During GO we ask participants to work pretty hard; they have to register, log their travels by “checking in” with unique codes, and see at least five studios in order to be eligible to nominate three artists. That may seem like a fairly involved and complicated process, but we believe these thresholds will engender deeper participation. Because of this participation model, we commonly get comments from artists like this one, “I reviewed what it takes to nominate someone and I really don’t think that ‘regular’ people will actually go through with it all.”

Artist Jason Polan breaks down the steps and shows people How to GO.

So, why do we make people jump through all these hoops? Requiring registration sets a high bar, but it gives all participants a way to identify themselves within the scope of the project.  In early phases, profiles allow participants to recognize each other in the studio, but in later stages of the project (nominations, curator visits) it becomes about continuing the dialogue online in a way that retains the feel of those open doors. The electronic “check-in” at studios is another step in the process, but it goes a long way to ensure that works of art are seen in person—an artist’s online profile is just a teaser to help visitors get interested in the work and then later remember what they saw, but we don’t want people judging work online where works of art are difficult to represent. Requiring a visit to at least five studios in order to nominate three is another high bar, but it allows participants to think more like curators. You have to make a choice, and by removing the nomination process from the open studio weekend, we hope to encourage participants to be more reflective in their choices.

Basically, you can’t just sit at home and vote online; and you can’t just go to your friend’s studio and vote on the spot. We want to shift the dialogue from the spontaneous “like” to careful consideration among many options.

The like button is easy, and while we don’t think participation in GO should be difficult, we do think we need to move away from the gold standard Facebook has forced upon us to something that’s more powerful and serves the needs of participants specifically taking part in this project.  Will everyone get beyond the like button during GO?  We sure hope so; participants may never register and might not pick up a mobile device, but if they find themselves in an artist’s studio on September 8-9, it’s likely they are already way beyond that ubiquitous little button, and in our minds, that is a success.

For those of you wondering if we have a Facebook page for GO, you’ll find that we don’t for many of the same reasons outlined here. During GO, we want to encourage participants toward a dialogue that takes place in the real world, and most importantly, in the studio. While you will see social sharing enabled throughout the GO website and we do encourage participants to share GO via their social networks and email lists, we believe that reaching out to your closest friends and supporters and asking them personally to stop by the studio will go a long way toward encouraging studio visitation and fostering deeper connections.

West Indian-American Carnival 2008 – Brooklyn, NY by David Berkowitz via Flickr.

This is just a reminder that there’s no First Saturday in September, but there will be plenty going on around the Museum with the all events surrounding the West Indian-American Day Carnival Association’s Labor Day parade that will be taking place.

My colleagues and I are not taking a break, however, and are busily preparing for the next season of Target First Saturdays. We’ll be kicking things off on October 3rd with a collaboration with the Hungarian Cultural Center as part of their year long Extremely Hungary festival. We’re excited to offer a night of art and culture beyond visitor’s expectations that will include a performance by Vertical Players Repertory, an Opera Open Mic with Brooklyn’s beer swilling, jeans wearing opera singers from Opera on Tap, and a soulful dance party hosted by Brooklyn’s DJ Reborn and a top Hungarian DJ.

If you just can’t wait for October, you can join me on the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook page during the month of September where I’ll be asking questions about visitor’s experience at and thoughts about First Saturday. Please join me. I’d love to hear what you think!

When 1stfans launched with the Swoon printing event on January 3rd, it was a pretty crazy night. Though Shelley and I didn’t get to meet every 1stfan who attended, we were able to meet a few. One of the people we met was a guy named Matt Held. He said he was a painter and had this project on Facebook. He and his wife live in Brooklyn, he said, and had been regular Museum Members for a couple years. He joined 1stfans because he thought it was a cool idea, and he talked a little about his project, in which he paints people’s Facebook profiles as portraits. He got his print (you can see Matt and his wife Joelle in the photo above) and was on his way. Shelley thought it would be cool if we could get him to speak at a 1stfans meetup, and I agreed. We approached Matt, and he liked the idea too. Like our last 1stfans presenter Lisa Bruno, Matt was a good fit to speak because he’s a 1stfan Member and Museum supporter.

Fast forward a month or so, and Matt Held has become something of an internet phenomenon. His project, which he chronicles on a blog in addition to the facebook group, was picked up by several art and museum blogs (<— 5 links). Last week, Matt even made it into the “lowbrow-brilliant” quadrant of New York magazine’s weekly Approval Matrix and this week he’s profiled by Gillian Reagan in The New York Observer. When Shelley and I visited Matt at his studio last week, he seemed excited and a little overwhelmed by the attention he’s received as of late. Since we were used to seeing these paintings online, I was surprised at how spectacular they looked in person (granted, I’m no curator). It is for this reason that we are particularly excited to have Matt speak to 1stfans at Target First Saturday on March 7th.

At 7pm, Matt will be giving a talk exclusively to 1stfan Members about his project. He is going to bring a few of the portraits for 1stfans to see, and then afterwards he’s going to pick one far-away 1stfan’s Facebook profile to do as part of his project. If you’d like to hear Matt speak and you aren’t already a 1stfan Member, you can join right here.

It was this idea of personal interaction that piqued my interest. Whenever I speak at conferences, one of the first things I try and get across is Social Media…or Web 2.0…or [insert whatever you want to call it here] is not about technology, marketing, or PR—it’s about people. When we establish a presence on social media site for the Museum our goals are simple: put a personal face on the institution and make personal connections with our visitors. This extension to communities on the web is just one part of a larger mission-driven synergy that begins with making these same connections within our building, in nearby communities and, now, with 1stfans.

Given that the crowd at Target First Saturday tends to be connected via the web, we started to discuss ways to utilize the social web to get to know and communicate with this new group. Rather than relying on the standard e-mail newsletter (which is more of a standard push relationship), why not reach out and go directly to these new members in places where they happen to be and deliver updates tailored to their own preferences. Just as important as delivering content is the idea that this is a social exchange, where we can better get to know the 1stfans at the same time.

We are calling 1stfans a “socially-networked membership.” To us, that encompasses the in-person, social aspects of the events planned for this group at every Target First Saturday and the way we intend to socialize with these new members on the web. At the end of the day, I think we will have done our jobs well if 1stfans get to know our Membership team, just like many of our current followers on the social networks have come to know me.

A little later today, I’ll be posting about the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed and look for posts from Will about Swoon and a few other things in the coming weeks. If you signed up this morning and have not heard from us, we are just starting to catch up and you’ll be hearing from us very soon.

Update – in case you missed them, check out Will and me introducing 1stfans in a couple of infomercial-style videos! part 1: hello and part 2: the launch now up on YouTube

What is 1stfans? a 1stfans Membership is an interactive relationship with the Museum that will happen in the building and online. We call it a “socially networked” Museum Membership, but what does that mean? The word has two meanings, which is why we picked it: it means developing face-to-face relationship with Museum staff and other Museum Members (literal social networking), and a strong, exclusive online relationship through social networking sites (you know them as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter).

What do 1stfans get? Firstly (pun intended), exclusive events at monthly Target First Saturdays, where you’ll be able to interact with other 1stfans, Museum staff, and contemporary artists. Oh, and you can skip the ticket line for movies, which is pretty sweet. Secondly (no pun there), we will send updates to 1stfans via Facebook, Flickr, or e-newsletter, whichever you prefer. These will tell you what’s going on at 1stfans events, give you behind-the-scenes insight from Museum staff, and provide you with links to other cool stuff going on in the art world. Finally, 1stfans will be the only ones with access to the Museum’s new Twitter Art Feed, an extremely awesome way of engaging contemporary artists that Shelley will describe in greater detail on this blog soon. All of this for a tax-deductible $20 per-year. Not bad, right?

Who is 1stfans for? You, for one. With 1stfans, people who enjoy the Museum on-site and online now have an appealing (and did I mention inexpensive?) way to join the Museum as Members. If you come to our monthly First Saturdays and want a way to learn more about the Museum while interacting with Museum staff and making new friends, then you’ll enjoy 1stfans. If you like the Museum and have an account on Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, 1stfans is also for you. Not only will we keep you updated via those sites, but we’ll also provide you with cool content and give you a shoutout when you post your own cool stuff.

An installation piece by Swoon in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. Photograph by Sam Horine via Flickr. All Rights Reserved.

1stfans will launch formally at the January Target First Saturday on Saturday, January 3 with help from the artist Swoon (18,000+ Flickr pics here). Swoon’s studio has very generously agreed to do a live printing event for 1stfans Members, so anyone who signs up for 1stfans between now and January 3 can come with their own piece of paper and walk out with a Swoon print. Stay tuned to this blog for details, which will be coming soon.

The artist for the Twitter Art Feed will be announced in the middle of each month for the following month, so keep a close eye on this blog in the next two weeks for the announcement of the January artist. If you’re a fan of contemporary art, you won’t be disappointed….

If you have any questions about 1stfans, please e-mail me.

Changes to better integrate with Facebook’s look and feel:

A while back, Facebook adjusted user profiles so they would look less cluttered. Those adjustments made all but the most used applications go into hiding on a person’s profile and that practically killed ArtShare’s growth rate. Most people add ArtShare when they see it on a friend’s profile, so once the app could no longer be seen, our install rate decreased significantly. This initial clutter clean-up was a stop-gap until Facebook could launch bigger changes to the profile design and these larger changes were what we were waiting for. With FB’s full redesign, we’ve adjusted ArtShare so the user can place the app back on their Wall (the profile’s main page). That’s a good thing, but since it’s an action people will have to take, we know there may be a questionable response rate. Still, being able to put it back on the main page will help a lot for those that decide they want it there (and allowing the user the control to do what they want is always a good thing—even if they don’t want it on their wall).

So, yay, we’ve got ArtShare back on the main page, but we had to redesign the look of it (above) to get that to work. Facebook has a strict size limit on the box that can be displayed on your Wall and strict sizes are a nightmare for works of art—suddenly everything was getting automatically cropped in really bad ways. To work around this, we went with thumbnails in the new layout that click to the larger works and descriptions. I think we are all a little back and forth on the way this turned out, but this is the compromise we made to get it there and we are stuck with Facebook’s limitations. **If you find yourself missing those larger images, we enabled the application tab feature, so you can create a tab (below) for ArtShare and display all the work you’ve selected in full size—back to yay! Try this – it rocks!

Also, if you are running ArtShare on a Facebook page, the old layout will still apply—a good thing if you are using this on your institution’s page.

Changes to better accommodate artists:

ArtShare has always been used by many artists to share their work. In the previous version, artists could upload work and share it with their friends, but in the new version we’ve made artist uploads global. Now anyone can upload their work and share it with anyone who’s installed ArtShare. This is one of the earliest changes we wanted to make and one of the most fundamental. From the first day, we felt this application should be open to all and allowing artist uploads to become global was a key factor in fulfilling this idea.

Changes to better accommodate institutions:

We now have 26 institutions using the application. Adding all of them was taking too much time, so we’ve overhauled how we do this on the back end. The app scales better now and this means I can add a new museum in about 60 seconds—double yay! We had a lot of people patiently waiting throughout the summer while we made these changes, so many thanks (we know the waiting was a total bummer). On a personal note, one of the new institutions sharing work is the Houston Museum of Natural Science and since I grew up in Houston and was constantly in this place as a kid, it’s pretty fun to see them in ArtShare.

As ArtShare grew, you might have noticed wading through each individual institution to see work was getting cumbersome, so we’ve now got a “view all” area—it may take a while to load, but you can see everything in one place. Eventually we will implement a search function, but that will have to wait for a day when we have more time.

Fun stuff:

A lot of the institutions using the app would like some kind of statistical reporting. It’s something we’ve never had a chance to do and not something we will be able to accommodate any time soon. We did decide to implement a fun little “Most Popular” tab, so you can see which 50 works are the most popular at any given time. While it’s a far cry from the stats everyone would like to see, this is fun and all users of ArtShare can benefit from discovering more objects this way.

That’s all folks!

If you are one of the 4,690 people using ArtShare on Facebook, you can see these new changes by enabling the new profile changes and then go to your ArtShare settings to select new work or make changes to how ArtShare is displayed on your profile.

ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application just won a Silver award in the Online Presence category of the American Association of Museums MUSE awards. We are in great company with the Powerhouse taking Gold for its online Collection (a project we are great admirers of).

Judges said:
“ArtShare on Facebook is a simple web application with a great, innovative concept: provide a database-driven storehouse of images for users to populate their Facebook pages with and allow users to add their own artwork. In other words, this application creates a new virtual port of entry to museum content (albeit one limited to Facebook users), that taps into the universal desire to “share ownership” of great art. By tapping into mainstream social networking, this application engages new audiences and spurs communal discussion and conversation about artwork and other collections objects. Visually, the application succeeds in retaining the clean and appealing interface of the Facebook site itself, no mean feat in the often-cluttered social networking environment. The Brooklyn Museum’s foresight and generosity in opening this application up to use by its museum peers (ArtShare now includes content from eight different museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Powerhouse) preserves the integrity and authority of art and institution alike makes this application an award-winning development. Three cheers for ArtShare’s art-sharing concept, execution, and cross-museum synergy.”

ArtShare now has 2239 users and 12 institutions using the application to share their collections (with more on the way in the coming months). We intend to make some technical changes/additions as soon as Facebook completes their expected profile overhauls.

Side note, if you are at AAM this week, I’m in a session about blogging with some really awesome folks, so come by and check it out.

Update! ArtShare also won in an additional category, the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award (Cindy, Seb – thanks for the headsup on this).

“The Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award was introduced in New Orleans at the 2004 MUSE awards ceremony. Jim Blackaby, a board member of the Media and Technology Committee, passed away in the summer of 2003. Jim influenced many in the museum world with his innovative work in information services and Internet strategies. Conceived in his memory, this award recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology a project that has a powerful effect on its audience, and one that stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to the MUSE awards of all categories and does not necessarily have to be a winner within the category to which it was submitted.”

Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.

Those are some of the straight stats, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story. On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.

And on that note, one of the things I find most interesting are the works in ArtShare that are most interesting to our users. Here are the top 5 selected works. Keep in mind, these top 5 shift around a lot – this is the top 5 today, not the cumulative over time. Also note, 4 of the 6 institutions are new to ArtShare, so the Brooklyn Museum and V&A collections have received more exposure over time and that’s clearly being reflected here.

We’ve received a lot of great suggestions and have some thoughts of our own to make ArtShare even better. Over time, you should expect to see user interface changes and adjustments that will enable artists using the app to better share their own work. We’d also like to work in a general stats page within the application, so the basic numbers that we’ve reported here are always available to anyone using it. However, these changes must wait until after the Brooklyn Museum’s Spring exhibition cycle when we expect our workload to lighten just a bit. In the mean time, go check out the latest works that have been uploaded – there’s a lot to choose from now!

If you’ve got a YouTube account and want to port videos, try YouTube Box by Tim Nilson. The great thing here is you can pull in the video description as well as the embed code, so folks never need to leave Facebook in order to play your videos.

If you want to integrate your Flickr photos, My Flickr by Kaleb Fulgham will do the trick. If you’ve been using this application on your personal account, then you know how great it is. Totally flexible in allowing you to port over photos in any number of ways.

Kaleb Fulgham has also developed another application that we really needed, My del.icio.us. This app can port your bookmarks from deli.icio.us – tags and all.

Lastly, if you are in a NYC-based org…check out Subway Status by Plastic Past. This beauty will let you display your MTA subway lines right on the page. In addition to the train lines, the station can also be displayed and you can add comments about your stop, so we naturally added the information about our Arts for Transit collaboration.

All of these applications have really helped make for a full featured page.  By the way, Facebook pages are fully open to the public and indexable by search engines, so there’s no need for people to have Facebook accounts in order to see the content.