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By James Kelly, November 27, 2009

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Are you looking to bring your organisation’s online performance to a new level?

Looking to harness the power applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Analytics, WordPress & Twitter to better engage with your audiences?

Would you like expert guidance to assist you along the way?

Arts Audiences is pleased to announce details of the New Media Mentoring Scheme, in which experts from a variety of organisations offer their time, for free, to mentor arts organisations seeking to build relationships with new and existing audiences online. 

Individuals from 6 organisations will be mentored in this scheme (RTÉ Publishing kindly offering to provide mentoring to three), and participating organisations will produce case studies at the end of the mentoring, to share lessons learnt with the wider arts community.

For more information about the mentors, suitable projects, the workings of the scheme, how to apply etc., please click here!

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By James Kelly, November 3, 2009

Sinead Mac Manus, originally from Dublin,  is a London based creative business consultant and trainer.

A regular contributor to the London Theatre Blog, she’s worked in management in a number of art organisations, including Frantic Assembly.

Of interest to Arts Audiences readers will be posts she has written outlining how to get going with a wordpress website. It’s actually very easy, and in these posts, she lays it all out very clearly;

How to start a wordpress site – part 1

How to start a wordpress site – part 2

In another post, Sinead gives a simple introductory explanation of how Theatre companies can use social media.

If people want to be kept up to date with the rest of the series – blogging is next – they can subscribe by RSS and email.

Finally worth mentioning that she has also set up a website called startatheatrecompany.com which provide a series of training modules for those looking to set up a theatre company, giving practical advice on business plans, budgeting, strategy as well as on audience development, marketing, and all that jazz!

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By James Kelly, September 29, 2009

Unsure of where, to put, the comma?

Wondering how to use the term prime minister in a sentence ? (according to the Guardian style sheet, we should “write Gordon Brown, the prime minister, said … ” not “prime minister Gordon Brown said”; never use the American English style “prime minister Brown”).

For those seeking to deliver their content clearly and correctly, there are guidelines available, and examples of larger style guides that can be a starting point in creating your organisation’s own style checklists:

The Elements of Style: William Strunk’s overview of plain English style and rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.

BBC News Style Guide (PDF, 276KB)

Guardian Style Guide – the newspaper’s relatively long A-Z of style.

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By James Kelly,

This is the first of a number of posts arising out of the Audiences 2.0 seminars, to remind course attendees of what was covered by Aileen O’Toole, and to provide a resource to those who couldn’t make it along.

Google’s aim is to sell us advertising, and being the enlightened organisation they are, they have given us a number of tools to help us realise how best to to spend our money, when we do buy their advertising.

However these tools are free, and in fact we can do a great deal with them to improve our websites, without parting with a penny. Over the coming months, posts on this site will go into use of these tools in greater detail, and within the context of organisations working in the arts. In the meantime, here are links to some of their free tools;

Google Analytics
Free, powerful and flexible website metrics – when you know how to use them.

Google Keywords
Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas for your website – when you figure out what words are most expensive in your area of operation, you can include these in the text of your website, in order to make your site more attractive to search engines.

Google Maps
Embed a Google Map of your location on your website, and you can add your organisation to Google Maps. Inclusion of a google map in your site can help bump your site up in the rankings.

Google Pagerank tools
Example of a Firefox add-on that displays the Google Pagerank of pages in your browser, including those on your own website.

Google Webmaster tools
Google Webmaster tools provides a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. It can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share information with Google to help improve your site’s search visibility. Two key features of the Google webmaster tools are:

Submitting a Sitemap – this can help Google learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.

Specifying your preferred domain – this tells Google which URL to use when indexing your site.

Feedburner
FeedBurner’s services allow publishers who already have a feed to improve their understanding of and relationship with their audience. Once you have a working feed, you can run it through FeedBurner and realize a whole new set of benefits.

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By James Kelly, September 16, 2009

Over the past week of seminars, a number of people wanted to know about RSS feeds and how you can make the most out of them.

For my own personal use, I use google reader, but there are others. My google reader account collates news from a variety of sites which I can access in the one place, rather than visiting 10 or 20 different sites.

To explain it however, the simplest thing to do is link into a couple of films which explain it well.

Here is a 90 second film from the google site explaining it all;

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if you’d like a more detailed explanation, this is good;

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I mentioned above that for personal use, I use google reader. In addition you can also use the RSS feature to bring content into your website. Looking at this particular site, you can see on the right hand side of the page that we have live feeds from the Arts Council and from Temple Bar Cultural Trust. These update automatically, so once I bring them into the layout of the site, the updates all happen without me having to do anything.

If you select suitable RSS feeds to come into your site, it can be a win-win feature. On one hand, it allow you as web publisher to offer your visitors information that it up to date and relevant to their interests.

On the other hand, it also can help bring traffic to the websites of other stakeholders (funders, kindred organisations etc), who hopefully in turn will reciprocate with featuring RSS feeds from your site into theirs.