I’m sketching out the next Metapod Connect course with Helga Henry at the moment. We’re thinking of calling it “Internet Fluency for Arts Organisations” with an emphasis on shifting their use of online tools from promotion to real engagement. More on that as it develops but as part of my prep I’ve been catching up on my reading. Here’s three things I think will be useful.

Everything you need to know about The Internet by John Naughton.

Naughton notes that while The Internet has become a utility in many societies we don’t have a good collective understanding of it.

So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment.

A good, long article well worth dwelling over.

Manifesto by Maureen Johnson

It’s more a preamble to a manifesto but it manages to articulate that which I’ve had trouble articulating about “social media” over the last two years. Maureen, an author of books, recounts sitting on a panel next to the classic social media consultant archetype.

My neighbor had a lot to say. She had a MESSAGE. She talked longer than anyone, and over everyone and through everyone. Her message, as far as I could determine, was that the internet is all about getting out there and SELLING yourself.

[...]

She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, “I am not a brand.”

Read the post for the manifesto itself. I think I have plenty to add to this, mainly on the notion of brands and what they mean in this space. We talk about online personas, or I do anyway because I have a fair few, and from a marketing perspective these are brands, only not in the same way as Persil is a brand. It’s complicated, of course, which is why those with the simple “you are a brand” message can shout loudest.

4chan is hacking the attention economy by danah boyd

If you want to understand how culture on the Internet functions you need to understand 4chan. Boyd’s overview is good but I’m particularly interested in replacing “attention economy” with “culture”. To tie this into my winning at culture post I think hacking culture, in the sense of “re-purposing or re-configuring of stuff to make it do something it wasn’t originally intended to do” (via), is one of the more interesting things the Internet enables and accelerates. It’s also something arts organisations need to understand if they’re going to be fluent online.

In July 2007 on Created in Birmingham I coined the term “Collective Memory” to describe a blog post which collects all the writing, photos and video that are put online after a large event found by searching the Internet for mentions of that event. The first one was for an event called Rootsville where I found seven blog posts and 4 collections of photos, including my own. That seemed about right. A few weeks later was the Supersonic Festival and I did the same thing online this time the results were astonishing. Later in the summer I did the Moseley Folk Festival with decent but not extraordinary results and continued gathering the memories for other events in the city. The next year Chris did Supersonic again in 2008 and boom it was the same only more so. There’s clearly something about Supersonic that makes people need to record and share their memories.

But this isn’t just a fun and interesting thing to do. Capsule found the collective memory posts to be invaluable feedback on the festival, complimenting the more traditional audience research events like this do. They already had a positive record of communicating with their audiences through MySpace and Facebook but this blew the doors open because it gave them impartial, unmediated feedback and qualitative data they could use to get funding and support for the festival. It had real value for them.

So this year Capsule decided to do the Supersonic 2009 Collective Memory themselves. Since I’m on their steering group for Internetty stuff I sent Sarah the following links to get her started. If you want to use them for your own thing simply replace “supersonic” with the relevant keyword(s).

• monitorThis: A general search of the entire Internet including blogs.
• The Twitter search for #supersonic, etc with an added filter to include only those tweets with links. (Twitter’s advanced search is quite powerful in places.)
• Recent videos uploaded to YouTube and the same for Vimeo.
• A Flickr search sorted with most recent first. I suggested linking to sets where available and tags if not.
• Google News picks up the more formal articles and as such you can probably filter it down using words like “Birmingham” or “music”. Proper journalists tend to be more detailed and thorough in their writing than bloggers who might assume their readers know it’s in Birmingham or about music.
• I have no idea how best to search Facebook for publicly available stuff. I’m not sure Facebook is interested in people doing that. Facebook is weird. I need to do more research on it.
• If you spot activity in an area not covered by those searches do a new one. Maybe your audience is all on Bebo. Capsule’s aren’t but yours might be.
• And finally, open up the comments and let people leave links there, particularly for those areas of the Internet that aren’t easily searchable like forums.

Once you have all the info it’s up to you what you do with it. Prepare a report, curate it into something (Capsule could stitch all the audience videos into a massive replay of the festival from all different angles, if they had the time) or simply leave the page there as a monument. It’s up to you. The point is collecting all this is not hard and if not more useful then certainly differently useful than getting people to fill out questionnaires.

See also Chris Unitt’s guide to doing a collective memory from January. 6 months is a long time in this game but most of the tools still relevant and the spirit and methodology certainly is.

(Larger version)

It comes (in the usual roundabout way) from this fascinating investigation by David Meerman Scott into how the Air Force is developing a social media strategy. What I found interesting was the notion of arming all their personnel with these tools and skills and seeing their role in communicating the reality of their situations, whilst also protecting sensitive material, as essential to the campaign. In a way this is revolutionary but it’s really a sensible reaction to a world where most of the troops are young, internet savvy and online. Rather than shutting them down they’ve realised this is their strongest asset propaganda wise.

But what’s really lovely is how methodical and bullshit-free the flowchart is. You can apply this to pretty much any organisation that’s wanting to engage with blogs but is wary of how to deal with negative criticism. Pin it to you wall. Or better still, adapt it for your own use, specifically the Blog Response Considerations of Transparency, Tone and Influence, and pin it to your wall.

In the morning there were a number of talks. Some were good, some were not so good but the best was from Gail Durbin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The videos appeared on the C:Cubed website a while back but, annoyingly, were not set up for sharing so I did a naughty thing and made a copy of Gail’s talk, uploaded it to Viddler and annotated it with links to the items Gail mentions as she talks. It’s about 10 minutes long and well worth watching.

As I watched Gail talk I grinned and grinned and grinned. She absolutely got it 100%. Everything she said was textbook social media gold. And she’s demonstrably not a web nerd. Her jargon might be a little off but she approaches this stuff with exactly the right spirit for success. Here’s a quick checklist of the things she’s doing right:

• You don’t have to have lots of money to do it. Technologically speaking the V&A’s website is pretty shonky but that’s not stopped them. The blogs use WordPress (free) and most of the projects seem to be based on email, a social media tool we often forget about because it’s so ubiquitous.
• Web 2.0 is about task, not technology. Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I think I’ll be using this in my talks.
• You have to seed these sites [or else] nobody will contribute to them. Spot on. The notion of “build it and they will come” is wrong. You have to show people what you want them to do by doing it yourself. The point about using your full name is also important. People are more likely to interact and share with other people than they are an institution. Use the tools as you would have others use them. Flickr does this very well where all visible staff members are also active users of the site.
• You don’t always get lots of contributions and this is not a problem. The pattern of interaction in a social space is often like this with, say, 5 really active users, 50 occasionally active users and 500+ lurkers who might pop a comment in or rate something occasionally.
• It’s not for us to determine how people do these things. I think this is an important attitude for an institution such as the V&A to have. Many cultural organisations will have an idea, implicit or explicit, of what is “good” or “right” which is fine but doesn’t always enable engagement and people feel they might be getting it wrong and not contribute. That’s not to say you don’t need some filtering system but by giving people the leeway to curate the space themselves you allow interesting things to bubble through, often things you’d never considered.
• Sometimes you get more creative things if you limit what you’re asking them to do. “Limitations are possibilities” someone once said. Give people a challenge and make them work within certain perameters. Don’t make it too limiting, just enough to get them thinking. The problem with a lot of social media tools is you can do anything you want with them, which is great in theory but daunting in practice. This is one of the reasons Twitter works. It’s blogging but you’re limited to 140 characters so you have to get creative. Or to take a more traditional example, haiku.
• We accept everything (except offensive, irrelevant and half-finished, which is fair). The subsequent rating system is key to this, allowing users to easily promote the good stuff up the list. Digg.com is the classic example of user rating but here it’s being used on a much smaller scale.
• Sue Lawty’s blog. I love this example for obvious reasons. Sue Lawty was their artist in residence and was “deeply hostile to technology” but agreed to have a go at blogging. After a while she started getting feedback from people who had been inspired by her work to do their own and from this The Beach Project evolved. This is a great illustration of how this isn’t about technology, it’s about communication and sometimes the best people to use this stuff are the people who have the most averse reaction to it. (I’m thinking of you, Yarker!)
• 400 contributions from all over the world with no promotion. The World Beach Project has spread through word of mouth. Here’s a Google Blogsearch for it but that’s just scratching the surface. This sort of project is a classic “social object”, something that people want to tell other people about and, more critically, can have a go at themselves. You don’t need to promote something like this. If the idea is good enough you just need to seed it and have patience.
• Be prepared to fail and move on. The list of projects on the Things To Do page is very long and I’d imagine most of them have had a takeup between poor and reasonable. But because the set-up and management costs for these things is so cheap it doesn’t matter. I’d imagine people working at the V&A have ideas for projects involving the public every time they walk through a gallery. Previously they’d have had to go through a long winded process of planning and budgeting to see them in action. Now they can get them up and running in a few days and, if they work, develop them further.

I could go on and on but I think you get the message. Concentrate on the ideas rather than the implementation. Keep it small and manageable – you can grow if it works. Fail often and learn. Technological solutions are good but you can do a lot with email and a shonky website. And above all treat the people you want to engage with as people.

Did you find this as inspirational as I did? Anything you’d like to add?

A Twitter update from Rory Cellan-Jones asked “what are the best web tools for journalists? I’m giving a seminar for colleagues tomorrow – so what do you find most useful?” I seem to spend a fair bit of time watching how journalists engage with the internet because those that don’t have their heads in the sand tend to be the most inquisitive and practical of the non-techy adopters so I’ve seen this question mooted a few times. Paul Bradshaw is better positions to offer practical advice here but it did get me thinking. The tools are almost irrelevant. Sure, you should have a blog, a Twitter account and be tracking the key blogs in your area through Google Reader and Technorati, but it’s how you use those tools that really matters.

The specifics will depend on what online communities you’re looking to engage with but I think there are some key things to bear in mind most of which can apply to anyone wanting to get stuff from the online people.

1. Build relationships. Get to know the people who will be important to you and let them get to know you. No need to get too personal but present yourself as a human being.
2. Give and take. Don’t expect to parachute into a community and get what you want before leaving without giving something back. You likely have skills and knowledge that would be useful to the community (journalists have helped me with libel laws, for example). Make time to help others and when you come to ask for help they’ll be much more likely to assist.
3. Mutual respect. Don’t think of the online community as a resource to be exploited. These people are participating in this community, and by extension providing you with a free resource, for their own personal reasons. Respect these reasons and engage with them accordingly.
4. Be humble. You may work for a large organisation and have an audience of hundreds of thousands but these people don’t need you. They’re creating their own media and will not drop everything deign to address them. Your professional status may even work against you. Until you earn their trust and respect you’re a visitor here.

And so on. It strikes me this is pretty much common sense and is probably how journalists have always dealt with contacts and sources, but given then relative ease of tracking these communities and conversations and the different means of communicating with them it seems worth stressing. I hope it’s of some use.