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?

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”?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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