. Gmail’s unique visitors numbered around 36 million as of last year. Clearly, Facebook is dominating. Google is attempting to challenge that dominance with Buzz, but Facebook is at the same time planning to move just as aggressively into Google’s territory.

It was recently discovered that Facebook will eventually launch its own webmail service. You can already send messages to e-mail addresses from Facebook, but the execution isn’t as smooth as it needs to be. The new e-mail plan would address that.

Codenamed Project Titan, the service would offer users e-mail addresses ending in @facebook.com. Facebook would become the largest webmail provider overnight. If the service is functional enough, it could threaten Google’s Gmail. People will be able to comfortably make the switch because they won’t lose the ability to e-mail their Gmail contacts — even if they move to another mail provider.

The Outlook: Buzz Won’t Win the Social Web Without Facebook Integration

I predicted at the end of last year that Facebook is well-poised to try to pry web dominance away from Google in 2010. Buzz doesn’t change my mind. Facebook is threatening Google, but Google isn’t threatening Facebook because it doesn’t offer any features so great that they incentivize people to leave behind their existing networks or spend their time updating and following yet another one when their friends are already all on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook now dominates the social web so completely that it’s difficult to imagine an exodus to a competing service, unless that service offered some revolutionary new features that Facebook couldn’t possibly match — Buzz doesn’t.

I can picture one other success scenario, though: a service that aggregates other services’ features and content, and then offers up its own set of unique perks (like Buzz’s noise-control algorithms) that make the social web experience better. People would feel comfortable switching for the extra perks, because they wouldn’t have to leave their existing connections behind.

The outlook could change if Buzz integrates with Facebook the way it does with Twitter. Unless that happens, though, you’re better off keeping your bets on Facebook in the coming year or two — at least if your standard of success is something greater than niche appeal.

GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable

[img credit: Drew Olanoff]

Tags: facebook, gmail, google buzz, Google Wave, orkut, project titan, social media, social networking, software, trending, twitter