I’ll be at Cloudforce NYC Wednesday studying all of Salesforce’s offerings including anything new that Radian6 might be presenting.   There are so many different offerings in the afternoon that it’s challenging to choose which sessions are the best to attend.

Web Journal

Read a great post on how to set up social analytics enablement for Google Analytics at HyperArts. And, perhaps, a wave of the future is the development of “personal analytics”, where all trackable personal activities are aggregated into a dashboard, as shown in the following post.   Another post warns how easy to lie and mislead people with statistics (I’m sure that approach is used a lot in politics – ha!).

Did you know there are 5 types of “Social Proof”? I think of Social Proof as evidence that something is the right thing to do based on what others are doing.  Examples of Social Proof include:

“….a restaurant increased sales of specific dishes by 13-20% just by highlighting them as “our most popular items”.  SP also works on your subconscious – it’s the reason why comedy shows often use a laugh track or audience; people actually laugh more when they can hear other people laughing.”

“…. Klout identifies people who are topical experts on the social web. Klout invited 217 influencers with high Klout scores in design, luxury, tech and autos to test-drive the new Audi A8.  These influencers sparked 3,500 tweets, reaching over 3.1 million people in less than 30 days – a multiplier effect of over 14,000x.”

But I didn’t see anything new to say about Social Proof, except it is a strong factor in decision-making.

I am in full agreement with the Path to Meaningful Social Web Analytics post by Scot Wheeler posted at iMedia Connection and the ideas expressed are similar to what I expressed in my book.

“…. Thus, while the first generation of social media measurement allowed PR to gain more granular insight (and entry) into public conversations about the brand, it did so with what was typically a non-representative sample of a company’s overall market, without verifiable means of segmentation of the sample population, and with meta-data derived from qualitative tools like sentiment engines that were highly inaccurate.

Did you know there is a new platform for Museum Analytics? Last week I was looking at Heardable.com and wondering if it could compare a few museums in NYC – but you know what,  while I’d still like to do that study, with Museum-Analytics.org, I can compare several sites (museums) at one time.  Museum Analytics is the creation of INTK, a Netherlands based company that researches and develops online strategies that reflect Art, Technology and Society.

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Here’s a report on the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has mostly diagnostic information on tweets, Facebook posts and engaging content in both channels.  But Museum Analytics includes other gems such as actual museum attendance (see below) for The Metropolitan (and other museums).  I suppose one might be able to compare the growth of social media around a museum to the growth of attendance at the museum to observe the correlation.

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I also like the fact that the creators of Museum Analytics are interested in Open Data, Open Data API’s and Microformats to gather the data used to compare museums.

“…We would like to instigate the use of open data and open standards. Do you know a museum with an open API or using microformats? Please let us know, we would be interesting in expanding Museum Analytics to include other type of information. ”

“…The information that is now being collected on a daily basis has been previously published in a scattered manner for several years. Some of the references that directly or indirectly have led to the development of Museum Analytics are listed here:

• The Art Newspaper yearly publishes attendance numbers of the most visited museums.
• Maxwell L. Anderson has published in 2004 Metrics of Success in Art Museums.
• The Indianapolis Museum of Art publishes daily numerical data in their dashboard.
• At the Walker Art Center a tool developed to aggregate data from google analytics.
• Sean Redmond publishes about museums popularity on Facebook and Twitter.
• At Smithsonian, their web and New Media strategy is publicly discussed.
• Culture24 has published a report about popularity and engagement online.
• Jesse Ringham has published Tate Social Media Communication Strategy 2011–12.
• Dutch Art Map lists infrastructures for contemporary visual arts in the Netherlands.”

There certainly is a lot of data to dig into here! Wow!!

I also really like the combination of several types of information, the Twitter followers for each museum, Facebook Likes, and Web Traffic (visitors), along with the aforementioned actual attendance numbers in person.

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I think many of these metrics aren’t that tightly correlated, such as MOMA’s leading number of Twitter followers and Facebook Likes yet the website visited the most wasn’t MOMA, but the Metropolitan.   But what about actual attendance?  The Met had close to double MOMA’s visits in 2010.   It’s true the Met is much bigger than MOMA, but it’s also true MOMA is much more aggressive using Social Media, and yet, depending on what goals you are looking at, or how you want decide success, The Metropolitan Museum wins over MOMA, hands down, where it counts (again, if you want to look at it that way).

MOMA visits in 2010 = 3.13 Million Visitors

MET visits in 2010 = 5.2 Million Visitors

In fact, if you want to get right down to it – the Louvre, which isn’t leading in any of the social media indicators, had far more visitors than any other museum (8.5 million visitors in 2010), period.

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And while I was muttering to myself the words “…too bad they don’t have any information on shows and special exhibitions at the museums…” guess what I ran into?
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Of course, and speaking of courses, all of this becomes much more important just now, besides the fact of my background in the Arts, besides being an Analyst (which isn’t as weird a blend as it sounds) as I embark on teaching a course at Rutgers School of the Arts on the Intersection of Social Media and The Arts.

You know me as an Analyst – but in this context, my approach will be unique, yet build upon material in place and adapted for the intersection of the Arts (in the widest sense of disciplines that fall under the process of creative ideation, regardless of the medium).

Social Media doesn’t (as the Museum Analytics site clearly demonstrates) always provide immediate solutions to marketing and branding problems. ……

For all MOMA’s innovative moves towards Social Media adoption (there are many, btw), tthey aren’t the leaders in attendance, by far, though they had a few top exhibitions last year.   Still, exposure to Social Media with the context of The Arts, offers a whole new set of questions that Artists and Art Institutions probably never asked themselves before (because they could not get the kind of information they have now – except the actual attendance numbers).

What I believe this course I teach will do, perhaps for the first time (judging from what I have heard) is lead to an awareness and leveraging of new solutions for my students.

Yes, I’m very excited.