Sculpture Made From Weather Data

Pretty interesting video from TED talks:
Nathalie Miebach: Art Made of Storms
The artist essentially takes weather data and visualizes it using sculpture and music. Pretty cool stuff:

Overview of Social Media for Artists

It seems like every time I turn around I hear a story about some artist making it big with social media. Don’t believe the hype. If you are an artist, and want to continue to work as an artist, social networking can help you improve your marketing approach. Becoming an expert in social networking takes a lot of work, skill, and experience. If this is what you want to do, then go for it! But, if you want to be an artist and use social networking to promote your work, prepare to balance yet another set of responsibilities with your passion to change the world through art.

With so many options and new services popping up every day, social media can be confusing. I thought I would start with an overview of the different social media pieces and how they fit together; a ramp-up to quickly get up to speed on social networking.

Before we move on it is important for me to explain the “attitude” of social networking. People who blatantly use social networking to promote themselves are quickly shunned. It would be like walking into a party and telling each party goer how great you are. No one would want to hang out with you. The same is true for social networking, listen, be yourself, build relationships over time, just like real life.

The Pieces

A complete online marketing strategy may have many different pieces, or channels, that you will have to maintain. The most important first step is choosing the channels that will best reach your audience, and making sure you are actively engaging customers through those channels. As an artist, you need to decide how much effort you want to put into this.

This is important: it is better to simply have a message directing customers to another channel than to have a poorly maintained one. If you only have one well maintained channel that is great! One poorly maintained channel will make you look bad. Start slowly and don’t forget, you are an artist, not a tech/social media geek.

Channels can include a web site, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, YouTube and a blog. I’ll briefly discuss each below.

Web Sites Are Still King

If you are only able to choose one channel, develop a web site. A well-designed web site is still considered your most important asset. This is where customers will ultimately go to find reliable information about your art. All of your other channels, should you decide to maintain any others, should point back to your web site, and your web site should list all of the channels you have chosen to maintain. The web site is the hub of your marketing efforts.

In the diagram above the viewer is at the center. You should always keep this in mind, people will come to your web site, Facebook page, Tweets, etc. from different places. It is up to you to make sure their experience reflects your work and personality.

Facebook

With 800 million active users, Facebook is hard to ignore. Facebook has pages and profiles. Think of a profile as a description of yourself, a CV or resume. A page is a storefront or professional presentation of yourself. You can keep these separate, but then you have to maintain both. You don’t need a page. A profile is a good idea.

Creating a Facebook page requires you to first create a Facebook profile for yourself. You can’t create a page without that page being tied to an individual’s profile. The steps to create a page are pretty simple and can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/help/pages

Blog

Writing a professional blog is one way to keep your content fresh. The blog can be hosted by a free service like blogger or wordpress.com, or you can ask your webmaster to host the site on your own servers. Blogging is an inexpensive way to reach your customers by offering valuable information that is relevant to your field. The important thing here, which is true for all of these channels, is to stay with it!

Linked-In

Linked-In is a professional social networking site. This service has fewer subscribers than Facebook, but people interact with a business focused mindset on Linked-In. You will find mostly mature professionals that are looking for networking and help finding resources and opportunities. Creating a Linked-In company page starts here: http://www.linkedin.com/company/add/show

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging site used mostly by the 25 and older crowd. You will find all kinds of information shared here, but it is particularly useful for breaking news and quick answers to simple problems; like finding a resource on the web or a tool to achieve a specific goal. Creating a Twitter profile is relatively easy; go to www.twitter.com, submit your email address and username and you are ready to start tweeting!

Google

There are other search engines, but Google has the majority of search and advertising traffic. Optimizing your site so a search engine can find your information can get pretty complex. The simple and most important things to keep in mind; constant updates to your site, descriptive page titles, keywords and section titles will raise your ranking. There is a whole science and industry built around search engine optimization, but Google offers some getting started advice.

Putting the Pieces Together

Hopefully the brief description above is enough to get you started asking questions on your journey down the social marketing path. The important points I want to emphasize:

1. You don’t need to use all of the channels, but once you pick one, stick with it! 
2. Overt advertising is considered spam. Start using social media by listening. Don’t send out a bunch of press releases and advertisements. Listen and try to help your admirers and colleagues, see how other people are using these channels and figure out how want to portray yourself. No matter how long you have been making art, you are building a reputation for the first time on each new channel. 
3. Each channel is different. There are tools that will allow you to send your Facebook updates to Twitter, for example. This is obnoxious and will annoy people, don’t do it.

Hopefully you find this information helpful. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think or whether I left anything out!