managing online communities

Liv Parker

Sorry - it's been a while since I've posted anything on here. During the while, I attended a Nancy White workshop and met other online community managers and heard about woes and throes of setting up, and managing an online network. Here are some notable links:
http://www.communityspark.com/how-to-build-an-online-community/
http://blog.angelaconnor.com/

I also met Alison Milchalk who runs the huge parenting site, Essential Baby http://ow.ly/Imej - there's a facebook group who meets regularly, with the next roundtable meeting planned in Canberra in 2010.

We have just done a survey of the culturemap users (thanks for filling in if you did!) and I was not really surprised at people listing "Facebook" as their primary source of arts and cultural information.

Word-of-mouth from trusted sources vs. eNews from producers/arts organisations?

Have you had a look at some of the arts-specific social networking sites?:

• MyArtInfo - http://www.myartinfo.com/
• MyArtSpace - http://www.myartspace.com/
• Artween - http://www.artween.com/home/

Or the site Charles Saatchi launched for showcasing student art works: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/stuart

See also Eliot Van Buskirk's Wired article from 5 October, 'Labels Emphasize Artist-Specific Social Networks, Websites'

Don’t expect your favorite band to delete its MySpace page any time soon, but the general social network is no longer the latest word in fan outreach. Artists and their labels increasingly see dedicated websites as destinations in their own right, for fans who want to get close to a band, together, without distractions from general content and other people.

The idea of artists running their own sites is almost as old as the web itself, but advances in tools have made it possible for labels to run full-featured offerings without relying on networks like MySpace — in some cases even creating their own social networks where all conversations center around a single artist.

Full article at: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/labels-emphasize-artist-specific-...

From a very informative site called mashable.com

This is an example of how an artist uses twitter to promote her work online as well as some creative ways to use twitter: http://mashable.com/2009/02/23/twitter-artists/

Liv Parker