Welcome to the Get digital! post-conference blog. We hope you enjoyed the conference and have been inspired to investigate the opportunities social media tools such as blogs and podcasts provide to communicate with your colleagues and audiences.
This temporary blog will feature images from the conference along with downloadable versions of the presentations you saw on the day. It also provides an opportunity to discuss the issues which were raised and share your views with other delegates and our speakers.
It's now 2 weeks since the Get Digital day and the one download I would find useful is still not available here.
Looking at the conference programme, I feel that the day let us down and failed to deliver what it promised. Philip Young and Stuart Bruce showed us their blogs and told us how great blogs are, how quickly information can be posted etc but did not relate this to how arts organisations can benefit in terms of reaching an audience that will then attend the venue or participate in events. As I pointed out before the coffee break - where was the evidence to show that this work encourages arts attenders? Didn't the figures suggest that the very people we would be aiming this technology at are the very ones who are staying at home in droves?
AAM did a common sense guide to email marketing which someone said was old hat now, which I find very worrying given that most arts organisations are still not doing it well.
The presentation by Chris Rushton was very interesting and I'd like to show it to our press team but what it had to do with Going Digital is beyond me, other than pointing out that we email press releases now instead of putting them in the post.
Whilst the Tenantspin and artinliverpool.com case studies could have been used to offer insights into how use of digital technology creates new audiences for the arts, neither did. They were simply presentations of what the projects are. Great projects without a doubt, but the content did not illuminate other organisations needs.
So, I didn't come away knowing how to get more people into our venue or events by using blogs or RSS. I came away with no evidence that these work for the purposes of arts organisations concerned with reaching audiences who will actually visit rather than stay at home and read about it, but I do look forward to that evidence. I'm not sure that I came away knowing "...how building and developing an online netwrk of peers, colleagues and audience members can increase traffic to your website, blog or podcast and create and develop new audiences."
In the meantime, I await the downloads - perhaps they are available on a website?
I'd be interested to know what other attenders thought.