I don’t want to pile on here, as I really and truly love the 92nd St Y. I’ve been to many excellent discussions there, and was the very appreciative recipient of a writing scholarship to their wonderful Unterberg Poetry Center Writing Program early in my career of being a broke writer.

But I have been thinking a lot about what happened over there on East 92nd St. during the Steve Martin event, as it intersects with so many things that I think about constantly:

• How online and social tools have made the voice of the audience much more powerful in ways that can be frightening to established organizations
• How building a vibrant social media following must become an organic part of an organization’s mission, meaning that real events must encompass planned connection points to the social media space
• How critically important it is to find ways of leading the conversation online, and producing a forum for intelligent, substantive discussion

I’ve been to plenty of live events around the city that have gone off the rails, and I realize that basically any organization could deal with the sorts of challenges the 92nd St Y dealt with. I’ve also had my own experiences building and implementing online social tools that meant to add an extra dimension to events during the recent New York Film Festival.

When building bridges between an online audience and a live event, we encounter huge pitfalls and opportunities. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but with a bit of planning and perhaps a shift in thinking about how social media can interact with live events, I believe that the 92nd St Y could have mitigated or prevented some of the bad press and hurt feelings that beset them in the aftermath of November 29th.

Preparation: the proactive use of social media can help you set the stage for a successful public event

While my focus is largely in building social integrated websites and web experiences, there are some really simple and rather old-fashion ways social media can be used to prime an audience for a successful event:

Use social media to educate your audience

In the days and weeks leading up to the event, plant the seeds of good discussion by posting relevant content that can spark conversation. During the launch of the New York Film Festival site, I was lucky enough to be able to collaborate with Film Comment magazine by getting the exclusive chance to publish the web’s first review of “The Social Network,” contributed by Scott Foundas–quite a juicy hook into our opening night selection. This garnered us a lot of chatter and interaction right from the get-go, but even if your aren’t able to create your own serendipitous online editorial synergy, you can post items from other pubs that will illuminate the upcoming discussion. Post links to interesting background materials online and use social media to ask substantive questions.

Involve the talent in educating the audience about what is to be discussed

A little more complicated but extremely effective: invite featured guests to help contextualize an upcoming event in extended online material. Steve Martin might have been persuaded to provide a brief overview of the art world he was depicting in his book in a blog post or email message. Even if Mr. Martin was not available, a chapter from his book, excerpted online, might have help add more dimension to the discussion.

During the event: bridging the online and live space with dynamic discussion requires curation and coordination

Use tools on Twitter and Facebook for real-time question aggregation

One thing that struck me as odd is that while the 92nd St Y was fielding questions from an online audience they were only using one channel to collect that feedback: email. Seems to me that Twitter and Facebook live streams could have been a great way to diversify the range of opinions flooding in.

Appoint a “question curator” to separate the wheat from the chaff

In the live event space, audiences can run the gamut, and the Q&A period can be a nerve-wracking descent into an abyss of stuttering, poorly formed questions. Where does your inspiration come from? and fawning fan questions that conjure Chris Farley’s “that was…awesome” parody from Saturday Night Live are the paradigms of snooze-inducing events. The sheer breadth and depth of feedback from the social media space can inject a breath of fresh air into a tired format–if the right people are enlisted to pick through all the available options and feed great questions into a live event. Giving a person this role can require guts and a certain degree of risk, but if done right it certainly puts you in possession of an action plan that hopefully short-circuits the “Oh my God we just got a hundred emails that this event is boring!” panic that seems to have set in at the Y.

Coach the interviewer on reading the room and have contingency plans

While I think 92nd St Y went too far in offering refunds (which did seem a repudiation of Solomon and Martin), I do think the talent, and particularly Solomon, bore some responsibility for reading the room, and also for asking questions that would appeal to people who hadn’t read the book.

Dealing with the aftermath: If you’re not using social media right now to establish trust and transparency, you’re in for a rough road during a public relations crisis

One of the things that would have helped the 92nd St Y immensely is if they were already using social media to have a fairly transparent two-way conversation with their constituents.

That the barrage of negative messages felt like an invasion of the event (to the talent and to some of the fans of the institution) make sense in some ways: “social media” isn’t an integral or integrated part of the way the organization conducts itself in the public sphere, its seems. Looking to the online space to cultivate key advocates might have really been a boon in this situation–for instance, figuring out a way to promote their best “fans” to positions of more authority can add real weight to a message that has several voices attached to it. At the Film Society, we have probably 10 or so regular commenters who raise the quality of the conversation considerably and involving them in that conversation requires nothing more than a retweet or a pull quote inserted in an email newsletter or blog post. I think there must be several hundred more individuals who are quick to contribute if given more incentive. These individuals are the people we rely on to gain momentum on some of our biggest initiatives.

Your best champions in good times are also your greatest defenders in times of strife. What should have been discussed during the Solomon-Martin evening is open to debate, and actually might have made an interesting debate across the various social media channels that the Y has established, if their constituent audience had grown accustomed to using those channels for discussion.

Not knowing the organization intimately and just conjecturing here, but I bet there are some talented and overworked folks manning the various social media channels (and making particular headway with Twitter), within a larger organization that hasn’t been completely “sold” on their value in creating and maintaining relationships with their audience. That’s something I hope will change.

If this controversy has any lessons for the organization, I hope that one essential one does not get overlooked. Not that they should be quick to accept the blame for so-so events (I feel that by doing so in this case, they made the situation much worse), but that they can use a perceived loss of control brought about by a storm of public comments via online channels can be an incredible opportunity to learn to be better players in a dialogue.

What the revolution looked like in 1895

I got my start working in indie film during one of its most exciting boom times: the late 90s. Miramax was ascendant, million-dollar deals were being cut at Sundance, and digital video technology (and the abundance of credit card offers) was putting feature filmmaking into the reach of regular people.

What the revolution looked like when I was a teenager.

What a difference 10 years makes! Miramax is gone, along with much of the studio interest in small projects, and it’s becoming harder and harder to mobilize large groups of people to turn out for challenging fare at the movie theater.

As much as some of our most beloved institutions have crumbled, there is a bright side:

• Digital video technology is now finally something to get excited about. Low-budget filmmakers now can choose the medium that fits the message, whether its the crappy-looking VHS used by Harmony Korine in Trashhumpers or the crisp and polished DSLR cinematography of of Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture.
• Digital video communities like Vimeo are creating a vibrant alternative space for creators to get their work out there, interact with kindred spirits, and get seen by an appreciative community.
• The rise of social media and the omnipresent nature of an incredibly vibrant array of independent media via the Internet allows for tremendous new exposure to powerful cinematic innovation outside of the traditional system of seeing films on television or at the movie theater.

But with technology so rapidly changing the way we both make and see movies, with audiences abandoning the movie theaters and getting rid of their televisions, those in the motion picture arts are left facing an uncertain future.

Should this be frightening or invigorating? I guess it depends on your investment in the past. Too often the discussion around where film is “going” enforces old and outdated dichotomies–studio vs. indie, videos of cats playing the piano on YouTube vs. “art.”

“We are in the silent age for storytelling,” said Lance Weiler of the WorkBook Project, during his speech at the Open Video conference in October. And over the past year, as I have been immersing myself as much as possible in emerging areas for motion picture making, I’m inclined to agree.

A variety of really interesting events that I’ve recently attended, including Vimeofest, Open Video, and earlier in the year, The Conversation, had different ways of grappling with the challenges of the future, but all were pretty clear about one thing: the most exciting things happening in film right now are increasingly not happening in the movie theater, or at least in our traditional concept of the movie theater space, where an audience passively sits in padded chairs and takes in something projected on a screen.

Films in new containers and new spaces

Vimeofest, which was held in Chelsea at the IAC building on October 8 & 9 was full of vibrant illustrations of the frontiers of creative movie-making, both on the high and low end.

The Disposable Film Festival, which presented a small showcase of films at the gathering, provoked a huge amount of delight. The mission of the festival is to showcase creative work that is made on non-professional devices such as laptop video cameras, cell phone cameras, and FlipCams. Just take a look at the ingenuity of the following:

I love this stuff–it’s handmade with a passionate ingenuity, portable and bite-sized. Which is exactly on point with how what we see is changing, along with how we see it.

On the pricier and larger-scale side of the equation, there was English collective Seeper Arts, with a brilliant demonstration of what “projection mapping” can be. I admit that after reading the press notes, I was not all that excited about watching something projected on the side of a building. But the performance truly was breathtaking, an inspiring feat of contextual, three-dimensional use of motion picture technology.

What the revolution looks like circa 2010?

Alternative business models of distribution

While the theatrical distribution business slumps, novel, DIY methods of distribution and broadcast seek to bypass the gatekeepers and put more power in the hands of the audience.

By now just about everyone is familiar with OK GO from their fantastically successful viral videos that incorporate all manner of quirky accouterments, including dogs, treadmills and pale hipsters with good dance moves. At an Open Video keynote, frontman Damien Kulash led the audience on his band’s circuitous journey from low-priority conglomerate pawn to grass roots YouTube sensation.

When the band first made their famous treadmills video, the record company’s lofty chief digital strategist told them: “if this gets out, you’re sunk.” The band gleefully continued, grew a tremendous fan base, cut the record company loose, and now do things the way they want to. “The fact that we can live in harmony with our fans is Valhalla to me,” Kulash said of a much more open and socially integrated model of the distribution of media.

Arin Crumley, who spoke at both The Conversation and the Open Video conference, is an inspiring upstart and a new kind of indie film mogul, posing a completely different form of exhibition and distribution. After making the scrappy feature “Four-Eyed Monsters,” he decided to distribute the film on his own, by creating a grass-roots online mechanism where audiences could request the film–which is a great model for film that the powers-that-be might term “hard to market.”

Check out Crumley’s DIY distribution case study:

Lance Weiler speaks frequently (he was at all three of the conferences I referenced above), and if you get a chance to see him, don’t miss it. He’s a new media pioneer and a champion of the world of transmedia storytelling. That’s storytelling that transcends the ordinary containers of “feature film,” “television show,” “novel.” It’s a more expansive view of what narrative can be and how it can fill in the spaces between old media conceptions of entertainment.

And it’s worth noting that amid all of the hue and cry about audience “abandoning” film and books, they are not actually abandoning narrative or storytelling. Lance is doing a great job of opening up a thrilling view of what’s possible in a world where choices of media don’t enforce strict (and some might say old-fashioned) divisions. I love hearing about how Lance has tweaked the concept of “interactivity” to encompass both real-world and virtual spaces.

So…what’s next?

A recent AdWeek column asked whether people will really adapt to watching television on their computer screen. My response is that they already have. As soon as the analog signal was switched off, broadcast TV’s goose was cooked. People are sick of cable monopolies and are simply turning to other forms of entertainment, such as games, in ever increasing numbers.

Add to that the stunning possibilities offered up by ever-more accessible filmmaking technologies, social media and online video communities like Vimeo, and it simply no longer makes sense to cling to outdated models that have reigned for just a blip in the overall human tradition of storytelling and image-making.

The revolution is much closet than you think on your iPad, your mobile phone, your computer screen, and maybe even the building down the street. Get ready.

Just in case you want an easy way to follow what some of the people I mentioned in this article are doing, I’ve created a Twitter list right here.

Something pretty extraordinary happened between the time we developed newdirectors.org and were set to roll out the New York Film Festival website. That was, of course, the rapid adoption of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol, and how it almost overnight created incredible new social dimension for sites on the web.

Obviously, it’s no longer enough to just have a Twitter and Facebook profile floating around out there that you maybe link to from your homepage or email newsletter. And so when it came time to build the New York Film Festival website, I wanted to be able to use the tools that the big publishers like Huffington Post and CNN were using. Ambitious? Maybe. But I think that you’ll see that by using WordPress, unlocking those sorts of tools is actually pretty easy.

The New York Film Festival website 2010 incorporated Facebook and Twitter widgets in the sidebar. We specifically set out to make each film page “shareable” content, so each page presented the opportunity to tweet the page content (via Tweet Meme), and to “Recommend” via the Facebook interface.

We also included comments in many of the pages (though not all). For this interface, I chose to use a plugin called IntenseDebate. Many use Disqus for comments, but I liked the numbers of different useful features that IntenseDebate offers, including Facebook and Twitter login, and it also seemed a bit quicker to load on the front end.

Soon after launching, an article that we published by Scott Foundas on The Social Network, went completely viral–spiking up our traffic and leading to a lot of retweets and comments. It was a great launch for a site meant to inspire conversation. I was thrilled to see how many new people were coming to our content via Facebook and Twitter. The question was…would the effect last, and would people start using the tools that we had put into the site to share and discover?

Favorite features

Some of my favorite features might be a little hidden from the casual glance. Chief among them were a number of “recommendation tools” that go to one of our central challenges of offering a number of movies from all over the world during our film festivals. A plugin called “Related Posts” was easily tweaks for our use to return a list of related films at the end of each page.

Categories and tags helped us out in another way: they allowed us to create (and automate) customized feature pages for various aspects of the program: French, Latin American, Documentaries and many others. Finally, one of our incredible digital media assistants, Curtis Laraque, came up with another fabulous discovery tool via a dynamic tag cloud on the homepage:

What’s to come

While presenting to WordCamp NYC 2010 this year, I explained to the assembled crowd of bloggers and small businesspeople that we learned by doing, and how some of the mistakes that we made were as instructive as our successes.

Chief among those mistake was selecting a theme to customize that is no longer being actively developed. When I learned all of the things that are being developed around WordPress 3.0, I see even more potential as a vehicle for nonprofit web development. Multi-site holds a lot of potential for developing a number of sites around one branding, and custom taxonomies could potentially make WordPress a much more powerful content management system. I’m already attempting to experiment with Twenty Ten, and I’m impressed by all the variations and innovations that are already happening amongst the WordPress community.

Is a DIY approach for you?

I’d never claim to know every organization’s inner workings, goals or capabilities, and I’d certainly never suggest that there’s a one size fits all solution for growing a nonprofit via the web. I know too many experienced professionals–information architects, digital strategists, filmmakers and content creators–to respect the fact that every project has its own unique demands and parameters.

Plus, a DIY approach to web development can be crazy-making. In environments where it’s easier just to do nothing or where trying something new could inspire criticism, why try? (As an aside, just imagine my chagrin when I was called out by an SEO blogger in Texas for my insufficiency in deploying the optimal number of keywords in an article! When you make a site that performs at a high level of visibility, nobody cares how you made it, or how limited your resources were).

But another lesson from the world of filmmaking occurs to me know. For years I worked as a teaching assistant for NYU’s beginning film immersion class. It was an intensive film production class where we handed the kids a couple of rolls of black and white reversal film, an MOS camera, and a gigantic list of what they couldn’t do: no sync sound, no complicated story lines, no budget. There were always a few student who came back in and gleefully smashed all of our rules. That’s what made the class such a joy. Later on, when the same students were given bigger resources and more options, they froze up. Their work became less inspired and less inspiring.

Anyone can make a serviceable website with an “appropriate” amount of resources. What is exciting to me is seeing the innovation that comes from limitations, and how WordPress can allow even resource-strapped publisher achieve and perform on an extremely high level.

It was the first time I got paid to write actually, during the heady days of the dot com boom, when you could barely walk down the street without a venture capitalist hitting you with a sack of money.

Picture, if you will, the late 90s. I was recently out of the NYU film program, scrapping together a living writing coverage on zombie film scripts for Dimension Films and working as a camera assistant on independent films. Those were more profligate times, and luckily enough a plum writing gig landed in my lap: a start-up entity called Indieplanet.com needed someone to write for their film “channel.”

My beat was how technology was reshaping the independent film scene, notably how digital video was creating an atmosphere where anyone could make a film.

At the time, I was a bit enamored of true celluloid (I was a camera assistant, can you blame me?). I cast a slightly cynical eye on the disappointing flatness of the video technology of the day. If you can score a name actor for your film, I remember thinking, couldn’t you shell out a couple of bucks for some short ends?

A decade later, video technology has come a long way, people are shooting movies with digital SLR cameras, Indieplanet is long defunct (thanks for the launch party, though, guys, it was raging!), and yet somehow I’m still preoccupied with DIY uses of technology.

Only, now I’m not as focused on lenses, grain and the inherent limitations of digital. These days, the DIY technology I care most about has to do with the web, and specifically how the little guy (whether that’s an independent artist, a nonprofit, or a small business) can create compelling, socially integrated website on a low budget.

Toward a more social web

I’m talking about WordPress, of course. But I’m also talking about an approach to web development that is more than the sum of its technological parts.

Everybody’s needs a website these days. We all know that. But having a website is not enough.

Your website needs to be a jumping off point to a whole set of aggregated conversations, peripheral social networks, and connections.

It’s simply no longer enough to give users a destination on the web.

Now, when we are successful as website creators, what we are giving users is just an entry point, a fluid, dynamic and evolving way of touching and engaging in a conversation that happens well outside of any particular web address.

This year, in developing a website for the for the New York Film Festival, I was cognizant of that significant change, and so all of our efforts were aimed at achieving a sophisticated social integration with the website. Twitter and Facebook live on top of all pages; we opened up many pages to comments, and via Facebook Open Graph, were able to offer our users an easy way to hook into the conversation with their Facebook logins.

Shareability was central to our vision of how this site would look and perform, and in many ways, we were hugely successful. It helped that we were able to push out the web’s first review of the new David Fincher movie, The Social Network. But more than that, we were able to take advantage of the trend toward greater social integration to create a website that does a lot more than simply serve up information or transactions.

Not bad for a blogging platform and a virtually nonexistent budget.

The background

Another lesson from independent film still resonates with me now: limitations breed innovation.

Before coming to the Film Society, I had only worked on large websites with large staffs and sophisticated divisions of labor. Being in a nonprofit setting forces you to handle web projects in a completely different way. I knew the organization needed web properties that were dynamic and socially integrated. But when resources for significant web development projects were scarce, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wanted us to be able to be in new spaces and platforms.

View from the Avant-Garde 2009

The first custom project my team took on for the Film Society was for a yearly film series called Views from the Avant-Garde. The programmers of that four-day series of film felt that the web didn’t fully do justice to the visual and innovative nature of their series.

This unfortunately happens with many organizations that handle many different types of content on the web; the infrastructure you build to treat core issues comes up short when confronting the specific or the idiosyncratic.

The Views microsite, 2009

So in confronting this challenge, I set out to make some specifically suited to Views, something highly visual and something that would offer the web visitor an entry point that was as enticing and unique as the program itself. WordPress was an obvious tool for such a task, and this early experience in hacking a template and reverse engineering proved to be a fruitful one.

Newdirectors.org

Onto a biggest festival and a bigger set of challenge: New Directors/New Films.

My second major custom web development project for the Film Society brought two major brands into one coherent web destination for the very first time.

For many years this wonderful festival of new works has been stymied by a diffuse set of web presences on the Film Society side and the MoMA side. Newdirectors.org changed all that, and helped this festival gain a stronger purchase in the consumer’s mind and lifted this year’s fest to it’s best ever sales performance.

It was great to be able to deliver a streamlined consumer-facing product, but some of the most exciting things we developed during this project took place on the backend. Instead of static HTML we had easily editable pages. Pages we could schedule for publication. Slideshows that impressed but didn’t have to be painstakingly developed by our graphic design team.

I was ready for a bigger challenge. This year, the venerable new York film festival opens with none other than the social network, a film about “the Facebook” as it is referred to in the film.

I had talked the social media talk, but had I really walked the walk?

With this new website, I knew I needed to raise the bar considerably.

In Part II of this article, I’ll talk about some of the successes, and challenges, we faced in creating a socially integrated film festival site for this year’s New York Film Festival.

Then there was the Brooklyn Flea, a homespun hub of folksy branding for purveyors of lobster rolls, vintage cowboy boots and kimchee-strewn hot dogs.

Now there is the Greenpoint Food Market, an incongruous oasis of scrumptious micro-enterprise in a church basement in North Brooklyn. You can only catch it once a month, and I was there for the May edition on Saturday, May 22nd.

I admit that what drew me initially was the novelty of what was, essentially, a bake sale in hipster drag. I wanted the chance to scope out what a new generation of culinary mischief-makers would plate up in a subterranean space much better suited to church mixers and girl scout troop meetings.

To wit, hand pumped hibiscus soda:

But in between mouthfuls of handmade chocolate and pork buns, I had to stop and marvel at what a weird and wonderful time it is to be a creative person with an idea and just a little bit of gumption. It takes risk to start a business, but thankfully venues like these make that risk much more manageable.

In social media circles, we talk a lot about the notion of “self-branding,” that is, bringing all of the disparate channels of your online self into a coherent package. Nowadays anyone with can appropriate the trappings of “branding” from an elite world of ad agencies and corporations. Bring incubators like the Greenpoint Food Market into the picture and a robust trend toward micro-branding can transcend a set of snapshots of your pooch or plate of brunch. It can suddenly make creating a business within the reach of a lot more people.

I stumbled across Greenpoint Food Market not through press but through social media channels. I was watching a “haul video” and the young woman at the center had just received a package from a baked goodie company called Fanny & Jane. As soon as I heard the word “chocolate-covered red velvet cake,” I was on the case. A few Google searches connected me with not only the Market’s website, but also some of the vendors’ blogs and Twitter presences.

I’m well acquainted with a whole constellation of craft blogs that extol the virtues of the “passionately handmade” and it was enjoyable to see the hand-made food crowd doing much of the same, while trading the yarn for free-range eggs.

Jen Curran of Fanny & Jane runs a blog that is called, appropriately, Follow My Bliss, about her path from desk job to baked goods artisan and comedienne. The baked goods at the Market did not disappoint, and it looks like Jen and her partner have set up a great online shop with very reasonable prices and shipping for what are products of exceptional quality. I would highly recommend one of these bundles as a gift.

Another nascent business I found fascinating was Milkmade Ice Cream. I frequently make ice cream and consider myself a tough critic. The friend I had brought to the event was skeptical of Milkmade’s pricing structure–$50 for 3 pints of their ice cream, delivered to your door on a monthly basis. However, I tasted the product and after checking out the various web properties of the small company, I have to say I’m rooting for this duo to succeed.

They’re doing three things really, really right:

• Their ice cream is not a product, it’s the manifestation of being a part of a very small and selective club. Like the late-night TV pitchman says: “This amazing ice cream is not available in stores!” To get it, you have to buy a three month membership. At the Film Society, we’re currently working on membership campaigns and this sort of model, applied to ice cream, appealed to me. Instead of a simple transaction, it creates a relationship–and to me that’s essential for a grass-roots business to succeed.
• In cultivating scarcity, they enhance their efforts. Building off the above, offering fans membership into a small, select group, Milkmade further burnishes the specialness of the experience by vowing to never make the same flavor twice. I’d be more than willing to pay a premium to enjoy an incredibly rare experience.
• They are using the web and social media to great effect. Blog, check. Facebook page, check. Twitter, check. The photography they’ve got going is utter food porn, and the only pointer I might give them is to create a luscious gallery of those images on their site. That, paired with a list of flavors that just aren’t available to anyone else, is sure to drive up the mania for their product.

My excursion into Greenpoint was just a taste of the vitality that’s been gathering steam in Brooklyn over the past few years. And even though the Greenpoint Market was filled with whimsical notions that would surely make your typical product marketing manager blanch, I was thrilled to see  all the initiative–and the creativity packed into this unlikely space.

The answer is, match the right tool to your objective, and you’ll have a killer online campaign ready in no time. So in crafting these resolutions for the “little guy,” I’d like to share some of my favorite DIY tech tools and how they can be used for maximum impact online.

Resolution for creative individuals: go beyond the resume

2009 has been a tough year for those working in both traditional and online media. People with fabulous qualifications and skills are having to knock on a lot of doors. So in these challenging times, creative types need to use every tool in their arsenal to set themselves apart. It’s not enough to have a killer resume. You also need a killer online brand. The good news is that technology is on your side.

A few months ago, I stumbled across a startup called Flavors.me. The concept is simple and readily graspable–a Flavors.me page is meant to bring together all the various strands of a person life in social media–but in practice you can see there’s also a lot of ways to use this platform for a quick, high-impact branding initiative.

Easy-peasey online portfolio

By setting up some affiliated content on Vimeo, Flickr and the like, I was able to put together a quick online portfolio in no time at all. In fact, I had such a positive experience that I recommended the platform for a new young donor cultivation initiative for my organization; you can see that here:

Quick, pop-up campaign site

Resolution for Small Business People: Get Yourself Seen Online

Using a simple aggregator to pull together various online strands of social media activity is an excellent strategy for small businesses as well. But too often, I hear that small business owners are intimidated by the online space. An instructive example: A friend of mine’s father-in-law is a talented potter who sells his goods in craft markets in the midwest. His one-of-a-kind product is the kind of thing that could certainly find an appreciative audience via the web, not to mention, he could certainly stand to find great advice on growing his business via a fine network of craftspeople on Twitter and Etsy.

The bottom line is niche is great when you’re talking about the online space. If you are a distinguished purveyor of distinctively glazed ceramic pieces or one of a handful of establishments in Brooklyn who fills growlers, all you need to do to expand your business is learn how to stake your territory online. The barriers to entry aren’t difficult, but they do start with becoming a part of the conversation, whether through starting a blog or being a part of Twitter. Anything you can put up online becomes a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead new customers to your product, whether through the social networking space or through search. After all, it doesn’t cost anything to try, and the rewards of getting an online presence established can be enormous.

Resolution for folks working in nonprofit marketing and development: use more video

It’s never a bad idea to use more video. We know that the word “video” increases open rate for email newsletters. And there’s just something about a personal appeal that make a huge difference when you are working on a donor campaign. Take a look at this example from City Opera. It instantly creates an urgency about giving, and it sets itself apart from the million other direct mail pieces that are competing for donors’ attention.

While I believe that paying professionals to produce great video is worth it, take a look at a couple of DIY-rooted pieces I produced for the Film Society. In the first, we were just hoping to raise more awareness of a new rush ticket program during the New York Film Festival. This piece was made with a Flip Cam, an intern, and some willing colleagues.

Below, you’ll see a more professional looking product that I nonetheless made on a shoestring budget, with the program After Effects. We paid for professional-quality sound work, as well as royalty free music on this one, because those are two things that are hard to fake, even with all of these great DIY tools. I’m proud to say that not only was this commercial running on Time Warner Cable for several weeks, it also garnered over a 1000 hits on YouTube on an incredibly short space of time. It was also a great entry to the program on our website–making a change from our usual text-based introduction.

So how do you get started? Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find great spokespeople in your organization (nonprofits are generally wealthy with passionate people) and capture them on camera. Come up with a fun skit to put on YouTube or Facebook. Learn to use a cheap or free program like iMovie. There’s no reason to be intimidated! This is another area where there is little to lose, and much to gain.

Resolution for bloggers and other webbies still using tired-old templates: master WordPress

I love reading blogs and know many bloggers who have great content, but they’re still using the tired old basic WordPress blue template or something shopworn from Blogger. My question is why when incredibly sophisticated design work is available for cheap and it’s easy to implement.

My favorite tool is Worpress, and not just for blogs. But in order to unlock all of the magic that is WordPress, the first step is to move to a self-hosted setup. You need to pay for a hosting account (Bluehost is my personal fave), which costs a couple hundred bucks for a couple years of hosting. With that, you get your own url, plus the ability to put together a custom site on a shoestring. Just google “cool wordpress themes,” look through the WordPress.org theme directory, or look in the footer for site credits of blogs you enjoy.

Customization is a topic that could merit its own post, but I warn you, once you get hooked, you will want to make sites for everything!

I’m always on the look-out for creative uses of DIY tech, so if you’ve got your own, I hope you’ll share it in the comments!

Amanda McCormick creates online and multimedia for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Follow her on Twitter, or connect with her on Linked In.

Can Twitter cure cancer? I’m still waiting for someone to start a feed that might. After beginning the @filmlinc feed for the Film Society of Lincoln Center and one of my own, I’ve gotten hopelessly hooked, and I keep looking for new and novel applications for Twitter. Maybe I should start one for the food coop I’m volunteering with. Perhaps Twitter is a great place to try out that new business idea I’ve been fantasizing about. Maybe my dog should be on Twitter.

I don’t want to get carried away, but I did want to get some advice from people who have successfully deployed more than one Twitter feed and kept them growing. I went straight to these experts:

• Seamus Condron, who’s at the helm of the hugely successful @mediabistro feed, as well as his own (@seamuscondron) and @journocafe, which focuses on the evolution of journalism and its convergence with community.
• Laura Fitton, who as @pistachio is well known amongst the Twitter community for her insightful Tweets, co-wrote the “Twitter for Dummies” book and consults with businesses on the successful deployment of social media tools.
• Barry Hoggard, who delivers vital news to artists as @bhoggard, @culturepundits, and @aczine.

I found that each prolific Twitterer had different strategies for successfully manning multiple feeds, but each had advice that could well serve anyone who is using Twitter for brand-building.

Know your objectives

We all know Twitter is growing a blistering pace; far faster than Facebook, and in contrast to its older brethren with micro-targeted ad placements, it’s much more difficult to buy yourself influence. Your boss, dry cleaner and Uncle Bob are all signing up for accounts, but a little strategic thinking sets the savvy Twitter user out from the pack: a cognizance that a specific strategy will bring followers, and results.

“Be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish with Twitter,” Fitton told me. “Focus on the tactic as a tactic. For instance in the case of a nonprofit, you wouldn’t judge the success of a fundraiser based on how many Twitter followers you picked up. An executive using Twitter to keeps his staff updated is an example of a tactic that I think really helps a company.”

Use micro-interactions for major results

Over the course of a year, Seamus Condron has watched the Twitter feed he runs for @mediabistro grow from 100 to over 40,000 followers. “The core goal was to provide resources to the media community through content from all over the web, but also conversation about that content,” Seamus explained via email.

Early on, @mediabistro adopted a tactic that has since worked well for big brands like Jet Blue and Starbucks. “We’ve perfected the practice of stalking 2.0, where someone might say something positive or negative about the brand, we’d respond within minutes. And they’d be genuinely shocked, then really happy. People like to know the companies they engage engage them.”

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

While maintaining three feeds delivering art news and resources to the Twitscape, Barry Hoggard has his hands on all three but gets some help on @aczine. He explains: “aczine is primarily for promoting our own listings and zine articles, but we’re starting to use it a lot to list things we don’t have a place for such as calls for submissions or one-time events such as lectures and panels.”

Event- and resource-rich Twitter feeds can often be well-served by multiple voices at the helm. At @filmlinc, I’ve recently been joined by the invaluable @claraque, who brings his own perspective and voice to the proceedings. If you’ve been holding tightly to that brand feed, you might be surprised how much new blood helps open the door to new possibilities for your feed-and new followers.

Decide: Are you your brand, yourself, or a little of both?

Among the prolific Twitterers, I found lots of differentiation on the issue of running a personal (name) feed or a business one. To Laura Fitton, “Twitter is the new golf course,” so it’s important to be a singular personality on this opportunity-rich social scene. “The more personal I’ve been on my feed, the more business relationships I keep up,” she explained.

As the voice of Mediabistro on Twitter, Seamus Condron discovered one of the pitfalls of “becoming a brand”: “A couple months ago I was really sick with the flu for four days,” he said, “and the Twitter feed was silent. Our followers thought it was the end of days.”

“Each person needs to find their own comfort level,” Fitton told me, and each of the three people I talked to demonstrates, in different ways, how much value a unique voice brings to the conversation. And the answer to the question of whether you should begin a Twitter feed for any brand or sub-brand may well be summed up simply: can you be unique, and can you be valuable?

Tuesday night I spoke at the Arts, Culture and Technology Meetup at Ars Nova, organized by Julia Kaganskiy. Put this gal on your one to watch list. We in the arts and technology community are extremely lucky to have her, because she makes it so much easier for us to share ideas, get excited about what’s going on, and just generally be a community. Yes, times are tough out there, really tough, but in some ways, there’s never been a more exciting time to be manning the Tweetdeck inside a big white box (as Victor Samra might put it). Technology is allowing the people in the arts world to let down their hair, show some personality, connect and collaborate. And Julia’s meetups are an essential way of getting all that brain-power, creativity and passion into one room.

The list of presenters was bold and diverse. Some random thoughts I had about what they talked about…

Christina Ray of Glowlab–Wow. Just wow. This a beautiful site and a beautiful way of encountering art that takes in technology and “the urban environment.” Christina obviously has a lot of passion, and it’s clear that she’s living the dream, which is great to see.

Manish Vora of Artlog–The nerd in me was totally taken up in how well they had designed the functionality of the site. Manish talked about how his goal is to supply artists and institutions with tools to get their message out. A great mission and a great site, and I was really curious about how they invite user participation in all of this. This is definitely a site to watch.

Barry Hoggard of various, including Artcat–Impressive resume here, with lots of interesting projects. Basically Barry has helped supply artists with a simple CMS system that allows them to throw up sites that promote their work simply and quickly. Sometimes ya just gotta use the right tool for the job. He also runs Culture Pundits, which is a vertical ad network that places ads on selected arts and cultural institutions. Who’s says artsy people can’t also be business-y?

Victor Samra of MoMA–Victor talked about breaking free of the big white box institutional model using Twitter, which when you think about it is advice that any business could use. I also liked his model in terms of adding value by doing more than just promoting your own cause in your communications. When you look at MoMA on Twitter, it’s all about adding that kind of value.

Jaki Levy of Arrow Root Media–Jaki was also on the Social Media Week panel, and now I feel like we’re BFF, even though I’ve never actually met him! Anyway, it’s always great when really technical people are also really creative. Made note to self to check out his projects.

Luke Crawford of Muxtape–two things I thought about this: what a great narrative that after being shut down by the record companies, Muxtape is now positioned to be on the vanguard of a new kind of record distribution. I was also impressed by the look and feel of the site itself, for which Luke said he enforced a rigid grid, and then went onto show the creative solutions that had sprung out of his constraints. No better example of how inspiration is born of limitation.

David Garrison of Indaba Music–this interface looked totally rad, basically it hooks people up to make music collaboratively. It’s one of those “crowd-sourcing” ideas that actually looks as though it has legs. Wish I had an iota of musical talent!

Michael Sabat of Mobile Commons–works with nonprofits to supply mobile communications. Very intrigued. I’m a little scared about companies that communicate with me via text message, but as Michael said you have to read it to delete it. Want to look into this for our organization.

Notes on my own presentation. You can look at it above. Basically, I think it was a little too basic for this group, which was filled with a lot of entreupenurial web types. I kind of used the language that I would use within the organization to talk about our gains in the social media space. Also, I think in the future I need to make a better case how the Film Society’s blog tries to act like a regular film blog, with daily updates and a lot of attention paid to how much we’re being read, rather than the typical company blog that is very infrequently updated and doesn’t get many readers.

Tiny notes to self in the midst of an awesome evening. It was exciting to be asked to present, and the whole event was very stimulating. I can’t wait to hear more presentations at the next one!

-Amanda McCormick

Getting the okay to start an official, company-sanctioned blog may take some doing, however. Your organization will likely have people who don’t know what a blog is, to those who furtively check Perez Hilton daily. A “blog”—an online publication with datelined posts—encompasses so many different kinds of outfits, from a mommy blogging about Junior’s first words to the Huffington Post, that perhaps it’s natural that the concept strikes fear in the powers-that-be in many a company.

Starting a blog is a worthwhile endeavor for many outfits, however. And you can put your organization on the couch, listen to its fears and allay them. Here is the heads up on some of the objections you’ll encounter and how to deal with them head on.

Organizational fear #1: What happens when we can’t control what the public says about us?

This, I would say is the # 1 fear organizations have about social media: if we give people the ability to comment on what we are do, what if they use our site to say bad things about us? Leave this part out of your spiel to the bosses, but the days of completely controlling the public’s ability to talk smack about your brand or product is over. Social media has put a lot of power in the hands of users. So you’re either in or you’re out—you’re using social media to spark, leverage, and maintain positive chatter, or you’re letting the public completely define who you are in the social media space.

But what will soothe this key fear? A few precautions will help you:

• First, make sure that people have to register to comment. This will weed out the vast majority of people who are out to cause problems in comments.
• Work with a lawyer to hammer out a solid “Terms and Conditions” policy that establishes the community standards for your site. Yes, it’s the mousetype that no one reads, but in the unlikely event that anything goes wrong, it’s the policy that indemnifies your company against bad actors. Assure the head honchos that malicious commenting on an organizational blog is actually very unlikely. Chances are what you post won’t be the most controversial stuff in the world, and thus unlikely to start a flame war.
• Realize your worst enemies are going to be spammers, who are easy enough to deal with via sophisticated spam catching software.
• Do establish monitoring of commenting activity on your blog, but recognize the real risks are actually very few

Organizational fear #2: What if no one comments on our posts? Doesn’t that mean we are a failure?

The fear above has a flipside: the fear of launching a blog and then hearing nothing but crickets. As blogs aren’t traditional marketing or traditional PR, you have to carefully manage your bosses’ expectations about what they can and can’t do.

Blogs that aren’t updated frequently won’t catch fire. Blogs that don’t offer their readers any value—that is to say, do nothing but promote the organization—won’t get you far in the online space. But even when you attain a measure of success with an organizational blog, you may not get a tremendous amount of comments.

Why not? First, remember that it’s only a tiny slice of the readers of any site that actually take the time to participate—some experts put it at 10%. Second, commenters are drawn to provocative, controversial content, something that an organizational blog will likely not cultivate.

Finally, remember that the number of comments aren’t the only way of judging the impact and influence of a blog. Number of visits certainly matters, and so does the number of links you receive from other sites. Are other sites talking about you? Can you use your blog to make ripples across several social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? When you are using a blog to cultivate awareness and affinity for your organization, sometimes it’s these trickier measures that mean the most.

To survive and thrive, a blog has to be lively, but remember to take in a full range of different metrics when looking at the success of your blog.

Organizational fear #3: We have a really established “voice” and we can’t be messing around with that.

Moving from a “read-only” culture from a new digital age “read/write” culture has moved once sacred branded properties into the hands of consumers, Lawrence Lessig writes about this in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Today, your brand has to live on platforms you don’t own like Facebook and Myspace. Its needs to, in other words, learn to speak new languages. A blog is one way to take your “voice” down a peg and make it a little more accessible to the consumers who are currently dying to interact with you.

Organizational fear #4: Aren’t successful blogs always driven by a single personality?

Many of the most popular bloggers—Dooce, Perez Hilton—have carved out their fame on their individuality. However, when you look at Technorati’s ranking of top blogs, group blogs are all over it: Life Hacker, Boing Boing, Gawker et all.

Whether your organization blog is voiced by a single person or several employees is a key decision that will affect the way your blog is perceived. There is no right answer to the question of how your blog’s “voice” should be defined. It’s an evolving process—chances are you’ll go through a process of trial and error before getting it right. And that’s okay—that’s what blogs are for. The bottom line is that any blog, even an organizational one, should have a personality, even if that personality belongs to the collective.

Organizational fear #5: Won’t this take our employees away from more important work?

Because blogs are rather informally written, people sometimes underestimate their power in reaching out to an organization’s audience. And it’s true that blog don’t write themselves. They take a lot of care and feeding in order to survive—a person or group who are willing to champion the medium as a way of connecting with new audiences and building a new channel of communication. Building a quality conversation with your audience—especially in the social media saturated world we live in—isn’t just important work, it’s critical.

Amanda McCormick maintains the filmlinc blog for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

My boss as the British Tourist Board New York office, hoping to swing me a company-sponsored trip to the UK, appointed me “Social Media Champion” of our operation. I had set up a social profile during the swinging heyday of Friendster, and set up an account on Facebook, but I was skeptical of the idea of using social media for marketing purposes. I had seen too many dumb ap ideas cooked up by major corporations that seemed straight out of an outmoded idea of what marketing should do.

But I poked around, did my research. Social media, it seemed to me, was less a new outlet for marketing, but a complete groundshift in the way consumers interact with brands. After a while I was hooked. At work, I proposed and initiated a cross-departmental “Social Media Working Group,” which involved everyone from the PR department to call center reps. We did more research, tried things, bounced ideas around.

Then I was hired by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I learned what it was like to play around with a brand with a tremendous sense of prestige, history, and public affinity. All these factors made it possible for me to quadruple our Facebook fan base in four months, launch a successful blog and try out all sorts of different applications of social media.

At this point, social media is a tremendously exciting, emerging field. This site is my way of sharing some of my experiments and ideas. Self-proclaimed social media “experts” are everywhere these days, and I don’t want to call myself that.

I’m just a gal with a passion for what’s possible in the social media world who wants to share it. With new ideas, intel and applications coming down the pike every day, there’s lots to talk about.

And I never did get that trip to the UK.