The Guardian Culture Professionals Network

The Guardian Culture Professionals Network launched this morning, having been announced a few weeks back via their Twitter account. In their own words:

This is a place where professionals from all departments in arts and heritage organisations – including audience development, communications, education, fundraising, finance, logistics, management and policy – can come to share advice and inspiration. We will combine the best comment from around the web with fresh content commissioned in-house to cater to your needs and interests.

As far as ‘combining the best comment from around the web’ is concerned, I was chuffed to hear that they’d picked up on the article about online collaboration that I wrote for the Arts Marketing Association’s blog. Not only have they’ve reposted it but they’ve also made it one of the editors’ picks.

On top of that, I’ve also been asked to chip in to the first of their live chats, which will be a discussion of creative collaboration in a time of cuts. That’ll be at midday on Friday 11 November.

Guardian Culture Professionals

Where are the stars of Facebook?

Just a quick one.

A few years back there were stories in the papers (accurate or not) about people/bands/whatever coming to wider prominence having built an audience via their Myspace accounts (think Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys, Tila Tequila and so on).

Meanwhile on Wikipedia there’s a whole list of YouTube personalities featuring plenty of people who have used the platform to find fame and, in some cases, fortune. There are comedians, actors, musicians, beauty experts and people selling blenders.

So what about Facebook? There have been plenty of causes and campaigns that have gained traction there, but I can’t think of any individuals (or bands) who’ve translated big followings into recording contracts, book deals or TV series. Have I missed something?

Links for 2 November 2011

To kick things off, there are two reports that I’ve flicked through and decided need some proper attention. First up is Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation (PDF) from The James Irvine Foundation. Frankly, they had me at this diagram:

Audience Involvement Spectrum

I was also fascinated by The Arts Ripple Report that Nina Simon blogged about:

Here’s how the project worked: researchers worked with small focus groups to understand their associations with arts and culture organizations and developed several framing arguments for public support of the arts. Then, they interviewed 400 people by phone and online, presenting them with a short framing argument (80-120 words), followed by a series of open-ended questions intended to determine how memorable the argument was, how it influenced their perception of the public value of the arts, and how likely it was to inspire action

Leaning back towards the tech side of things, Wieden + Kennedy’s post on Why We’re Not Hiring Creative Technologists started a fair few conversations. As did Steve Yegge’s unintentional thinking/ranting out loud. I’m still not quite sure to make of the Photos of Sarah article in The Awl and the post that I’ve brought up in conversation with others more than any other has been Bobbie Johnson’s one about failure.

Arts/digital links

Other links

Some apps and services