My rather nifty friend Andrew pointed me in the direction of this video, and I think it’s rather cool. Not just because I think cephalopods are amazing, or that my nickname for one of my oldest friends is Squid, but mainly because I just love science.

If you enjoyed that, I suggest following it up with listening to the super awesome Here Comes Science album by They Might Be Giants (yes, I know it’s designed for kids but don’t let that stop you.)

This is part of a series of short blog posts I wrote for beginners in social media for the Australia Council for the Arts. Enjoy, share and if you have any questions, let me know.

You’re panicking. You’ve spent months coming up with a strategy, you’re design work has been completed, you’ve got your Facebook Page created and your new app is launched and looks fantastic – and no one is seeing it. It’s the worst thing that could happen because when it comes to social, Oscar Wilde was on the money: “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

Tips and Tricks

Organic is great but it shouldn’t be your only tool. Organic growth is when you rely on social word of mouth, like people seeing their friends interact with Facebook Pages in their News Feeds to build your community. This is great and very valuable, but support it wherever you can!

Use your existing contacts! If you have a mailing list, make sure they know about your community. If you have physical locations, make sure you put up signs. Don’t be afraid to also encourage everyone in your organisation to invite their friends too.

This post originally appeared as part of the Connecting:// arts audiences online series, and you can continue reading the post on the blog here.

This is part of a series of short blog posts I wrote for beginners in social media for the Australia Council for the Arts. Enjoy, share and if you have any questions, let me know.

Whenever a new social network or tool is launched and creates enough buzz you can guarantee one thing: there’ll be a swathe of articles about digital security. We’ve seen it just recently with the launch of Google’s new social offering, Google+, but how real are these concerns?

In short? Reasonably. For an arts organisation or company? Extremely real! It’s important to look at this from a couple of different angles:

What you need to know

The most important tip: stop! Don’t put anything into a social network that you would be worried about being known! You can be careful, but the simplest way is to keep it to yourself.

Know your networks! Plenty has been said about Facebook’s security concerns, but there are ways around the confusing security info. The site ReclaimPrivacy.org has a great tool for locking down your settings, for example. Keeping an ear out for new issues is also important.

This post originally appeared as part of the Connecting:// arts audiences online series, and you can continue reading the post on the blog here.

This is part of a series of short blog posts I wrote for beginners in social media for the Australia Council for the Arts. Enjoy, share and if you have any questions, let me know.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook – not just posting funny cat videos and tagging friends in embarrassing photos, but working too – and the one I’ve learnt is Facebook loves to change things, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. So, what do you need to know?

Groups
Facebook recently redesigned Groups. Rather than being the old precursor to Pages, they now sit on the left side of your navigation bar and are like small, private communities. Perfect for organising and smaller clubs, they can email members when there are new posts and be kept completely private.

They’re harder to use for organisations, as you post as a user rather than as the company, like you do with Pages, but they’re definitely worth checking out. One great feature is each group includes a group chat feature based on Facebook’s built in chat service.

This post originally appeared as part of the Connecting:// arts audiences online series, and you can continue reading the post on the blog here.

This is part of a series of short blog posts I wrote for beginners in social media for the Australia Council for the Arts. Enjoy, share and if you have any questions, let me know.

So you want an iPhone app? Well, there are certainly a lot of options out there, but before you even start working out how to get your app from your mind to the Apple Store, there are some things you should really consider.

The questions you need to ask first:

1) Firstly, and most importantly in my book, why are you creating the app? One of the biggest problems organisations run into is creating an app for apps sake – remember that to be successful your app needs to solve a problem.

2) What kind of budget do you have? There are affordable options, but the fancier the app the more it’s going to cost.

3) Would your goal be better suited by a mobile optimised website? This will open it up to all mobile devices and can be a lot cheaper.

This post originally appeared as part of the Connecting:// arts audiences online series, and you can continue reading the post on the blog here.