Is this a project? I think I can classify this as one. When I was brought in as the gallery’s social media volunteer early in 2009 I decided to treat it as a bit of an experiment. Femina Potens already had Twitter, Facebook and Myspace accounts set up but there was no one specific that was handling everything social on the internet. I answered a call for volunteers (on their Twitter no less) and I got to work the day I got the grand tour of the gallery. Below I will outline the different projects and how I use them to create a community centred around the gallery.
Twitter
Facebook
Myspace
Blog
Integration
Consistency
Twitter – https://twitter.com/FeminaPotens
I use Twitter a lot for my own personal networking, in my community it is a big way on how I communicate with my friends as well as some more notable people I follow, a few bloggers whose sites I read regularly for example. Using Twitter to represent an organisation has different dynamics than personal use however so here’s a few things I do differently;
For my personal account I generally only follow people I know in person, or the aforementioned notable individuals. For the FP account I follow most people who follow our account, minus the obvious Twitter spammers, anyone who says “social media expert” or “marketing professional” doesn’t get a follow back. I don’t like using auto follow for this purpose. It also gives me the opportunity to get an idea of what kind of demographic we’re attracting with this account which is pretty much what I expect. Mostly women with a mixture of artists and people in the sex industry in some form or another. I’ve gotton a lot of “thank you” direct messages for following people back actually.
Another major thing I use with Twitter (and Facebook to an extent) is fester conversation which results in a bit of an online community. I often post links to topics about various things that relate to the general demographic of our community, gay marriage rulings for example. I’ve found its not necessary to post things directly related to the gallery, especially since there’s really not that much happening at the gallery itself to post 5 messages in a day or so. I know I’m doing something right when I get people reposting stuff on a regular basis.
Facebook – profile, group
Facebook operates much in the same way as Twitter, with a few notable exceptions. The first one is it is much easier to track responses to things, especially if you comment on someone else’s post. The second (and probably the biggest difference) is ability to coordinate events. FP has a decent amount of events happening throughout the month and Facebook is an easy way to get people knowing about it and for us to get an idea how many people are showing up. Generally its about a third I’ve noticed.
I also ignore all app requests, games etc. on Facebook as none of them are relevant to anything that we would use the site for and only serve to clutter up the feed as well as distract the user (me currently) fro actually getting work done.
We also have a group that is used mostly for event postings. Every once in awhile I’ll invite new friends of the FP profile to the group so it is not only easier for our friends to keep track on our events but also easier to invite massive groups of people to events.
Myspace – http://www.myspace.com/feminapotenssf
To be perfectly honest, the FP Myspace isn’t really utilised as much as it would be 2-3 years ago when it was about neck and nexk with Facebook. You can post status updates, little blogs, comment on people’s profiles and post bulletins. 90% of our friends on Myspace are on Facebook and Twitter so it is almost redudndant to expend more energy into managing Myspace than needed. It also attracts more spam than any other network.
Blog – http://feminapotens.tumblr.com
Not everyone uses Facebook and Twitter is too short for anything longer than a quick blurb so what else is there? I realised we needed something that everyone could see and we could post press releases, interviews, news about the gallery etc. so I created a Tumblr. I mostly use it for the afrementioned press releases which usually relate to an event that is happening at the gallery soon as not all of them are posted on the main site but also interviews as I also mentioned as well as videos and other news related to FP.
The feed to the blog is sort of integrated with the main site but not as well as I would like. I am currently awaiting a Joomla upgrade so I can migrate the blog to the main site, keeping everything better integrated which brings us to…
Integration
Since we do have a number of social networks it can be a bit of a pain to keep track of all of them so I set up a Ping.fm account to take care of this for me. I compose a message that can fit inside our networks with the lowest common denoninator for character size (currently Twitter at 140), hit the ping button and they’re all updated at once with the same content. It has saved a significant amount of time which I can use for experimenting with other things related to the gallery.
Consistency
One thing I have learned when working among various sites representing the same organisation is keeping everything consistent. For example, the image posted in the top has three colours, purple, black and white. I use these everywhere I can customise the colour scheme. All of our networks let you upload a profile icon so I upload one that represents a piece of artwork that’s at our gallery for the month and change it every time a new exhibition is being shown.
