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?

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.

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.

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?

It was a screening of Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public that first got me thinking about the dark side of the rise of social networking. Timoner’s film tells the story of early Internet pioneer Josh Harris, and how some of Harris’s theories about “living life in public” are now playing out on a mass scale thanks to social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

The film was great—a reminder of just how rapidly the Internet has become a part of our lives—but one of the most interesting part of the evening (part of New Directors/New Films) was the post screening Q & A. With the room filled with quirky creative types and Internet old-timers, it wasn’t long before conspiracy theories edged into the discourse, from the audience member spouting 9-11 “Truth” movement rhetoric to the resounding boos of the audience, to the director herself, who looked askance at the potential for data-mining via sites like Facebook.

Seeing as how Facebook and the like are filled to the brim with so much ephemera, I’ve always felt that any one person’s predilection for the Arctic Monkeys or knitting dog sweaters is like so many drops in an endless ocean of data. So forgive me for wanting to hand out tinfoil hats to those ascribing “Big Brother” like capabilities or motives to social networking sites that comprise an immense amount of largely irrelevant data.

But after having seen the powerful positive potential of social networks to give voice to the average Internet user and connect brands and business to their base, have I been living in puppy-dogs-and-rainbows land? During the past few weeks I’ve been paying attention to some signs and signals that there’s trouble in this little paradise we’re creating. And though I don’t think social media is in danger of falling into the hands of evil multinationals or unruly populist mobs, I am more aware than ever of the conflicts that may fan the flames of a social media backlash.

Mob mentality: #amazonfail

Last week, when a number of LGBT book mysteriously lost their rank on Amazon.com, outrage spread like wildfire on social media networks, and especially on Twitter. It was amazing how fast an erroneous consensus view emerged among users of social media that Amazon was perpetrating a major anti-gay conspiracy. In fact, a small technical glitch had resulted in the temporary delisting of the books in question. Writing about the fracas and its aftermath, Clay Shirky owned up to his own role in the angry mob: “When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.”

Social networks are a particularly good place for the viral spread of provocative ideas, whether you’re talking about a gorgeous voice inside a not-so-glamorous body or the juicy tale of a corporation perpetrating some kind of evil scheme. It is a shame that some of the more pressing issues of our day—lack of available healthcare, the fact that the New York City unemployed have some of the lowest unemployment benefits in the nation—don’t have the ability to grab hold of the imagination in quite the same way. I don’t know what would have stopped #amazonfail. Like all memes it took on a life of its own after a while, but I do recognize that the power of social networks to rapidly spread false information—and the madness of crowds—is a real and troubling one.

Privacy concerns & the challenge of running a business that’s fair to the people who built it

Until April 23, Facebook is submitting its privacy policy to a vote by users. This action followed a controversial move in February in which Facebook revised its Terms of Service to encompass broad control of the content users create on the site.

Though I think people can tend to be a little overwrought about Facebook appropriating their intellectual property, as inane or ephemeral as it may be, this effort to institute a Terms of Service that pays attention to user needs and wants is obviously is an important one. Less, I think, because Facebook really wants to use all that material for some nefarious purpose but because part of building a user-generated-content empire is respecting the users that created that empire. Only problem is, Facebook is only going to pay attention if a certain number of us vote. So let’s all go over there and vote now.

In a cover story for New York magazine on April 13, Vanessa Grigorgiadas offered a highly anecdotal assesment of Facebook filtered through her own point of view, one reluctant to buy into the site’s vision of tamed Internet built around the “sharing” of information. Though the article was several thousands of words long, I’m still not completely sure of what her concerns are beyond a vaguely articulated annoyance with being asked to track so many unrelated “friends” status updates. And to the people who are sure that Google and Facebook are after mind-control via data-mining, I don’t know what to tell you. I think it’s a generational thing. Notions of privacy are changing, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or not as bad as some writers make it out to be.

Criminal activity: from Casual Encounters to “cyber bullying”

Social media’s alleged facilitation of criminal activity is one of the more thorny quandaries brought about via the rise of social media. It’s front and center in the news again, as an arrest has been made in the Craigslist killler saga. But the use of social media technology in the commission of crimes has grabbed headlines before.  Remember the MySpace cyber-bullying case, in which a teen’s mother was accused of using a MySpace profile to edge her daughter’s rival to a suicidal state?

When talking about tragic crimes like this, I think it’s important not to ignore their rather complex underpinnings. Sex workers are the disproportionate victims of violent crimes, whether we’re talking about crimes facilitated by the Internet or not. The taking of any life is wrong and we should be doing all we can to protect the vulnerable, including sex workers. “Cyber-bullying” is not more disturbing iteration of what is reprehensible to begin with. The existence and pervasiveness of bullying itself is the problem, not the means of bullying. While legislators may get headlines by proposing “cyber-bullying” bills, what resources are available to combat the more deep rooted demands of how we raise children to have a sense of self-esteem? The role of the Internet can too easily become a convenient screen upon which to project our fears, when the real issues deserve our attentions and efforts.

These are the hot button issues I’ve been tracking, anyone have any other “tales from the social media darkside”?

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.

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

“Social Media Experts are the Cancer of Twitter (and must be stopped!” was an article that naturally ruffled a lot of feathers on Twitter last week. In it Michael Pinto describes a scourge of social media expert “zombies” who follow each other, and what’s worse, aspire to manufacture other zombies: “Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.”

Despite its inflammatory tone, the article nonetheless resonated with me and other social media practitioners I know. After I posted the article via my Twitter feed, one representative of a prominent institution DM’d me to say how surprised she was to find that a significant slice of her “followers” were not regular members of the museum-going public but “social media experts.”

So if they’re not zombies, who are these people?

Confession time: I’ve been there. I’ve been in organizations where no one really knew anything about social media and with my Facebook know-how and interwebs surfing ability I’ve been tempted to cultivate my waning whipper-snapper aura and stick on the badge of “expert.”

But I’m here today to say, fellow social media practitioners, its time to put down the crack pipe.

The truth is, there are no experts yet in this  emerging field. Social media is simply a set of tools you can experiment with, in the hopes of finding a better way of dealing with traditional business challenges: interacting with customers, promoting your goods or services, and cultivating a positive image.

Further, I believe that social media will create jobs, but they won’t be for something so amorphous as “social media expert.” Rather, social media will begin to be integrated into traditional job functions, rather than being seen as some superfluous extra. But what do I actually mean? It was fun to think about how social media will inform the jobs of tomorrow. These are my predictions. Obama are you listening?

From Information Technology to Interaction Design

For many years, technology made the flow of information easier, and it was good. Gradually, it became clear that technology is not the be-all, end-all. We have to be extremely mindful of how people interact with technology. Technology and systems aren’t everything—social media is there to remind us that online media, in the end, is a people-centered enterprise. Interaction Design is a real discipline that involves psychology, design, information architechture, and clean writing and is absolutely a field that’s poised to grow immensely in the coming years.

From Customer Service to Community Management

Time was, a customer had a problem and someone in Customer Service from up on high issued their proclamation: free coupon! We’re sorry! You’re SOL! These days, if the only time you hear from a customer is through a complaint, you’ve blown it.

Social media will tweak the traditional customer service relationship from top-down to putting a company representative right in the mix: chatting with actual, real customers all day, solving problems and whipping up positive enthusiasm. Twitter is already beginning to make this happen, with corporate representatives manning the desk for @Starbucks and @Zappos. But expect “Community Manager” to become a must-hire of the social media rich future.

From Marketing/PR to Conversation Leveraging

If it sounds like tomorrow’s “Conversation Leverager” ought to have his organization’s  “Community Manager” on speed dial, that’s because she should! It’s time to start breaking down the wall between departments, people. That’s part of the revolutionary change social media will bring.

And gone are the days when a Marketer tells the public what to think. Instead, social media is creating an atmosphere in which the successful Conversation Leverager puts their ear to the ground, measures the affinity for their brand that already exists, and then channels that affinity into the media and platforms that will amplify it.

Let’s face it: people call themselves “social media experts” because the field is incredibly new and there’s no one around to tell them to stop. As a community of social media practitioners, we can do better.

We can recognize the most wildly successful players on the social media scene right now—the people inspiring great community conversation, building fan bases on Facebook, and getting a lot of buzz going—are people who know better than to slap on a label that places them above their audience.

Where are these people? Good question—you don’t see them because they are down in the trenches, actually interacting with their communities. More than that, they are learning from their communities. They think of themselves as students, not experts.

So let’s all be students for now. Let’s recognize that there’s a lot to learn. And let’s be good community players and egg each other on to better integrate the tools afforded by social media into our current jobs.

How do you use social media in your job today? And how do you think social media will affect the jobs of tomorrow?

-Amanda McCormick is the web editor of the Film Society of Lincoln Center

It bums me out when I see a publication like @salonmedia or @nytimes, both of whom don’t really follow anyone and uses Twitter solely to broadcast their latest posts. Heck, as @filmlinc, I’ve been guilty of not mixing it up enough with the Twitter public about movies. That’s why sometimes I wish for the Twitter Police to start issuing warnings to all of those organizations who aren’t using the service for what it was meant for: conversation.

On the other hand, I’d be totally in support of a gold star program for outlets such as @mediabistro, who not only shows a tremendous dedication to customer service in their Tweets, but is also constantly serving up interesting content for media professionals. They are an example of a media organization that has confronted the unpredictable atmosphere of this new service and figured out how to use it to bring a lot of value into the lives of thousands of followers.

2. Integrate a client like Twitterfox

Everywhere I go, I am an evangelist for Twitter, especially to people whose professional lives have something to do with online media. But I constantly find that newbies have a really hard time “getting it,” and thus don’t hook into Twitter’s constant stream of bite-sized nuggets of valuable info. New users are left to discover clients that allow them to do work while Tweets are served up like IM’s in the background. Like StumbleUpon or De.li.cio.us, Twitter should supply people up with tools that allow them to use Twitter most effectively. If new posts were easy to follow without constantly having to log onto Twitter, I think newbies would jump in a little more.

3. Make a search function part of the interface

A good way to find people to follow is to search keywords on a Twitter search engine, but to do that at the moment, you’ve got to get off of Twitter and go to another site. I long for different ways of interacting with the information Twitter yields. Hashmarks are one way to follow multiple Tweets on one subject, but this approach seems pretty low-tech to me. An integrated search engine could create such an enriched interaction for Twitter users.

4. Help you separate the wheat from the chaff

At the moment, Twitter influence is built through number of followers and quality of interaction. Following people is a good way to build your number of followers, and also your influence. But the more people you follow, the harder is it to grab key info from the useful Tweets. I know this goes against what Twitter is about, but I wish I could filter out some less interesting Tweets for the ones that offer more valuable info.

5. Make me breakfast

Hey, while I’m making a wish list…

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.