Rebecca Krause-Hardie

Leveraging Social Media

On Saturday, I had the great pleasure of doing a presentation with Erin West at the Technology and Arts Conference in Pittsburgh on leveraging Social Media.  We'd never worked together before and weren't quite sure how we were going to merge together all our ideas and content into one presentation.  Amazingly everything seemed to dovetail together with great ease.  Maybe because Erin did that part and her gift for organizing, and getting to the core ideas is fantastic.

I also just wanted to say that Conference organizer, David Dombrosky had the great wisdom to move the conference out of the CMU campus and down to the Hilton hotel.  That move transformed a really bad thing into a really good thing.  Lots of room and space and time for networking, and learning.  As David says, lots of things he'll do differently next year, but he's really on the right track!

So here is our presentation.  Feel to use with attribution.

Leveraging Social Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Come Participate in "We Are The Media!"

I am a religious reader of Beth's Blog.  And there is rarely a day that I don't learn something interesting there.  And Beth is one of those amazing people that shares everything she knows with you. 

But this post isn't exactly about Beth, its about the sharing part. I learn something and share it here and with clients. All over the web people are doing amazing things.  Just look at Brooklyn Museum, or the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the Boston Symphony, or the New York Philharmonic  (shameless plug here).   Can we help Beth and NTEN and all our friends in the non-profit community? 

Here's how:

NTEN and the Non-profit community, spear-headed by Beth Kanter are creating:

We Are Media Project:

The Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits

There is a hugh amount of expertise in the non-profit community and the goal of the We Are The Media project is to harness that great collective of knowledge and experience and share the love.  This month is focusing on the social media tool box.

As the site header says...

Starting October 6th, WeAreMedia participants are going to unabashedly focus on the tools and collectively build the nonprofit social media tool box. Now that we've laid the strategic framework in the other modules, we can have some fun. So come join us ... it will be easy and quick. And, we'll be awarding special prizes for participation.

Have you experimented with any of these things?

• RSS Feeds
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting
• Blogs
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing
• Crowd Sourcing
• Lifestreams
• Social Networks
• Fundraising Apps
• Fundraising Widgets

Please go over to We Are The Media, join the group and join the conversation.  Your 2 cents makes a difference!

Lessons from Podcamp: #1 - Marketing with Chris Penn

I went to my first podcamp this weekend.  I didn't really know what podcamp was, but saw that there were really interesting people involved so I put it on my calendar in hopes that schedule would work out. I did manage to make it for one day and it was really super.

Brand and emotional experience 

Ostensibly it's about making good podcasts, but really its much more. Here's what struck me from Chris Penn's talk on Marketing:

Brand = the emotional after taste from the experience

What does that mean?  What do we remember when we walk out the door from the concert hall, or the museum?  How can we build on that? When we connect with the emotions, it is very powerful.  It reminds me of the great quote from Maya Angelou:

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." 

As arts institutions, what can we do to ensure that every aspect of the experience conveys this same message?  As Chris says, 

we have to remember that it is all a continuum of experience.... Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and of course the 'product' itself.

Podcast Power and Access

Chris added a feature to his blog so that people could subscribe to his podcasts by email, rather then RSS feed.  It increased his audience by over 20%.  His comment was that some people are really not comfortable with RSS feeds or don't know how they work. It's important not to hinder audience growth by making assumptions about how people access your content.

And as I noted in a previous post, podcasts are powerful ways to build audience.  The Boston Symphony's online sales increased 50% after they started doing podcasts and they have over 75,000 subscribers now.

Three's a charm

Turning leads into sales = conversion.  I liked Chris' analogy:

Sales is turning ideas into action

Here's 3 points he made about sales

1. Stay in Touch:  In new media word spreads fast. Make sure you fulfill your promises and stay in touch with your customers to make sure.
2. 3 connections needed:  Send 3 notices 15 days apart to connect with your potential customer.  (I had heard that it takes 4 impressions, but either way its an important reminder, that one shot doesn't do it.) 
3. Outreach where they are: You want to reach a certain Latino population? Consider speaking at their church on Sunday. Go where they are.  

  All good stuff.  Thanks Chris.

A Conversation with Allegra Burnette @ MoMA

I had the great pleasure of talking with Allegra Burnette, Creative Director of Digital Media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Allegra and her department oversee all the ‘public facing’ media at the Museum which includes the design and production for the Museum's Web site, MoMA.org, as well as interpretive kiosks and displays. Their focus has been on developing the experience for the online visit, as well as the visit to the museum. 

Audio Tours and iTunes U
Using iTunes U to extend network and reach  - 20,000 downloads a month

As a result of a Bloomberg Grant, MoMA has been able to make its audio programs available for free, including online for download without being in conflict with any revenue stream.  Most museums have to create new content for the web because they have to charge a fee for their audio tours.

Says Burnette,

“The grant from Bloomberg not only enabled us to offer the audio program for free within the Museum, but it provided the opportunity to repurpose our audio tours for use online.  What this means in part is that you can download the programs to your ipod and bring it with you during your visit or listen at home. We recently extended this initiative by working with Apple and becoming part of their educational program, iTunesU, which was recently expanded when it became part of the iTunes application.

Initially iTunes U was a way for colleges and universities to make lectures and material available through the iTunes interface.  In October Apple extended the format to include cultural institutions, and MoMA was in the first group of non-universities to be featured.  What that allows us to do is to create an ongoing archive of different content, from our past and present audio programs, to featured lectures and other public programs, and includes both video and audio. It also allows us to link back to additional resources available on MoMA.org.”

FINDING iTUNES U

You can find iTunes U, by opening up the iTunes application and opening iTunes Store if it’s not already open.  iTunes U is at the bottom of the iTunes Store menu.  MoMA can be found in the “Beyond Campus” Category on the lower right portion of the screen.  Sometimes it’s also featured in the graphics in the center section.

“Its been great”, continues Allegra, “We’ve had a lot of people get the audio from MoMA.org, but it also really expands the audience for that material and gets it to an audience we are really trying to reach – educators and students. 

The audio tours as well as other material is in the iTunes U.  You can listen online or download it.   

That’s been one of our big focuses -  making sure we are reaching beyond our website and reaching our audience where they happen to be.   In the case of students, and educators and scholars, they’re starting to use iTunes U for courses and as a research tool.

What’s nice about this is that we can specify the links here, so for example the guides for teachers or things that we’ve added can link back to materials we have.  There’s other supporting links.  So its a way to broaden where the content goes but also to say, ‘Hey, if you want more information its available here on MoMA.org.’”

Update  3-13-08

Since they launched in October 2007, they've had about 20,000 downloads a month, which includes anything from full video to short audio clips.

Red Studio & Student Created Podcasts

Participatory Culture - Engaging Students

Red Studio is a project where groups of teens are working with educators at the museum and creating their own podcasts.  So far there have been 3 groups of teens working specifically on creating audio podcasts- groups of high school students that work for a 6-8 week period on a project. The first group was experimental to see how the project could work. Students come in and work with educators and someone from Acoustiguide, the audio company MoMA works with.  They teach the students about creating audio programs, and the kinds of things they need to think about.  Students pick works they are interested in, research them, do the audio, learn how to edit it, and do all the nuts and bolts of the process.  Burnette is enthusiastic about the project:

“It’s great. They bring their own take to it, but they have also been engaged and learn about how a professional process works.  The result is a looser feeling project then what we get with some of the other audio programs but it still has a basis in teaching at the museum.” 

There is a whole Red Studio site for teens, with other activities.  So some of the students have been working on the podcasts and some are doing other projects like interviews with artists that are turned into videos.

You Tube Channel

From Video Contest to Time Lapse Photography

MoMA also recently started a YouTube Channel. For a recent popular video for their Richard Serra exhibition, they used time-lapse photography to capture the entire installation process.

Currently there are about 37 videos up now, as well as some film trailers promoting MoMA’s film program.

“It started with an online contest with the ‘Residents’.  They had a song that we (MoMA and the Residents) both posted, and then people could make their own video to go with the song. The judges were the ‘Residents’ Band and the curator for the film retrospective at the Museum. The finalists were posted on YouTube and screened as part of the retrospective of the ‘Residents’ Films at MoMA. That was our first exploration into using YouTube, which has since grown to our own channel with close to 40 videos currently.”

'Home Delivery' -  and MoMA’s version of BLOGGING

A fun project coming up is ‘Home Delivery’ – about prefab architecture.  Five prefab houses are going to be installed in the empty lot next to the museum as part of its exhibition.

Architects are working on their projects at their various factories and then will bring them in to be installed. Each architect will capture the whole process in blog ‘journals’. The postings will include images, video or text.

Says Allegra, “We’re not doing blogs in the tradition sense of an ongoing conversation from a single point of view, but using it in a different way to show the multiple streams of production on the project happening simultaneously. It’s going to be a big experiment as there are many unknowns in the whole process of setting up this exhibition.”

The Right Tool For The Right Project -
Second Life -  Build or Visit?

Allegra talks about the approach to web interactions....

“A lot of it is thinking about where people are going and how we meet them in that space, not for the sake of technology but which format makes the right sense.  YouTube made sense for the ‘Residents” and a type of blog format is what’s going to work for ‘Home Delivery’. But it’s important to us to match the content, the goals, and the technology in a way that they all are able to play off of and support each other.”   

Paola Antonelli, curator in the Architecture and Design Dept, hosted an event in 2nd Life not long ago.  But rather then try to reproduce the Museum in 2nd life,  MoMA felt that hosting an event made more sense.  As Burnette notes,

“Somebody like the San Francisco Exploratorium is doing a lot in Second Life. For them it makes so much sense to have a space there, because so much of what they are doing is very hands on and fits, like their 3D activities or flying around planets. For now, event-based initiatives is what we have been focusing on in this space, but who knows where this could lead?”

‘Design and the Elastic Mind’ and Twittervision:

I initially contacted Allegra because of an email blast I’d gotten from Biz Stone.  I almost never read them, but for some reason I opened this one last week...

Twitter at the MoMA

Twittervision, a popular Twitter API project, is included in a
show at the New York Museum of Modern Art titled "Design and the
Elastic Mind." The show explores the relationship between science
and design and is open from February 24 to May 12, 2008.

Twittervision, created by Dave Troy is this cool little app that’s a mashup between google maps and Twitter, where you can see twitter posts in real time mashed up onto where in the world they are coming from.

 

Troy has also created another version called Flickrvision that mashes google maps with photos that have been uploaded to the Flickr photo-sharing site.

These are part of the ‘Design and The Elastic Mind’ exhibit also curated by Paola Antonelli, It is a fascinating look at the intersection of design, technology and science, how they come together and how they play off of each other.  The exhibit contains an online piece that captures images and videos from some of the exhibits at the MoMA.

The exhibit includes all sorts of intriguing items, from the video project called ‘Lightweeds’ - of plants that grow and respond based on the weather outside, to the ‘Shadow Monsters’ – which takes your image and then adds ‘monsters’ to it.   

Allegra says... “So many of these objects – some of them may not be so eye catching initially, but each as a story about why they are there...”     and they look way cool.

A must see for me for next visit to Big Apple.

Web Lessons from Rich Bradway at the Boston Symphony

Meet Rich Bradway at the Boston Symphony

Rich Bradway, Associate Director of E-Commerce and New Media for the Boston Symphony, and I spoke the other day about the BSO’s strategies for the web.

What’s the goal?   First Things First.

I’m so interested in exploring social media and web 2.0 and for me it’s a really good reminder that first things come first. One of the first goals is to enhance the user experience, and make things as easy as possible.  There is no point in making all sorts of content and connections out on the web only to have people struggle to get around and find what they want when they land back at your site.

For the BSO, on the most fundamental level, one way to accomplish this has been to find ways to make navigation simpler and reduce the number of clicks and pages that have to be refreshed.

Calendars:

Says Rich, “One of the most visited places on the site is the calendar. To navigate between all the performances, flip flopping between Pops, and Tanglewood, or trying to find Mahler required a lot of clicks.”

Using web 2.0 technologies like those that underlay tools like Google calendars and maps, they rebuilt their calendars so that that they automatically refresh content without having to reload pages.

Continues Rich, “Visitors can now navigate through each month and pages automatically update without having to be refreshed.  They can go from calendar view to list view, or search within list view to dynamically narrow their search so people can see what they want to.”

 

This is really important for the BSO because they have 4 brands and hundreds of events to manage. Their new rebuild allows a visitor to see any of the events for any of the brands with just one click.

Similarly, they wanted to keep a calendar on every page, wanted a small foot-print and also to maintain functionality. Now with their horizontal calendar anyone can easily see a month out and every event with one click.

The goal:  It helps people get to what they want more quickly. 

Creating Versatile Module Based Content: Flash

The BSO is changing how it presents its interactive and educational content.  They are converting their “Online Conservatory” to something more accessible and versatile called Classical Companion. The Online Conservatory was an in-depth look at just a few programs from the season, with all the content combined together in a way that limited its ability to be used for other purposes.

Now each small piece of content is being created as separate flash modules that can be used more frequently and in varying contexts.  Rich notes that “we have the ability to showcase many more programs, or composers, or music being performed.” Something that could be dropped in and not its own separate website. 

Starting last fall with their Carter program, and continuing with other concerts like their Family concerts, they are creating small modules showcasing each of the composers and including kid friendly interactive modules with quizzes, and timelines with certain milestones in a composer’s life or other important dates in history.  Another basic module will be called Timbre – and it explores the ‘colors’ of music and how you can orchestrate or arrange a piece of music to create or change that timbre.   

The long-term goal is to build an interface independent of the programs so content can be used anywhere on the site.

Podcasts are Incredibly Powerful! 
Direct link between podcasts and increased ticket sales.

Last year the BSO started producing podcasts that were concert previews for the BSO season. 

“We tried to create a slimmed down version of our pre-concert lectures that we could extend through the Internet and allow people to subscribe to.  Over the course of time, while the audio portion is still trying to be a snap shot of the pre-concert lecture, these podcasts are getting longer and with more ancillary content. People started asking for the program notes at the same time, so now we also pass in the program notes at the same time as the podcast.  We try to supplement with other content.  For example when we did Daphne and Chloe, we were able to put up some footage of a concert we did in 1967, and getting our toes wet in doing video podcasts” says Rich.   

WGBH had some great features and interviews that they were unable to reuse and were happy to provide to the BSO for the podcasts.

So here is the amazing thing….

“We saw a very direct relationship between the podcasts and sales and a direct increase in online ticket sales which increased 50% over the year.”   

Every year online BSO ticket sales tend to go up 10-12 % each year, and that was the only thing that they really did differently. This year they are continuing with excellent results.  The current challenge is to be balanced with the right amount of content without overdoing it.  At the same time keeping the content compelling with each item supportive of the next.

So Podcasts are an important part of their business now.
75,000 subscribers!
 

There are over 75,000 people subscribing to their podcasts, of which about 40,000 are regular down-loaders  -  (either every week or every other week). 

Rich says, “Its gotten to the point if we are 2 hours late in posting a podcast we hear about it.  Someone is saying, ‘I’m at Logan, at the airport, and I’m waiting to hear this podcast…’ People are clamoring for this.“

Considering how many people come to the BSO during any given week, this seems like a huge following. 

The podcasts were originally designed to augment the concert experience, and make the experience more enriching for those already planning to attend. They thought it might be helpful to those ‘on the fence’. 

This is part 1 of a  2 part series.  Part 2 tomorrow.