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.

One of the most interesting discussions in our class was about measuring the impact of your efforts within the social media space. If social media is more about building community, affinity, and conversation, are there ways to express those efforts in numbers, or analytics?

It’s a complicated question that takes a little investigation to unpack. Yes, the impact of our efforts in social media are measurable, and growing more so everyday, thanks to the Facebook Open Graph Protocol. At the same time, social media practitioners lack a master dashboard like Google Analytics that will help us link up the insights across the different networks.

Further, a major challenge we face is that we want to track two different kinds of behaviors: what users do when they interact with our brand presences on Facebook and Twitter, and what they do with our content on those networks.

So which numbers matter in social media?

There are more than I can possibly catalog in this post. But let’s start with…

The big one:

Fans and followers–despite what anyone says about quality vs. quantity, your follower count (especially as it compares to other organizations like yours) is still the simplest way to measure the effectiveness of your work in the social media space.

Informative numbers that are easy to eyeball:

Retweets–For a quick read on the “shareability” of your content, just look at how many times it is retweeted.

Facebook “likes”–A great innovation of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol was that it made interacting affirmatively with a website so darn easy. You don’t have to log in or do anything except hit a button that says “like.” Further, now you can do more than just like a brand or organization. You can like content that they post, or even their status updates.

Slightly harder to track but still important:

Facebook shares–To me, a “share” requires more effort than a “like,” and also requires the user to be more of an evangelist for your content. By “sharing” your content, a user is putting their support of your content into a newsfeed that her friends can see. “Liking” is a lot less visible and more personal.

Tweets of your content not including your handle–A bit harder to track, but you can see this by using Bit.ly or HootSuite, or Backtype.

Comments–This is another great innovation from Facebook, making comments incredibly easy via their interface. That’s why you will see more comments on Facebook for blog posts than on your blog itself. Comments on Facebook are worth counting when you are looking at the quality of the interaction you inspire on the social nets.

@ Replies–How much interaction are you inspiring and/or participating in? It’s a metric that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Stumbles and Diggs–can be important, depending on what your priorities are.

What tools exist for tracking these numbers?

Not a ton, I’m afraid to report. Here are the ones that I’ve come across, please let me know if you know of more.

On Facebook:

Facebook Insights–gives you an idea of what users are doing on your Facebook page, and how much they are interacting with your organization there. The drawback is that only gives you intel on a contained space (your Facebook page). It doesn’t tell you how users are using your branded content across Facebook.

Facebook’s Activity Feed Plugin–this allows you to enter your main URL and it tells you how your content is being shared on Facebook. Very interesting to see these stats, but I wonder how comprehensive it really is.

Third parties:

Radian6–this seems to me the major player in social analytics. Unfortunately I have never used it because it costs money! But from what I understand it gives you a social media dashboard that helps you understand your impact across networks.

Bit.ly–Twitter’s ubiquitous URL shortener, Bit.ly comes with a free dashboard that offers a quick hit on where your links are showing up and being shared.

HootSuite–like Bit.ly has a social media dashboard. This one tells you the links that you have used the ow.ly shortener for via HootSuite. It has an added feature of integrating Google Analytics, though it doesn’t give you a tremendous amount of insight about your total impact on social media, i.e., what users are doing with your content.

Backtype–this is a “marketing intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media” and it served the main requirements for my needs–it was free! You just type in a URL and see its impact in terms of share, likes, comments, you name it. My main problem is that I wonder, how reliable are the stats?

Beyond numbers into nuances

So you’ve got a great following going. The next question to ask yourself is how are you using social analytics to improve the performance of your campaigns?

To answer this question, I reached out to two of the most socially-savvy organizations that I know of: The New York Public Library and the Tribeca Film, the organization that puts on the yearly Tribeca Film Festival, as well as other events and online initiatives.

Susan Halligan is the Director of Marketing at the New York Public Library, an institution that’s really using social media in a progressive way throughout the organization. Susan’s past tips have completely changed my Twitter game, making me a passionate convert to the HootSuite application, and her insights into social analytics inside of a large organization like the Library gave me new perspective on how analytics can and should be used to shape strategy and content development.

Last spring, the Library was confronted with an impressive number on their social media dashboard: several million views of their Ghostbusters video on YouTube, a project made in collaboration with Improv Everywhere. The brainchild of Heidi Singer at the Library, this serendipitous coming together caught the public’s imagination, and also served a purpose: supporting the Library’s public advocacy campaign during an important political season.

An impressive showing, but one-to-one interactions still matter quite a bit within the numbers they track via the social analytics tools at their disposal such as HootSuite, Google Analytics and Radian6. “Who are these people who are sharing things and are we making it easy for them to share our material?” Susan asks.

The analytics they track help them identify areas for new content creation and distribution, Susan explained. “For instance on Facebook, the most sharable type of content is pictures. Anytime we put up a picture it’s like ‘boom.’ I want to make it really easy for people to share those images and I want to know who is sharing those images,” she told me.

Further, analytics helps the library stay focused on core services: “People look to us for program/events and service, so anything we can offer around change in library hours, and what you can put on hold, gets massive hits. And what that tells us that there is a market for that.”

At Tribeca Film, the numbers that count are the ones that show they are successful in inspiring conversation. “The more people comment on our site, the more exponential our reach will be, as comments show up in [users'] personal news feeds,” explained Kristin McCracken, who is the Director of Web Content and Operations at Tribeca Film. To that end, most status updates pose a question and seek to engage a discussion.

On that note, Kristin gave me some great advice that I have taken to heart: repost your blog content to Twitter and Facebook by hand, without using automation tools such as Twitterfeed or Networked blogs. The reason? Context is everything. You need to be smart about the types of users who are on each network, and the action you need to take to make your content engaging and shareable.

If you want to know how to run a wildly successful fan page on Facebook, check Tribeca Film out for sure. Their posts connect to both the mission of the organization, and to what’s hot in the pop culture–and are extremely successful in sparking a high number of comments and “likes,” two incredibly important measurements when talking “engagement metrics.”

The bigger picture on social analytics

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to explore the big brand perspective on social media while I was attending the AdWeek Social Media Strategies conference. “Shareability” was quite the hot topic–to the point where one panelist called it “the new SEO,” signaling a shift away from the preeminence of search and into a new focus on the power of social networks to raise awareness around brands.

Different brand marketers and ad people present at the conference had different ways of looking at social analytics as well. Important measurements of social media effectiveness were posed as the following:

• Numbers–how many followers?
• Engagement–how much commenting and interaction?
• Virality–how much is content being shared?
• Action–is this messaging causing the user to do anything (buy, join, sign up)?
• Advocacy–is this messaging turning the user into a “convert” who with positively influence others?
• Awareness–is this messaging contributing to an overall positive awareness of the brand?

All of these are the vital questions that those of us engaged in social media must ask ourselves regularly.

But the question that launched launched my investigation in the first place–how can we track social media metrics? ultimately left me without a satisfactory set of solutions.

It’s obvious that those of us engaged in the social media space need better tools for analyzing our efforts, both because it will help us run more effective campaigns and because great analytics are an essential “proof source” on the value of social media in organizations.

I’d love to hear from others though–how do you track your social media efforts, and what’s on your wish list?

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.

Maybe it’s not surprising then that the diverse notions of social decision-making and crowd-sourcing are entering the realm of philanthropy and fundraising. Splashy new campaigns backed bymajor corporations Chase and Pepsi were designed around the premise that the crowd should help determine how to distribution a rather large pool of funds.  As these “competitions” take grant-making decision out of the hands of a high-level governing body and ostensibly into the hands of the people, they threaten to upend tradition fundraising dynamics and expose conflicts among the professional dedicated to the social good through their work in the nonprofit space.

I have participated in two such processes via Chase Community Giving and the Jenzabar Foundation’s Social Media Leadership Grant initiative, and learned first hand the pitfalls and perils of the new vogue for “vote for me” contests.

From the perspective of the corporate sponsor, these contests have an obvious appeal and instant PR value. “We don’t just give money away to our favorite causes,” they say, “we value our audience enough to let them decide the most worthy charities.” Pepsi’s Refresh project further blurs the line by seeking to sponsor not only recognized 501c3s, but also any “great ideas” that fall into any one of six issue areas.

The notion of charging community with anointing the best and most socially conscious ideas within it sounds laudable in theory, too. Social media has elevated a number of grass-roots efforts in the past, and these community-powered contests seem like they have plenty of potential to lift up the struggling but worthy smaller nonprofit.

But with some entrants in the recently closed Chase Community Giving contest facing accusations of fraud, it’s worth it to try and and understand some of the objections and controversies that have arisen due to this new style of grantmaking in the age of online community:

• Cutthroat competition encourages unethical behavior and draws some bad actors out of the woodwork.
• The contests don’t really reward the best or most worthy ideas; rather they favor those with the most tenacious desire to “win.”
• “Vote for me” contests add to the noise in an already challenging landscape for fundraising professionals.

The first two issues were certainly something I witnessed first-hand during my experience with the Jenazbar Foundation process. Though I don’t want to knock the Jenzabar Foundation for their worthwhile idea, a contest to find a nonprofit with the most forward-thinking strategies in social media quickly devolved into a frenzy of questionable behavior by some of the participants. With no way to verify that vote comments were coming from unique IP addresses, entrants who were not even able to attract more that two dozen twitter followers suddenly had hundreds of votes. Also, outfits that weren’t even legitimate nonprofits were competing for the prize money.

So can online community and social media have a legitimate and valuable role to play in the grant-making process? I’d like to think so, but I think notions of how community should influence the process can develop in an intelligent and measured way. There are already some great ideas on how to do it out there, such as Kickstarter, which equips grant-seekers with social tools that aid in their proposals, and then encourages them to make the appeal directly to donors in the public. Unlike “vote for me” contest, Kickstarter projects rely on supporters putting their money where their mouths are, and actually kicking in some support dollars. With unsavory behavior plaguing some of the bigger competitions, this distinction between voting for a project and truly supporting it is crucial. Perhaps Kickstarter would be a natural place for major corporations to begin a matching grants program?

I’d also like to see grantmaking organizations find a way to harness community tools to enhance their existing initiatives. In building communities online for certain key groups—let’s say for example students, community organizers or neighborhood bloggers—grant-giving organizations can gain critical intelligence on the worthiness of their proposals and their potential to affect social change.

Because these crowd-sourcing initiatives brought forth by major corporations are so new, it’s only natural that there would be a steep learning curve–along with some unfortunate bad behavior on the part of some of the participants. In order to make community part of the process of grant-making, it’s essential that corporate sponsors attempt to find a balance between seeking community input and finding the best ideas–and not just the winners of a popularity contest.

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?

One of the most interesting discoveries I made while at South by Southwest Interactive was all of the exciting stuff people are doing with Advanced Programming Interfaces, or APIs. Did I lose you at “advanced” or “interface” and you want to go back to reading about Terminator? Don’t worry if you have no idea what an API is–I didn’t either, until I did a little poking around the Internet. Shelly Bernstein of the Brooklyn Museum wrote a very helpful explanation for all us non-programmers. Simply put, organizations can use APIs to open up their vast libraries of information (the New York Times archives, the collections at the Brookyn Museum) so that outside developers can develop new ways for users to access that information.

The next time you get something useful from Twitter, a Facebook ap or your iPhone, thank a movement that is goosing large, information-rich organizations to get more of their information out there via APIs. A badge on your blog that serves up relevant content from your favorite publication, or a mini-gallery straight to your iPhone are two ways that the collaboration fostered by APIs can manifest.

It turns out that “social networking” is more than just updating your Facebook status. And as organizations begin to open a two-way conversation with the public via social media, we would be remiss in failing to recognize the opportunities in the kind of information sharing that can grow out of APIs. This is a different type of social/online interaction–inviting in talented collaborators from the tech world to help us do a better job of getting vital information into new spaces–but as mobile devices begin taking over the world, an increasingly vital one.

And while the Film Society of Lincoln Center isn’t equipped yet to offer our visitors creative and/or mobile access our deep reservoir of knowledge on classic films and festival selections from the New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films, it isn’t hard to imagine a future in which we will be able to index exactly that sort of content, and serve as a resource for students studying film, offer movie-lovers a mobile gateway into a deeper understanding of what they’ve just seen, or to simply help someone select a new discovery from our diverse offerings.

Live-action web design at SXSW panel "Ooh, that's clever: Unnatural experiments in web design"

South by Southwest Interactive, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is a conference that brings together massive hordes of techies and creatives and creative techies for lots of panels, schmoozing and plenty of twittering (ok, and also a lot of BBQ and tacos, at least in my case). Conference attendees take for granted the stuff that websites are made up of: words, content, code, but we don’t often think about changing up the method of presentation. What happens when you put the navigation bar on the bottom of the screen? Or when you take over someone’s browser with a film trailer that seems to burst out of the frame? Do you give the viewer a “wow” moment that elicits a sense of delight or curiosity?

Keynote speech by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh was all about bringing maximum wow to the customer.

There are important reasons for thinking about these things. In a panel called Presenting Straight to the Brain, it became clear that there’s a disconnect between the way the mind and the more primitive roots of our caveman brain perceive all the sensory information that we are constantly bombarded with. Think of the last time you began wondering about lunch in the midst of a pie-chart laden Powerpoint presentation at work. The cavemen brain needs exciting visual stimuli wedded to a compelling words, is the way the argument goes. The caveman craves a story.

Another kind of wow: the Texas-sized breakfast plate.

And with innumerable daily interactions with websites, the average Internet user needs a little more “wow.” You can check out some examples of unnatural experiments in web design here (try resizing the browser), here (click on the worm on the bottom of the screen) and here, but I’d be curious to know, when was the last time you were wowed by what you saw on a particular website or interactive application? And once you’ve been wowed by a website, do you keep coming back?

This post orginally appeared on the filmlinc blog.