So what are we up to back in the motherland? A few things really…

While our traveling cohorts organize and gather the documentation materials, a team of us are ready and on-hand to help get that content to you (and our friends in the media) as quickly as possible. Working within a system that includes a 6 hour time difference isn’t always easy, but multiple process meetings prior to the trip has made for smooth sailing (knock on wood).

Most of my job entails getting the content out to you, our online audience. From updating the website with videos, images, and information to managing our Facebook and @imamuseum Twitter account, my work is 90% online and 10% meetings about the online material. I sincerely love this job and it’s because of this job that I feel like I am in Venice along with everyone else.

Closely following all of the @la_biennale and @USPavillion11-related tweets, I am inundated with updates, sightings, and picturesque views. I could open my Hootsuite account now and virtually connect with the city of romance and its temporary visitors. Tweets from everyone in Venice and the subsequent correspondence with those from all over the world have really been fascinating.

Another part of my job (web management) means that I’m one of the luckier ones who gets to see the new IMA content the second its published to our website. I don’t think this really hit me until I was able to publish photos and videos of the US Gymnasts performing on Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American).

Slideshow: Allora & Calzadilla, Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American), 2011. Photos by Andrew Bordwin.

Tethered to my computer, I’ll be anxiously waiting all week for our Publishing and Media team to send over their latest creations. If you aren’t following @imamuseum or @USPavilion11 – now is the time to stay up to date on the latest. Also, be sure to “like” us on Facebook (a behind the scenes photo album coming soon) and browse our Venice Biennale microsite. There is a page for each of the six commissioned artworks, which includes videos and photos (stay tuned for some installation shots and full performance videos).

It’s because of all of these things (and the workings of a lot of people) that I can actually feel the energy radiating from the US Pavilion, 4,500 miles away. Reading tweets from the US gymnasts (@USATeamGloria), I sense their anticipation before opening performances and share in their pride for this wonderful opportunity with which we are all involved.  Watching rehearsal videos I can see the hard work and collaboration needed to pull it all together, while the final installation shots show me why it’s all worth it.

As I write this, I did just finish a nice glass of cabernet so while I may not be riding a vaporetto to work or rubbing elbows with international elites, my focus and heart (along with many others still in the building) is 100% Venetian this week.

Who’s up for some gelato?

What’s really convenient about HootSuite is that you can pull most of your social sites into one interface, so you spend less time logging in and out of the different sites. From the dashboard, you can create a tab for each of the accounts you want to include, with choices of: Twitter, Facebook, Facebook page, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pingfm, WordPress, and Foursquare. As you can see in the screen-shot below, my chosen tabs for the trial were my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

One nice thing about HootSuite is that you can post a message to multiple accounts. If I wanted to say the same thing on Facebook as I do on Twitter, I can check both boxes and the tweet/status change will post simultaneously. I haven’t used this feature because our audiences are different and therefore we generally have different things to say, but I’m sure some would find it useful.

You can also schedule posts ahead of time. So, if I want to wish my friends a Merry Christmas this coming Saturday, but will be stuck at Grandma’s sans internet, I could schedule the status to auto-update. A more practical use of this might be if you need to release information at a specific time, but know you’ll be held up in a meeting, etc.

The program also does some basic tracking. For Facebook, the stats are pulled from Insights and from Twitter (as long as you use their ow.ly URLs), you can see general click stats, referral and regional stats, and Twitter ‘influencers’ that have mentioned your handle.

To give my two cents on the program, I thought I would break it down into perks and pitfalls for both Twitter and Facebook management.

Perks for Facebook

• One nice thing about the program is that it will show you in your page feed when someone has tagged you, which doesn’t show up from my Facebook interface. I can then go to that person’s page and comment on their post or status.
• When you post a URL, HootSuite does allow you to edit the title, description, and thumbnail image just like Facebook, which is very handy.

Pitfalls for Facebook

• There seems to be a bit of a time delay with the ‘like’ feature. It’s not as instant as it is within the Facebook interface.
• The Facebook Insights on HootSuite are very close to the Insights within Facebook, but do not include quite as much information. Basic stats are there, like daily post feedback, daily page activity, total likes, and demographics of visitors, but to really break down the information (like visits by city), I still had to log in to Facebook.

Perks for Twitter

• The delineated tabs make navigation between each social account easy and well organized. Within each tab, you can also separate the information into streams. With Twitter you can add separate feeds for Home, Mentions, Direct Messages, Sent Tweets, and a variety of others.
• The tracking for Twitter is pretty nice. For anyone who uses bit.ly, the stats are very similar. You can see click stats for a set time period, referral and regional stats, Twitter ‘influencers’ that have mentioned you and how many times they have mentioned you.
• HootSuite also gives stats on individual tweets or what they call messages. Within this section you can search past tweets, which makes it really nice if you need to go back and look at stats for something in the past (as shown in screen-shot to the right).

Pitfalls for Twitter

• While the tracking is pretty nice there are a few flaws. Under most popular messages, you can see who else shared the link within your tweets, however it seemed some users were left off of the list. It does not appear to be all-encompassing.

If you manage more than just Twitter and Facebook accounts then this product is probably even more useful. And for $5.99 a month, the price is really not bad. There are several other features that I have yet to explore including Firefox add-ons and an iPhone app, so I’m sure there are more perks (and possible pitfalls) to add to the list. Overall, I found the tool particularly useful for Twitter and ‘not bad’ to use for Facebook. Has anyone found a different tool that you absolutely love?

Jumo was conceptually introduced in March of 2010 when Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes announced a soft-launch of the non-profit platform that matches users’ philanthropic interests to various causes. Nearly 9 months later, what was just a landing page is now a beta-launched version that is definitely worth checking out. So what exactly is it?

Jumo set out to address three key challenges in the non-profit sector:

• There are millions of people working to improve the lives of others, many of whom lack the resources to have greatest impact.
• There are millions more who want to help, but don’t know how.
• Despite huge advancements in connection technologies, it’s hard to find meaningful opportunities to get involved.

Their goal is to make it easier to find organizations and issues you care about, follow the latest news and support these causes with your time, money, and skills. Functionally speaking, Jumo allows you to ‘follow’ an issue or project (organization) that you’re interested in, providing you with a news-feed of information on those that you follow. The news is aggregated from a variety of sources including local newspapers, industry-related blogs and sites, the project’s own blog or web site, etc. You’ll also see a Twitter feed with mentions of those you follow and a list of related projects and issues. Charitable donations can also be taken from the site so as users become savvier to its capabilities I’m sure will see what fund-raising possibilities there are.

Some of you may be thinking that the purpose of the site sounds similar to others like change.org or idealist.org. There has been some debate as to whether Jumo is able to bring something new to the table. My immediate reaction is that while they all connect individuals to organizations, there is more interactivity and networking possibilities on Jumo.

One thing I really like about the layout of the site is the instant similarities to Facebook. New interfaces can sometimes take a while to get used to and there are several familiar features that ease the navigation. From your homepage, you’ll see a list of your friends that are also on Jumo and you can browse the projects and issues that they follow. Jumo also uses the 3 column layout with your Facebook photo on the left above your list of friends, top news in the middle, and then suggested follows on the right.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy challenged their Twitter followers to assess whether Jumo will succeed. According to one response, Jumo will succeed because there’s a need, it is easy to use, it offers unprecedented access for nonprofits, and it offers networking capability. Another claims, Jumo will fail (though admits this statement is a bit of a journalistic hyperbole) because at the end of the day Facebook will still consume so much personal time that while Jumo may gain a bit of muscle power and a great deal of good, it will not become the next Facebook.

I think this is a pretty valid statement and I’m not sure that even Jumo’s founders believe it has that sort of power, nor was it their intention to create a site to challenge Facebook. But, I do think that the site has potential and it serves as a great way for us as a Museum to connect to our constituents while also allowing our constituents to connect with one another. If you’re interested in checking out the site, or following us, you can do so from the IMA’s Jumo project page.

(photo via Joe Shoemaker)

Last week, I represented the IMA (@IMAMuseum) at the Indianapolis Social Media Breakfast (@indysmb) on the topic of Using Social Media in Travel, Tourism and Attraction Industries. Serving on the panel with me were representatives from IndyHub (@IndyHub), The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (@TCMIndy), The State Fair Grounds (@IndyStateFair), and the ICVA (@VisitIndy). Sitting in the audience were some of the most engaged social networkers in the city. It was a great opportunity to discuss the IMA’s social media strategy and to hear how other organizations are utilizing social networks for marketing and audience development strategies. (In case you don’t know, the “@” behind the organization refers to its Twitter account).

To sum up, here’s what I discussed:

1. Social Media = Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) + Social Content (Video, blogs, etc.) If an organization creates great social content then social networking is a heckuvalot easier! Producing good, engaging content should be your top priority.
2. The staff person/s that manage/s Facebook and Twitter is your online visitor services staff. Whether they speak from their own voice or on behalf of your organization, Social Media staff are evangelists of the organization. They have to be authentically passionate about what they communicate and be willing to live the mission of the organization. The best Social Networking is done 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.
3. When it comes to online strategy, the best plan is to not plan. While it’s essential that overall communication objectives and key messages are understood, the best social media presences are those that have the ability to be flexible, responsive and experimental.

See the full discussion:

Indianapolis Social Media Breakfast | May 13th 2010 from Twelve Stars Media Productions on Vimeo.

Want More?

If you are local and want to learn more about the IMA and our social media strategy, you’re in luck! This Thursday, May 20 at 5:30 we will be hosting Bloggers Anonymous, a meetup group of individuals who are interested in art, technology, online communications and networking. Come, grab a drink in Nourish Café, get some freebies, and meet some really great people while you’re at it!

Zephyr by Steve Wooldridge; Photo by Lauren Tally

What changed my mind about creating content for the Web? This fall, I enrolled in two courses devoted to contemporary museum practice: Collections Care and Management (CC&M), co‐taught by IMA Objects & Variable Art Conservator Richard McCoy and IUPUI faculty member Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, and Museums and Technology, taught by IMA New Media Director Daniel Incandela. My first assignment for both classes was to create user accounts for Wikipedia, Twitter and Flickr, and then start using them.

In CC&M, our major project was to formalize the artworks on and around IUPUI’s campus into a real collection. In the end, we identified 40 pieces that we dubbed the “IUPUI Public Art Collection.”  Didn’t know that much art existed on IUPUI’s campus? Take a walk around sometime to see an incredibly diverse representation of styles, media and condition qualities.   You’ll also find four sculptures on loan from the IMA: East Gate/West Gate, Mega-Gem, Portrait of History, and Spaces with Iron.  You might remember when East Gate/West Gate was moved to IUPUI early this year:

Our methodology for identifying and documenting these artworks was derived from the very successful Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!) project that started in 1989 and was organized by Heritage Preservation: The National Institute of Conservation in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution. A book published in 2005 by Indiana’s SOS! leader, Glory-June Greiff, was also an inspiration.

We set out to share our research and documentation using Wikipedia and Flickr. With that move, our academic project became a movement that we call Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA). The primary goal of this project is to protect and preserve public art.

Conducted largely in the Internet cloud, WSPA has earned the attention of many other museum professionals and some very particular Wikipedians. By contextualizing our academic exercise in the Wikipedia universe and utilizing existing social networks, our project has rippled out through IUPUI and into the larger debate about how public art is cared for and managed. Our scholarly research efforts will become an active part of institutional memory rather than just being papers graded and forgotten. By publicly conducting our research and publishing our articles in Wikipedia, we opened our academic exercise up to intense scrutiny by our peers and Wikipedians committed to protecting its policies and procedures.

With such a large public undertaking, we were grateful to have help. Herron School of Art and Design Dean Valerie Eickmeier,  Art Strategies consultant Mindy Taylor Ross and Smithsonian American Art Museum Head of New Media Nancy Proctor visited our class and helped place our efforts in a larger campus, city, and national context. We also had help from IUPUI University Archivist Brenda Burk, Indiana University Curator of Campus Art Sherry Rouse, and the staff at IUPUI’s Campus Center and Herron Galleries.

So many people were willing to work with us because Wikipedia Saves Public Art isn’t just a one-time class project. It has larger goals. We seek to demonstrate the ways in which Wikipedia can be used as a content management system (CMS) so that anyone in the world can follow the WSPA model to care for and protect public art.

Like every other CMS available commercially, the needs of our project did not exactly match the capacities of current technology. Wikipedia is a complex structure with hard rules banning original research and copyright infringement, and it is also a forum premised on negotiation and debate. Student run‐ins with Wikipedia editors intent on enforcing the laws of the system ran from polite reminders to harsh {{speedydeletion}} of hours of work. Condition reports and images intended to provide a factual record of the current state of the collection were deemed out-of-bounds within Wikipedia. However, we were able to upload and tag images of IUPUI artworks using Flickr, and these images are linked to our Wikipedia articles.

Also, I’m proud to report that three of our articles made it on to the Main Page of Wikipedia, under the “Did you know section …” (Zephyr, Untitled (Jazz Musicians), and Peirce Geodetic Monument.)

Now that I’m on the other side of having to create and manage 40‐plus Wikipedia articles, 375 images on Flickr, 1 Facebook page and countless Twitter micro‐blogs specific to this project, I am invested in the longevity of the WSPA project and will continue to participate and follow the work of my peers.

A memorable moment of the project was when a WSPA article about a contemporary artwork in the form of a bucket of rocks suspended from a tree near the Herron School of Art and Design spurred the classic question “Is it art?”.  My professors and peers engaged in the debate across social network platforms including Wikipedia talk pages and Twitter.

Even though many of our articles went through dramatic revisions, the great majority of the critical information that we collected in our research (who made the art, where it is located, what it is made of and who is responsible for its care) did make it onto the most recognized encyclopedia in the online universe. At last check, even our previously deleted article came back to life (just try Googling “IUPUI Bucket of Rocks”). Now that makes me chuckle, and then I send links to my followers and friends to make them chuckle.
Finally, we’d like to make a call for help.  After much research, one of the artworks on campus still lacks fundamental information and verifiable sources.  Do you or does someone you know anything about Carey Chapmen’s artwork  on IUPUI’s campus?  Please let me know here on this blog, or go and fix it yourself within Wikipedia.  For now, it’s titled “Unknown (Tall Metal)“.

Unknown (Tall Metal) by Carey Chapman Photo by Chrissy Gregg

OK, not so much a fight, as a discussion. And when I say ‘in public’ I mean on my Facebook wall.

It all started when I retweeted @anarchivist (see below) and then it ended up on my Facebook page too. Anyway, the ‘discussion’ played out like this:

ME: I agree. RT @anarchivist hates the phrase “social media.” all online media is inherently social even if you dont want it to be.

Ben: to be social is to have an understanding or acknowledgment between two or more people. so then simply watching a movie on line would not be considered social but definitely media.
Wed at 2:33pm

ME: but what if you can comment and/or share that video with your friends using FB, Twitter, etc?
Wed at 2:41pm

Ben: that is social. but watching the movie and commenting on it are two separate things. right?
Wed at 2:56pm

ME: but the fact that it exists online DOES mean that. The fact that it has potential to be shared makes it social.
Wed at 3:50pm

The argument ended there. But did I win it?

Let’s take a look at what good old Wikipedia has to say:

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

I agree with Ben that the simple act of watching a video online is not social. But because of the way the web had evolved,  now any media that exists online can be social media, whether it was intended to be used that way or not. An article, picture, or video is posted and you can share it numerous ways (email it, Facebook it, Twitter it, Digg it, etc.)

Or is my friend right? Are they two completely different things? Maybe the real question here is why are we so eager to label everything? The IMA is always on the look out for cutting edge ways to interact with with the public. Call them trends, call them buzzwords, call them The Next Big Thing… we’ve employed just about every ‘social media’ tactic that makes sense (and it’s working!)  So maybe it doesn’t matter and if it works, it works.

I’m not sure why anarchivist’s statement and the resulting debate got me so riled up, but maybe the ‘anythings possible’ sentiment of ‘all online media is social media’ simply gives me the warm-fuzzies.

Please comment below and help me prove my friend wrong, er… help us sort things out so we can look each other in the eye again.

Even though the show has only been over for a few days now, I thought it would be interesting and a little fun to recap some of the online stuff that happened around European Design.

As for interesting, turns out the European Design exhibition website was relatively successful in terms of traffic and Google PageRank. According to Google Analytics, through the run of the show, the site welcomed nearly 30k unique vistors and beat out our last two special exhibitions, Power and Glory and To Live Forever over similar time periods. For a young site with a short span of marketing relevance, European Design was able to muster a PR of 5 before the show ended. This is a little hard to believe but we also managed to keep the site’s bounce rate below 20%. That’s awesome. Good work.

As for fun, who remembers the European Design Facebook caption contest? I know I completely forgot about it until my trusted Facebook associate, Emily, reminded me about all the good ideas she’s had and how that was one of them. Below is a notable example.

It looks like that flower is "sponge worthy"... - Jake on Facebook

As for more fun, we also started up a Flickr group that fed into the EuroDesign exhibition site. Not only did group members get to see their designs streaming through our site but we also gave away a few tickets and some cool prizes like exhibition catalogs and Design Center gift certificates. Check out the Flickr group.

While I’m a little sad to see European Design leave, I’m super excited about what new interesting and fun online stuff is going to show up for Sacred Spain. While I’m not going to make any promises, expect some Facebook activity. And since it’s all the rage, my guess is that Twitter may make an appearance. As always, if you’ve got any ideas or suggestions, let me get ‘em in the comments.

In the recent days, I have watched and listened as social media innovates political process in Iran. Twitter has been a powerful forum for a newsfeed out of the country, allowing people to photograph, video and blog about events in real time, even as more traditional journalists are being asked to leave.

Listening to a segment about it on the radio, I couldn’t help but think about the massive change to how news is found and the way crowdsourcing of information has so drastically changed the source of the news we get, and for museums, how closely this is tied to the changing face of visitor interactions through the web. Nina Simon, in this article at Museum2.0, writes,

For people who are deeply immersed in social media, social networks are already a much heavier influence on personal choices–where to visit, what concert to attend–than traditional advertising. Which means that your organization’s website–a brochure out in the wilderness of the Web–is only going to remain relevant and useful as a marketing piece if it is being referenced in the social context of your users’ lives.

Different people and institutions have found vastly different approaches to garnering information from their audiences.

Some museums have decided to use crowdsourcing, which can be appealing to visitors, in a way that is helpful to what the museum wants to accomplish. The Brooklyn Museum’s Shelley Bernstein wrote about a new project called Freeze Tag! where Brooklyn decided to utilize their loyal taggers to help control errant or incorrect information. Putting control back in the hands of the visitor can be risky, but, like Wikipedia, ultimately a project where passionate people and the wisdom of crowds wins out in the end. Brooklyn is a leader in integrating the visitor into the museums practice in innovative ways. With or without social media, how can other museums use this model to further their own goals?

Certainly, insta-media has increased the demand for transparency. Last week, Tyler Green and Christopher Knight tweeted and blogged about the dubious ethics in a private sale of works of art at the Orange County Museum of Art. These exchanges led to a heated discussion of the readers of the respected entries, including people representing both sides of the argument, and lots of scrutiny at the museum. Did the museum miss a chance to lead these discussions in the first place?

The problems start when the institution places itself on these social media sites, but don’t seem ready to hear what their devoted fan have to say. Douglas McLennan, of  Diacritical says,

…traditional PR notices are not only ineffective in this new era of many-to-many communication, but can make things worse. And what might have been a real opportunity to meaningfully engage this community has been lost.

Can a museum be listening all the time? In the world of public relations and standards, the casual conversation style of the Facebook world must seem completely alien.

The voice of the audience has never been as available to museums as it is now. Museums small and large have been all over Facebook and Twitter, my social media outlets of choice, trying to add fans and establish a voice that is cohesive with the museum’s image. Let’s imagine there is a museum out there doing it all perfectly. They generate lots of discussion and suggestions from their core audience of loyal visitors and donors…. What now? This next step is crucial and the point of getting involved in social media in the first place, and it is up to each museum.  How and when is that museum going to listen?

It’s my hope that we will continue to see the flowering of visitors being welcomed into the museum conversation, worldwide, with social media just being an example of ways to welcome them into the rest of the practices in the institution. If we want the community to value our institutions, we can strengthen the relationship by showing how much we value them.

facebook.com/imamuseum – I’m a real trooper. On Friday night, nay, Saturday morning at 12:01 am, Facebook started allowing vanity URLs. As the IMA’s main Facebook logger-in person, you know I was poised at the keyboard right before the witching hour, ready to blast-type in the nine characters that would once and for all slap the collective Facebook faces of our main IMA rivals, the museums for Internet Memes and Artifices and the Iconoclast Museum of Art. Oh yeah, I also snagged facebook.com/artbabble. For you web folk, here’s some geeky Facebook URLs for ya.

EnvironmentalGraffiti.com – Came across this page as I was doing my normal morning search for shadow art made from garbage/junk. Don’t question my queries. Anyway, I’m into clever uses of materials and space so you know my eyes were like “let’s pop out this skull” when I saw a post on their homepage about green roofs. As I’m aware, the IMA has a green roof above its parking garage. Good looking out, EnviroGraff.

BadArtists.jpg – Speaking of graffiti, as reported by CNN, “artist Banksy, famed for infiltrating museum collections without their knowledge and spray-painting public buildings around the world, is holding his first major exhibition in years.” Neat! Here’s a link to some pictures. @dincandela – Check out this show if you have the chance. It’s at the Bristol museum.

Monday Music – “Last Dance” (Demo) by The Raveonetttes.\”Last Dance\” by The Raveonettes

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids.

Where Facebook presents a view of the conversations from your hundreds of contacts, Wave focuses on conversations that you are directly involved with. You will even be able to branch new (private) conversations with whomever you wish. Conversations can be played back so late-comers can see how they evolved. How many times have you received a forward with broken fragments of conversation and you are supposed to understand all the context around it? No more my friends!

Concurrent rich-text editing in Wave

Much of Wave will be embeddable as well.  An example was shown of blog authoring from Wave.  Edits are published in real-time.  Comments on the blog are also pushed back to the wave interface in real-time. A blog author could immediately start up a conversation with a complete stranger who posts a comment on their article if they both happen to be online at the same time.

You are not bound to Google's Wave.

Another interesting note is that Google Wave is indeed a platform. An entire protocol is being developed so anyone can host their own Wave Server. Entire conversation can be held without leaving your intranet. Information only leaves your Wave host when outsiders are brought into the conversation. Still, parts of the wave that occur internally will stay internal. This platform also means we won’t be forced to consume ads down the road and we truly own the content.

If you have 80 minutes and a tolerance for poor presentation style, feel free to watch the announcement from Google I/O.