The Birdbath: Digital Tips & Trends, Winter 2023
Greetings from The Birdbath! This newsletter from Bower Blue takes a look at digital tips & trends impacting the visual arts & design communities.
Happy winter, everyone! Or, whatever sorry state is passing for “winter” this year in New York. Is it weird to wish winter was colder and snowier? We’ll tell you what’s not weird: controlling your own media presence. In a constantly shifting world where AI is pretending to threaten to take over our livelihoods (and our love lives!), it is more important than ever to control your own story. In this edition of The Birdbath, we will take a look at three big, related stories impacting 2023.
Thanks for being here. Let us know what’s on your mind.
#1. WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING, ANYWAY?
Haven’t you been paying any attention to The Birdbath? It’s really what we’ve been talking about all along: creating your own content (usually digital, these days, although creating your own printed material like a glossy magazine or a scrappy zine also counts) for the purposes of telling and controlling your own story, towards whatever your aim may be: increased foot-traffic, more sales, more donations, education, or other mission-driven goals. Content marketing–or “owned media”–is usually contrasted with “earned media” such as coverage by independent media outlets. However, we at Bower Blue feel strongly that a content marketing strategy should work hand-in-hand with a thoughtful and targeted public relations strategy. We often rely on our partners at Blue Medium to craft effective, bespoke communications strategies for clients, while each of us also work independently and with other partners. For a solid overview of real world content marketing strategy, we recommend this guide from the pros over at Hubspot Marketing.
#2. INSTAGRAM DOES WHAT KIM SAYS
Was anyone really surprised by this? Remember six months ago when Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner told Instagram “Make Instagram Instagram again (stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends”? The Washington Post even weighed in the next day to tell us, “Instagram knows you don’t like its changes. It doesn’t care.” Well, we are here to tell you folks, INSTAGRAM CARES! 🙄 In January, Instagram announced they might have overpushed videos and have been working on balancing that out with more photos. This is great news not just for those of you who miss Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but also for the Instagram-obsessed Art World. Read more about the shift on Social Media Today.
#3. HELP FROM OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS
A lot of ink is being spilled these days about the coming AI-apocalypse. We don’t think we need to bore you with an exhaustive list, and instead we will sit back and anxiously await the arrival our first copy of Total Crap, the first magazine written entirely by AI. But as our grandfathers used to say, If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. How can we actually harness the power of AI in our workflow? One application we are tracking and liking these days is for creating social media content: a task that can seem both at once like rote drudgery and overwhelming in its scope. Over on The Art Newspaper’s always good Insta’gratification blog, Steven Franklin, digital engagement officer at the UK National Archives, pens an excellent guest post on Five ways ChatGPT could help the culture sector create social media content. Ready to dive in already? Check out Buffer’s new AI-assistant tool.
CLIENT UPDATES!
We mentioned last time that are thrilled to be working with the Jack & Shanaz Langson Institute & Museum of California Art at the University of California, Irvine. Now, we can share with you the first of a series of videos that we are producing for them. The assignment here is to create a series of videos, integrated with, and promoted by, a comprehensive digital promotion campaign to tell the story of the Langson and introduce it to its diverse audiences. In this first video, we hear from Kim Kanatani, Museum Director, and Kevin Appel, artist and Chair of the Department of Art at the UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, as they introduce us to the background and mission of the Langson.
Bower Blue produces digital strategy & content for galleries, museums, & cultural nonprofits. (Take a look at some of our clients.)
Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for updates, and see more of our productions and other work on Vimeo. And of course we’re always up for saying “Hello.”
