Social Media @ Work

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

This post is tagged Arts, Culture and Technology, IRL