There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers' conference until the fall this year, after having hosted it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement and announce where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.
So, what are we looking for? Facebook's recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook's new features have been to counter Google's push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.
Burning Man is, in some ways, a virtual world. It's not unlike Second Life: a flat, empty plane onto which creator/participants build a temporary society however they can, making every decision into a work of art. Indeed, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a longtime Burner himself, and the Burning Man organization now holds an official event there. But there are also stark differences. Burning Man's principles emphasize participation, immediacy and face-to-face encounters. Plus, it's an awfully dusty place to bring your iPad.
This week we're looking at how social media is being deployed in museums. The idea with our Social Media Case Studies series is to analyze how social media is actually being used by organizations, which we hope will provide inspiration or assistance to others. We started with Brooklyn Museum yesterday. Despite being impressed by the presence of Brooklyn Museum on many social media platforms, I concluded that the museum is spreading itself too thin. I think it would be better off focusing on deeper engagement on fewer channels. Some of the feedback suggested that I was overly critical. That wasn't the intention, however I do think constructive criticism motivates us all to find more creative ways to use social media.
Today we're going to review a service that creatively uses video. Called ArtBabble, it's an art video service run by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). Want to know some best practices for integrating video into your social media plans? Look no further...
As museums look for ways to attract more visitors, social media has become a key tool in drawing people along and engaging them. Some museums are trying to be more creative with social media, but step one is to make use of the main tools. Brooklyn Museum is certainly doing that. It has a main web site, a blog, a Facebook Page, a Twitter presence, a Flickr account, a Tumblr, a Foursquare, and more.
Unfortunately, a closer inspection reveals that many of those social media accounts are infrequently updated. Perhaps Brooklyn Museum would be better off focusing on one or two of the tools and using those selected tools creatively. There may be lessons here for other organizations attempting to cover all social media bases.
Tate Museum's Kirstie Beaven wonders whether museums are using social media creatively enough. She listed some recent activity by Tate: a Twitter discussion around the hashtag #artfilmtitle, a video dialogue with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and a Flickr collaboration. However, complained Beaven, "all of these things are basically one-offs [and] perhaps that's the nature of social media - essentially ephemeral." She continued that "most of our initiatives [...] have really been about finding creativity in our audiences, rather than pushing the creative boundaries of the social networking site as a medium."
Personally I think Tate is much more innovative than most organizations with social media, but it does raise a broader question for all organizations: is social media being used in a truly creative way? Or is it mostly about self-promotion and - that magic word - "engagement"? Let us know your thoughts, including any good examples of social media creativity.
Knowing when to post content to the Web can feel like a black art. It's always procrastination time somewhere. But understanding one's audience can yield simple and scientific insights about the best times to reach it. Balancing work and scheduling is still a lot of work, though, so Web services have cropped up to handle that effort algorithmically, letting publishers concentrate on publishing.
Buffer, a service that stacks up one's tweets and publishes them at the best times for engagement, has analyzed its user data and found some promising results. Buffer's developers report that clicks on tweeted links increased by 200% on average after two weeks of using the scheduling app, and retweets doubled.
An article in the art magazine Frieze talks about "a disconnect between having social media resources and actually employing them to engage various audiences [...]." Lauren Cornell, executive director of the technology-focused art organization Rhizome, writes that "institutions could amplify their educational and social role by publishing - daily and online - a great deal more history, opinion, context and anecdote around their activities, rather than just issuing press releases and visitor information."
I heartily agree and can point to one example of an art museum that is actually doing this, albeit because they were forced to. The Christchurch Art Gallery has been closed to the public since the big February earthquake. That prompted the gallery staff to utilize their blog more, to keep the art gallery 'open' at least in an online way.
According to StatCounter's measurements, StumbleUpon has just surpassed Facebook and now delivers more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp tweeted the news this afternoon.
Facebook achieved this goal in April of 2010, but StumbleUpon was already well on its way. At that time, StumbleUpon already gave twice as many referrals as Twitter. StumbleUpon's user experience is fanciful and fun, but its traffic power for publishers is quite serious. While the other social networks make the headlines, StumbleUpon has been a quiet success story. In light of today's news, it won't be so quiet for long.
Big ideas aren't prevalent anymore, posited academic and author Neal Gabler in a New York Times op-ed. "We are living in an increasingly post-idea world," he wrote, "a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding."
While this could be seen as just another variation of the "Internet makes you dumb" argument, a favorite of academics and contrarian technology writers, Gabler's article touched a nerve for me. As I look around at my own industry, tech news, there is certainly no shortage of content. But ideas... those we're bereft of. Tech media today is driven by deals and speculation. There are plenty of ideas-driven people, too, but you generally won't find them at the top of Techmeme anymore.
The London Riots are still going strong, but we're seeing social media used for both good and evil already. Yesterday, we asked "What effect does social media on the Web have on social unrest in the real world?"
You answered and we culled your responses from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook, and used Storify to present it back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.
