Links for May 2013

Have a play with the Google Street View Hyperlapse if you’ve not already, or at least watch the video. It’s great.

Arts, digital, etc

The Digital Public Library of America is ‘a platform’.

Nymbol connects digital content like text, photos and videos with physical objects and places. Could be used to create apps that help people discover and explore a collection.

Donate is a mobile-donations-to-the-arts thing that’s launched with a few partners. I don’t really get how it’s an improvement on anything though – see Article19′s take for more.

Culture Hive is a repository of documents about cultural marketing. Guessing it’s early stages for this, because I’d understood there was going to be rather more to it.

Some stats about digital engagement with museums:

The survey showed that 30% of adults reported visiting a museum or gallery website, up from 16% when data collection began in 2005/06. This reflects a steady upward trend in digital engagement during that period.

Of those who had visited, 60% had done so to order tickets or find out about exhibitions and events and 45% to learn more about a particular subject.

Which is funny, because the ticket-buying experience on museum websites is often terrible. Speaking of museums:

  • Ideas for museums is collecting interviews with people working on implementing digital technologies in everyday museum practice.
  • Design Thinking for Museums is a blog sharing resources and lessons learned all about, well… design thinking and museums.

The RSC are revisiting digital storytelling with Midsummer Night’s Dreaming over 21-23 June. Such Tweet Sorry received a mixed reception but should at the very least be chalked up as a good effort, so good on the RSC for taking a second swing.

Playground Sessions is a software platform that teaches you how to play the piano using popular songs. Quincy Jones is one of the backers.

The job ad for the next V&A Head of Digital Media (£70-75k per annum) says:

The successful applicant will have… Familiarity with using web marketing analytics

At this point I shall leave a casual link to the Arts Analytics series I’m doing (worth knowing that stuff if you want to get ahead).

Other links

Want to get some perspective? Then Here Is Today.

Mailchimp explain how they do email marketing. If you’re going to learn lessons from anyone, it may as well be them.

Kaggle is a community of data scientists. They compete with each other to solve complex data science problems, and the top competitors get invited to consult on projects from some of the world’s biggest companies. This is pretty fascinating, with this profile in Wired explaining more.

I’ve been looking at a few of the companies trying to help businesses make sense of all their data, including ClearStory Data, Statwing and Platfora. Not used any of them, but it’s a really interesting area.

The quickfire round:

Apps/services/etc

Finally…

Do Not Touch: this is the music video for Kilo by Light Light

After 50 years of pointing and clicking, we are celebrating the nearing end of the computer cursor with an ever-changing music video where all our cursors can be seen together for one last time.

Do Not Touch music video

I’d also recommend Beardyman presents The Beardytron 5000 mkII, although I’m not sure whether I was most interested in the performance or the interviews about the kit’s development.

Arts Analytics: YouTube views and subscribers

Arts organisations are increasingly producing (or being pushed by funders to produce) more and more professional video content. For the next post in the Arts Analytics series I’m looking at how some of the larger funded organisations are using YouTube.

Findings

  • I found YouTube channels for 97 of the 100 arts organisations in my sample group.
  • On average, their channels have 872 subscribers and 480,547 views.
  • The video with the most views belongs to English National Opera.
  • Royal Opera House have built up the most subscribers and channel views.
  • 9 organisations are using the new One Channel layout.
  • Two organisations (English National Ballet and Stephen Joseph Theatre) did the Harlem Shake to score their most popular videos.

As you’ll see in the table below, there’s a massive disparity, with a small number of organisations hauling those averages up. In fact, outside of the top 20 or so there’s not a lot going on.

Here’s the data, collected on 13 April 2013 and sorted by subscribers.

What this tells us

Well, although pretty much everyone is on YouTube, I get the impression that the majority of organisations aren’t putting much effort into building up their presence there. There’s little rhyme or reason as to what they upload and their accounts are mostly used as public repositories for video content.

Which is fine, of course. It’s a perfectly legitimate use of YouTube, it’s just unlikely to result in a great many views or subscribers (if people took that approach to Twitter there’d be uproar). I have two caveats to throw in here:

  1. On of the joys of YouTube is that you can serve up content that will be valued by very small, niche communities (for example, the people involved in an educational project and their families).
  2. It’s also worth noting that video doesn’t just live online – something that gets a handful of views on YouTube might well be shown on foyer screens to thousands of people. YouTube’s certainly not the only player in the game either, I know Sadler’s Wells use a different video platform on their website – others probably do likewise.

It’s pretty notable that the Royal Opera House and ENO top the charts. Both have produced content specifically for YouTube – ROH with their live day-long broadcasts and ENO with their ‘social networks in real life’ video. Those are still hit-and-run approaches to online video, but they’re interesting.

By the way, I’ve also added a column to show what percentage of an organisation’s total views are accounted for by their most popular video.  This shows us which organisations (looking at ENO, Fact, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Crafts Council and Serpentine Gallery) have scored most of their views from one stand-out video.

What to measure 

The figures I’ve pulled out give a broad state-of-the-sector overview. For my money, if you’re ‘doing YouTube’ on a regular basis then there are two main things to pay attention to:

  1. The effect your videos have on your organisation’s mission and/or bottom line.
  2. Your number of subscribers.

The first will vary depending on the organisation and the type of video. It’s a massive topic and one I’m not going to get into here except to say that you should at least know what visitors from YouTube tend to do on your site. You should also (much more importantly, from what I’ve seen) know how to judge whether embedding a video on a page makes any difference to things like conversion rates.

It’s also well worth pointing out that this is information I don’t have access to. I may make slightly disparaging remarks but for all I know things could be working out just fine for everyone.

The second is very simple: subscribers = views. To quote the National Theatre’s Maya Gabrielle (as I always do on this topic):

If you’ve made a beautiful piece of content but not created an audience for it, you’ve wasted your money

So if you’re going to keep producing video then build up those subscribers.

The new YouTube One Channel layout and approach is interesting – it’s nudging people to consider their YouTube channels as a hub for ongoing interaction with audiences. They put subscriber numbers front and centre and give channel owners a chance to ‘sell’ their channel to non-subscribers. For a good example of how this works, check out the pros like Charlie McDonnell or even Jamie Oliver.

charlieissocoollike on YouTube

It’s always interesting to see what you can learn from the real pros. In this case, it’s the people who have figured out how to master YouTube for fun a profit. A recent Guardian article profiled some of the rising stars and this stood out: 

YouTubers – those who make content specifically for the platform – will often compare the process to theatre or playing music live, more than to producing a television segment.

Something to think about.

Recommendations

Others must have some good tips for YouTube – what would you recommend?

UPDATE

A few hours after I published this, there was a post on the Google NonProfits Blog called Anaheim Ballet performs on a global stage. It’s about how the company has used YouTube to reach more people:

In their YouTube videos, Anaheim Ballet created a discussion with their viewers by asking questions and seeing responses in real time.

You can tell it worked for them, because when they didn’t post anything for a few months people asked when they’d be posting more – see the comments on this video. How often do you see that?

What’s also interesting is that their most popular video is six-years old and titled Ballet: Dancers. It happens to be the #1 result in Google for the phrase ‘ballet dancers’ and so far has over 11m views. I didn’t want to talk about SEO in this post, but video tends to do well in search these days.

This post is part of a series called Arts Analytics where I’m using digital metrics to see what a group of arts organisations are doing online. Sign up to the Arts Analytics email for more of the same.

Links for April 2013

APPLAUSE
Photo by Pete Prodoehl.

Easily the best thing I read over the past month was Megan Gardner’s article for The Atlantic, A Brief History of Applause, the ‘Big Data’ of the Ancient World. It’s all quite interesting stuff but the reframing of social sharing is very neatly done. Especially the last bit of this quote:

Mostly, though, we’ve used the affordances of the digital world to remake public praise. We link and like and share, our thumbs-ups and props washing like waves through our networks. Within the great arena of the Internet, we become part of the performance simply by participating in it, demonstrating our appreciation — and our approval — by amplifying, and extending, the show.

Arts / digital links

I just discovered Keir Winesmith’s blog. He leads the digital media department at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which I visited a few weeks back. Very nice it was too. This post on building the MCA’s new website is good, as is this write-up from the recent Museums & Mobile online conference.

Speaking of mobile, a post from the V&A asks What do visitors say about using mobile devices in museums? and summarises a session looking at the findings of two visitor surveys on the use of mobile in cultural venues.

In yet more mobile news, ME : CA have written up some notes from their recent symposium – another event looking at mobiles and cultural experiences.

Michael Rushton is the latest Arts Journal blogger and he’ll be writing about “innovative pricing models around the world, both inside and outside the arts, debates on pricing practices, and current research”.

In blogathon news, Barry’s Blog did a five-part series on nonprofit arts research and data which I’m still working through. Also, Jake Orr’s rounded up some good commenters for a series of posts on the future of digital in the arts.

A statement of intent from the Digital Curator at The New York Public Library who says “I have specifically made it my mission to:

  • make as much of our collection available online as copyright law, professional ethics, and our budget permits
  • provide both contextual information and software tools to make our digital collections as useful as possible
  • improve methods for preserving and providing access to the born digital materials (word processor files, digital musical scores, 3d set designs, etc.) that are now part of the creative history of most contemporary works of art”

On to the quickfire round:

  • Museums Showoff is “an open mic night featuring curators, conservators, librarians, collectors, Museum Studies students, archaeologists, social historians, educators, multimedia developers, explainers, visitors, theorists and everyone else associated with museums and library special collections”.
  • CalArts Joins the Free Online Course Experiment. That’s the California Institute of the Arts teaming up with Coursera
  • The British Library have launched labsbl and are looking for transformative research ideas, wanting to create new narratives from their vast digital collections.
  • ‘The Thing’ Redialed: how a BBS changed the art world and came back from the dead | The Verge – Recovering an arts focused bulletin board
  • ArtistShare is a platform that “connects creative artists with fans in order to share the creative process and fund the creation of new artistic works”.

Other links

Since reading How I became a password cracker, I now firmly believe that basic password cracking should be on the national curriculum.

I was really taken with Magazine Você from Brazil. Customers can set up their own stores on Facebook or Orkut and collect a commission on each item they sell. I can’t find the link now, but I noted down something saying that over 40,000 customers were taking part, with conversion rates far higher than on the main Magazine Luiza online store.

For all the Spanish speakers out there, Olemiarte es una red de arte, un lugar de encuentro y una oportunidad de brillar, mostrar tus trabajos y relacionarte, reencontrarte con el mundo artístico en sus múltiples manifestaciones.

Blueprint Search Analytics and Diagnostics was a new one on me and could be handy.

Trust Hide & Seek to come up with some interesting Kickstarter rewards.

I like this kind of thing – Vanity Fair are doing a series of interviews with people showing which mobile apps they use.

Apps, services, etc

Finally…

The National Center for Arts Research held a panel discussion about Using Data to Foster Thriving Arts Organizations. There are some good fundamentals in there but I liked the starter question for attendees – what questions do you have about your organization’s practices that you think data could help you solve?

Arts Analytics: suggestions from the mailing list

I’m about to put together the first of the Arts Analytics email newsletters, looking forward to sending that out to everyone very soon.

In the meantime though, when you sign up to that list there’s an optional question asking:

What would you like me to cover?

I figured that, since the people who sign up are showing such an interest in this series (and seeing as how they’re clearly among the brightest and most charming the human race has to offer), I should take the chance to find out what sort of things they want to hear about. I might get some good ideas.

So far, roughly a third of the people who’ve signed up have left a suggestion. That’s quite a few, so I thought I’d dive in and talk about some of them.

The requests

How many organisations are effectively tracking the entire user journey through to purchase confirmation & what ticketing system/set-up they have to do this

The first part of that is impossible for me to tell using publicly available information. I’d need access to each organisation’s analytics package to get any further (now that would be fun). The second part might be easier to find out – I was thinking of looking at the technologies each organisation uses and ticketing systems could certainly be part of that.

How streaming of performances is doing

Arts orgs who produce interactive content only for online consumption, digital native work.

These are difficult ones. I doubt that all of the organisations in my group are streaming performances or producing digital native work and it could be anywhere on the internet, making it tricky to track down. Even if I could find it all, I probably wouldn’t be able to lay my hands on any useful stats. Sorry about that.

Maybe ask The Space to release some detailed stats? Or don’t the Arts Council collect figures on how many organisations are producing artistic content online? I’m sure I saw something like that somewhere. I think it’s worth having a wider conversation about approaches to streaming, especially as the higher ups seem to be pushing people towards it.

How to have a successful blog site. Will all newspapers be online?

I’m not too keen on doing ‘how to’ posts, but the first question does hit on something crucial that I’m hoping to get across in this series. That’s the fact that I have only a very limited idea of what constitutes ‘success’ for the organisations I’m looking at. I have even less idea of what’s working for them or even what priorities they may have set.

That’s why I can’t make too many firm judgements about how well an organisation is performing online. I can show certain metrics and explain what they might indicate, but that’s about it.

On the specific question of blogs, there are 101 reasons for sticking one on a website – they’re good for giving people in the organisation a voice, they can be a dumping ground for press announcements (or smaller bits of news), they can help with SEO and all sorts of other things. In a nutshell – define success, look for others achieving that success, work out what they’re doing and then do something similar.

As for the second question, that’s outside my remit but my uneducated answer would be ‘yes’. It’d be interesting to trace referral traffic from newspaper websites to arts organisations over time (it’s always a lot less than you’d think but is it going up or down?).

ROI, using social media to measure intrinsic impact

See above for why this is tricky. I’ve not got access to the ‘return’ part of the equation. In some cases I can’t even guess at what kind of return these organisations are looking for.

I am interested in what really is the most ‘useful’ online data and what stats indicate real success.

Tools that arts organisations can use for measuring their digital work. Also on benchmarking / measuring digital success.

This I can do, although you might find that I chip away at it post by post. I’ve actually been working on a model for identifying the most useful digital metrics for an arts organisation based on a set of organisational aims and objectives. I’ve got quite a long way, so it might see the light of day at some point.

In each post I’ll always say which tools I’m using and I might keep a list of them somewhere too.

I’m interested in hearing about examples of organisations doing interesting work.

Certainly, I’ll flag up examples where I can. For instance, the last post I wrote showed some unglamorous but shrewd PPC work by The Roundhouse.

The Dollars.

I like this request a lot. Unfortunately it’s not something I’ve got access to across the board. Oh, the fun I could have if I did.

Anything that helps me better understand and utilise Google Analytics would be a bonus. Also insights into what type of digital / social media content seems to engage arts audiences the most would be interesting.

Interaction and conversation / marketing balance

Hopefully I’ll flag up a few useful things with Google Analytics, although again, it’s something I’ll chip away at post by post.

On the interaction/marketing front, I might look at something along these lines with Twitter, although it’s so much easier to do if you’ve got admin access to the accounts in question. If anyone can recommend a good tool/approach that doesn’t require you to be an admin (and doesn’t cost the earth) then please do let me know, otherwise I’ll have a look around myself.

Small fish competing in a big sea of their friends. :)

Well, the organisations in my sample group are what you’d call medium to large, but the overall lessons from each post will most likely apply to organisations of any size. In truth, they’d apply to any other sector, I just happen to be most interested in helping and contributing (in my own way) to the arts and culture sector.

The other thing to note is that plenty of the big organisations are either still trying to work out what to do or are tripping over their own feet trying to achieve anything of any worth. There are a lot of benefits to being the smaller fish in this area and the playing field’s never been more level.

Estimating demand for arts organisations’ PPC advertising

In my earlier post about arts organisations spending their PPC budget on brand keywords I said there was good evidence to show it was a smart move. However, I also said that assumptions should be tested and there might be reasons for not doing it. To give one reason:

High demand may have pushed the price of the keyword out of the range of their bidding (it happens where there’s a strong secondary market for an organisation’s tickets, for example).

I said that I would look at this in a later post. So here it is.

Google AdWords comes with two very handy tools:

  • Traffic estimator. Give it a keyword and this tool will give you an indication of how much you’re likely to pay per click and how many clicks you might get per day.
  • Keyword tool. This gives an indication of the competition for a given term (ie to what extent other people are bidding for it) as well an estimate of the number of monthly searches for that term (both globally and restricted to the UK).

Using these tools, can we find out how much demand is there for arts organisations’ branded keywords? Yes we can.

Findings

I put the names of the 100 arts organisations in my sample group into both those tools. I also set very high maximum bids and daily budgets so as to max out the various estimates. The results are in the table below, which I’ve sorted by cost per click:

Data was collected on 16 March 2013.

Before I go on, I should point out that the numbers here need to be taken with a good pinch of salt. They’re estimates and indications, rather than anything more solid.

Thoughts and observations

So what does this information tell us? Well, first of all, we can see that most of the organisations in my group should be able to afford their brand keywords under a Google Grants allocation. For the uninitiated, Google gives a free AdWords budget to qualifying not-for-profits and lets them bid up to $2 (or about £1.30) per keyword.

In fact, even where the cost per click (CPC) is above £1.30, there’s a good chance the other organisations’ ads would show up if they were to bid at or below the £1.30 level. That’s because competition for these keywords is shown to be low across the board.

The reason that the level of competition and the average cost per click are low for these keywords is that it’s not really worth lots of people buying them up. The reason for that is that you’d only buy them if you had a way of making a profit from people searching with that term. With many of these organisations doing their own ticketing (usually without affiliate deals for third parties) the result is that there’s no competition out there.

In this sector, if you see a keyword with a high CPC it’s often down to competition between ticket agents, ticket resellers or companies that are selling travel, hotel and ticket packages. You also tend to see much more competition around the names of a production than around the name of the venue. Put the names of some West End productions into the traffic estimator tool, for example.

In fact, I found quite a good example to illustrate what I’m talking about. The band Atoms For Peace are playing at The Roundhouse later this year and the search results ‘atoms for peace london‘ currently tell quite a story:

atoms for peace london - Google Search

In the screenshot above, you can see that The Roundhouse doesn’t show up at the top of the organic search results for the term I entered, trumped by sites deemed by Google to be more relevant. Fair enough, so The Roundhouse have used AdWords to jump to the top of the page and snag potential ticket buyers. A smart move, depending on the CPC they’re paying and the margin they make on tickets (or the lifetime value of the ticket buyer whose data they collect as part of a transaction).

You can also see that Viagogo and StubHub have bought ads. They’re likely to be bidding more than The Roundhouse, which is why they appear higher up. Still, the cost should be more than covered by the commission they charge on transactions.

Compare that with the search results for ‘roundhouse‘:

roundhouse - Google Search

Nobody but The Roundhouse themselves are advertising on that one, because they’re really the only people likely to gain from that kind of traffic. After all, if someone buys any of the tickets on their site then it’s a good result for them. On the other hand, a ticket resellers might not necessarily have something to every person who wants to visit that venue.

I should point out that the Roundhouse are a client but I’ve had nothing to do with their PPC campaigns.

On a related note, you can see that lots of people seem to be searching for keywords relating to The Place, The Drum, Sound and Music, The Junction, Unicorn, National Theatre and Watershed. Of course, it’s because those are also generic terms (no offence) but the good news is that nobody’s that interested in bidding for them, so competition and prices are still low.

Is this information useful?

Interesting as it is from an outsiders point of view, if you’re one of these organisations then no, it’s not especially useful. There’s not much to be gained from looking at other organisations in this way and you’ll get much more useful information from your own AdWords account (especially when connected to Google Analytics).

However, it’s useful to know about those two keyword tools when researching what you should spend your PPC budget on. There’s also some interesting sector-wide info here if you’re into that kind of thing.

Quick note: before I write the next post in this series (which will probably be about YouTube) I’m going to send out the first Arts Analytics email newsletter. It’s FREE and it’ll have some nice extras in it so join everyone else on the mailing list here. Oh, and share this post with folks – they’ll be impressed you made it to the end.