Despite the overcast weather, my husband and I headed to Poplar Beach with our dog. She’s really loved the beach the first couple of times we took her (the second time way too much… she went running down the shore and almost didn’t come back), so we’d been wanting to make it out again. I thought that the beach would be packed on Memorial Day, but with rainy weather and fog coming in, it was nicely sparse. Elphie found an adorable Havanese puppy to play with and tired herself out nicely.

Kate Nash – Girl Talk

I discovered Kate Nash a few years ago while in the UK. I heard “Mouthwash” on the radio and thought ‘YES! This is everything I’m thinking all the time.” When I saw that Nash was playing in San Francisco, I bought tickets as soon as they went on sale. Good call, as the show sold out. Saturday night, I went to see her at The Chapel and it was, without exaggeration, the best live show I’ve ever been to (where I wasn’t friends with the band, at least). Between the gorgeous venue, the super-excited crowd, and the perfect set list mix of old songs and new, it was everything I could have asked for. Add to that the fact that Kate Nash is just a genuine, conversational, wonderful artist who really connects with her audience and seemed truly excited to be there and it was a recipe for magic. Seriously, go download Girl Talk now and if she’s touring anywhere near you buy tickets. You will not be disappointed.

The Great Gatsby (Music from Baz Luhrmann’s Film)

Back when I used to write bad screenplays, I had three filmmaking idols: Quentin Tarantino, Richard Curtis, and Baz Luhrmann. Those three know how to work music into their films like no other filmmakers today. While I still haven’t seen The Great Gatsby (I’ve got a date to see it tonight, don’t worry), I had to go ahead and download the Jay-Z produced soundtrack. I was not sorry and the songs have been on constant rotation in my car (and my head) ever since. My favorite tracks: the 20′s inspired Emeli Sande cover of “Crazy in Love” and the moody take on “Back to Black” from Andre 3000 and Beyonce.

A couple of really exciting things happened recently that resulted in me creating a LOT of content. I started working part time as a community contractor for Ning, helping out with content at their flagship blog, as well as other community outreach. I was also approached by Business in the Heart of Gainesville Magazine to start writing a monthly column on social media. My first article went up in the May issue (which you can view in full online). So all in all, April was a pretty darn great month. Since I slacked on sharing the things I wrote at the time, here they are, all in one convenient place:

Ning – Cultivating Community

How Attribution Helps Build Community – Raising awareness of the importance of sourcing and attribution are pet projects of mine. Partly because of my deeply ingrained sense of justice (if I have to follow the rules, everyone should have to follow the rules). But mostly because of the effect that sourcing and attribution can have on a community – namely, a great one.

Social Media Responds to Tragedy with Tact – The social media response to Monday’s tragic Boston Marathon bombings was, for the most part, one of tact, community, and cautiousness and shows the power that social media and online community can have in times of crisis. While there was the inevitable brand misstep, the majority of conversations happening around social media communities were positive ones.

Do You Tweet Chat? – If you’re on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with hashtags. Hashtags group discussions around an easily searchable keyword. Did you know that you can participate in regular chats with other community managers and influencers on certain hashtags? Even between scheduled chats, these hashtags are great places to find notable articles and conversations.

7 Tips for Developing Your Community Guidelines – It’s the boring part of developing a new community: setting the Dos and Don’ts. While Community Guidelines will be an ever growing part of your community, getting some basics down will not only give users a clear idea of what’s right and wrong, but it can also go a long way toward developing your community culture.

6 Curation Tools for Community Managers – There’s no denying that content is king online, but trying to create all that content on your own? It’s exhausting and, frankly, boring for your readers and community members. Using content curation tools is a great way to find fresh content to share, build on, and even allow your community to join in on the editorial process with. Here are the six tools I find the most useful and powerful.

Business Magazine

4 Questions that Determine Your Social Media Strategy – Facebook, Twitter, Vine, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, YouTube, Pinterest… just trying to figure out where to get started in social media can make a business owner or marketing director dizzy. And if you’re not confused by it, then the amount of time necessary to set up and post to social media daily seems daunting. These four questions will help you figure out what’s worth your time.

TechSoup hosted the San Francisco Online Community Meetup which recently featured Marc A. Smith and his talk “Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL.” Marc is with the Connected Action Group, which uses social methodology to gain insights into patterns of communities.

Along with an international team at the Social Media Research Foundation, they’ve developed NodeXL, which turns invisible networks and connections into spreadsheets and graphs. Marc’s talk was fantastically insightful and full of ways that community managers can use social network analysis to gain greater insights into and grow their communities.

Read the rest at the TechSoup Blog.

… Livefyre, that is.

After seeing how awesome the Livefyre commenting system is on other blogs, I decided to switch over. The next time you comment on one of my posts, you’ll see a few little differences, but don’t worry… you’ll soon grow to love it, I’m sure.

The Livefyre comments that I’ve installed will allow you to choose the way you comment: through your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account; by creating a Livefyre account that can be used all over the web (including most major tech blogs); or as a guest, using the same info that you would normally have put in.

I think you’re really going to like it. Go ahead and try it if you want to check it out.

Lots of big news to announce soon, which somewhat explains the lack of Wednesday Wonderful and This Week in Links posts. Wednesday Wonderful will be back tomorrow.

Until then, enjoy this pic from the Mountain Winery ampitheatre. Some friends and I went up there for a wine tasting after Easter Brunch on that gorgeous day.

And yes, I have caved to Instagram now that I have a phone with a good camera. I am but a sheep.

The February talk for the San Francisco Online Community Meetup, hosted by TechSoup, was on Arts Organizations using social media to engage existing communities and reach new audiences. This meetup was also a collaboration with Emerging Arts Professionals. The panel included:

Dan Meagher, Director of Marketing, Diablo Ballet of Walnut Creek: The Web Ballet project is using Twitter to crowdsource the first ballet work made from the internet. You can read more about the Web Ballet in The Huffington Post.
Maura Lafferty, an independent communications consultant working with classical musicians and performing organizations in San Francisco, CA.
Danielle Siembieda, former Community Engagement and Special Projects Manager for ZERO1: The Art & Technology Network, where she was in charge of all things social media, audience engagement, technology research, and trend forecasting.
Carly Severn, Digital Engagement Associate, San Francisco Ballet, who ran the ‘Nutcracker Holiday Challenge’ series of contests (Nov-Dec 2013) across Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and WordPress.

Danielle Siembieda spoke about developing the Arts Ambassador program for their recent festival. They trained a team of their fellows to act as bridges between the sometimes complicated world of art appreciation and the attendees. They acted as guides for the people who say “I just don’t get art,” both online (via the Zero1 app) and off.

Carly Severn gave an overview of how she ran the Nutcracker Holiday Challenge during the past holiday season. Foregoing Facebook as a platform for contests (partly due to its restrictive rules around contests), each challenge was was an enhancement of the participating platform. The goal of the campaign was the cement SF Ballet’s The Nutcracker as a San Francisco Holiday fixture, connecting the city, the season, and the production together in the affinity of the patron.

Maura Lafferty spoke from a slightly different perspective. As a consultant, Maura has worked with a number of organizations, determining what strategies will work best and be the most maintainable for her clients. She often deals with the tension between wanting to reach a community that’s built of both digital natives and the less tech savvy, as well as clients who are very concerned with what their ROI (return on investment) is. Getting to the root of what’s behind their concerns of ROI is something she advises in that situation. In a later discussion, an audience member pointed out that tracking of ROI from posters and traditional advertising is virtually non-existent; social media provides that tracking on a scale never before accessible to small businesses and organizations.

Dan Meagher spoke about the work that went into The Web Ballet. 132 suggestions for the ballet’s content were received from all over the world; Diablo Ballet’s job was to pare that down to seven components that comprise the ballet. The result was “Flight of the Dodo,” which premiered March 1st. One other thing that The Web Ballet and getting more involved on social media did for Diablo Ballet was to change their perspective on who their audience was, opening the doors for them to reach out to a new community.

One key takeaways for non-profit organizations is something Dan Meagher brought up early on. While we’d love for the arts to be a huge moneymaker and command a million dollar marketing budget, most arts companies (and non-profits in general) are barely scraping by. Social Media allows us to reach our patrons in direct, low-cost, and much more personal ways than ever before. We don’t need that million dollar budget to get to them through social media.

Another tip that resonated with me was to nuture your in-house talent, from Carly Severn. As the Digital Engagement Associate, Carly works closely with the marketing office and the content creators within San Francisco Ballet, allowing a back and forth exchange of ideas and content that can be used across multiple platforms.

My top three takeaways from this great session:

From Danielle Siembieda: Don’t hide your staff; your supporters want to know who’s behind the organization. A lot of the time, we’re so focused on message, message, message, that we forget to be human. That human connection resonates with your patrons (especially in non-profit organizations) as much or more than any other message you’re sending out.

From Carly Severn and Maura Laffs: Be immersed in social media and the arts, as it’s the only way to keep up your fluency. Even if you’re not actively working in an organization, stay up to date on what’s going on in your arts world. On the social media side, the social world moves so fast, with new networks and technologies popping up every day.

A simple, but profound statement from Carly Severn: in order to make an impression, your content needs to be appealing as the content from your patron’s friends and family.

Other Links:
Awesm – ROI tracking tool mentioned by Maura Lafferty – http://totally.awe.sm/
Want to check out highlighted tweets from the meetup? My storify’s got you covered.
Want to watch the whole panel? View the recording on UStream.

I’m totally backlogged from all the awesomeness that I experienced this week (Launch 2013, Her Girl Friday with Ann Friedman, and meeting, meetings, meetings), so I’ve got about 6 things to write up before I get around to This Week in Links. Look for it Sunday evening or Monday morning!

No Wednesday Wonderful today, as my brain has been set to LAUNCH. In case you haven’t seen my twitter barrage, I’ve been at the Launch Festival 2013 all week. There will be a huge post (or many little ones) with my picks and thoughts from the conference coming later this week, but if you want to catch up, here’s where you can follow myself and all the other news from Launch:

Epilogger (one of the companies launching here!) coverage pulls together all the streams in a beautiful platform.

The Launch2013 YouTube Channel is posting videos as they become available. Or you can watch live at http://festival.launch.co/live

And, as always, you can follow me on Twitter: @ThatGirlCrystal

The Nicest Place on the Internet

I actually remember hearing about this ages ago, but I forget who pointed me to it, so thanks to Brit Morin for bringing it back to my attention. The concept is simple: need a hug? Go get one from the internet. You can even upload your own hugs to share with family (or the internet) and make a playlist of your favorites.

(h/t to GeekSugar via Brit Morin

Calming Manatee

It’s no secret that Manatees are my spirit animal and patronus all in one. Fun Fact: for a social studies fair in fourth grade, I made art of a manatee out of yarn and lentils. I’m not even kidding. Man, I wish I still had it. Add to that, the site runners at Calming Manatee add image descriptions (for those using screen readers) and credit the sources and I love them even more. Plus, who can’t use a Manatee pick me up some days. If you want just a randomized bit of Calming Manatee, you can also check out CalmingManatee.com.