All posts by Tools

Haven’t quite got a grip of the Eastern European art scene yet? If your after a quick fix to feign insider knowledge look no further than the Spike ART GUIDE EAST. This brand new publication provides a briefing on Contemporary Art and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe divulging the secrets of the cities’ art scenes. After a browse through this glossy you’ll soon know the places where art takes place, the cafés and restaurants where people meet, the bars and clubs…etc. Volume one deals with Belgrade, Bratislava, Bucharest, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague, Sarajevo, Sofia, Vienna and Zagreb. The specialised travel guide presents the contemporary art scenes of these selected Central and Eastern European cities or regions. A short and compact text on the (art) historical development of the individual cities is followed by recommendations regarding galleries, museums, culture and art institutions, architecture, fashion, design, theatre and music. Short interviews with artists, curators, critics, gallery owners, collectors and creatives on-site provide an insight into the present situation, development and future of the respective scenes.

Beautiful democracy in action thanks to UserVoice.com. Get a pool of your users (or staff, or whoever) to suggest improvements to your service and then vote on the idea they want to see implemented. See at a glance the will of the people who really count and then decide what to do with it.

A really neat tool, and up to 100 users in the freebie version.

From Boxer Creative.

“…Watch as curators, librarians, and special guests, such as chef Lidia Bastianich and pianist Margaret Leng Tan, share their passion for the treasures of our remarkable collections. Travel the Spuyten Duyvil Creek in 1777, hear music recorded 100 years ago on wax cylinders, marvel at rare 1920s Japanese comics and other pop ephemera, enter the turnstile at the 193940 New York Worlds Fair, hit the road with the Beats, and witness how photographers have engaged the world from the 19th century up to the present-day work of photojournalist Stephen Dupont…”

View here (requires iTunes to be installed)

We stumbled across Lodestar Theatre Company’s campaign to help save the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival as a result of their use of targetted Google Adwords. As ever, the skill is in the headline writing – one self-made guru we know recommends writing up to 30 versions of a headline for the same piece (benefits-orientated, of course!) before deciding on a shortlist of 3-5. Google Adwords can then be used to compare the impact of each headline in the marketplace, before pushing ahead in confidence with the most persuasive.

Lodestar Theatre Company

Share visualisations to help analyse data buried in spreadsheets, tables or text. Simply upload your data to many-eyes.com, and let their tools do all the work. Sharing and analysing the data as a group may help you spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

To me, the value of many brand agencies lies in their ability to distill difficult and often complex organisations into the simplest of words. This simplicity is the holy grail of consumer-facing communication; it doesn’t mean dumbing down, it means straightforward clarity for those unfamiliar with the message.

One popular tool of branding agencies is the Brand Wheel (or ‘Brand Essence Wheel’), which attempts to uncover the simple words through a systematic process. It works best with a mixed group of people who are relatively familiar with the brand or product in question.

Work from the outside in, firstly going around the outer wheel and listing single words that come into mind for each of the four questions (what it does, how I would describe it, how it makes me feel, how it makes me look). Second, go into the middle wheel and again work through the four questions, distilling your original words from the outer wheel into fewer (ideally 3-5 per quadrant). This then provides the basis for the inner wheel, where you summarise and prioritise the words from the middle wheel in fewer words. These words form the basis of your brand proposition.

Take this brand proposition as the building blocks for your communications, whether verbal, written or graphical. How can everything you do reflect these core words, and in turn provide a very focussed, very simple and very effective message to the consumer?

A great tool for making sure your key marketing messages say what you want them to say. Wordle makes a visual word cloud from the most common words found in the text you provide – enter a block of text, your web page feed or a delicious feed. The largest words are the most common ones.

Here’s what we get from inputting IntelligentNaivety.com’s homepage:

Say, for example, we wanted to aim higher on the Google rankings for the word ‘entrepreneurship’ – the word isn’t appearing very much in the cloud, meaning that we use it infrequently on our current homepage. It is therefore probably worth using that particular word more often in our posts.. whilst obviously taking care not to force it too much!

Good for us is the diversity of words – we’re a news and info blog afterall – but having so many words probably isn’t so good for a basic introduction to who we are/what we do. Keeping the ‘about us’ page simple is probably therefore well worth the effort, and the Wordle cloud should reflect that. We could even use it as a basic ‘before’ and ‘after’ test for writing our messages.

Best of all it’s completely free! Have a play at www.wordle.net

To understand the many emotional influences impacting upon your users, emotional geography – involving mapping whilst exploring the connections and opportunities therein – provides a consumer research tool that can be just as useful as physical mapping of culture facilities.

We have already mentioned the role that geography plays for cultural entrepreneurs when it comes to implementing new ideas. Whether shared heritage, ‘owing’ your hometown, or just the close association wih self-identity, each of these presents a strong motivation.

Furthermore, there is also a lot to be said for the importance of ‘local’ for cultural consumers. Whilst major, national brands may be internationally recognisable and draw in the culture tourist, and thereby prove more attractive to corporate sponsors, often the local museum or gallery can elicit an equally emotionally-charged connection with users.

‘Get lost’

New York may perhaps lend itself more naturally to emotional bonds than some other cities, but a project created by the New Museum (NY) could provide a useful model for consumer research and connections.

‘Get Lost’ is a New Museum production providing a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw it as a map, “bringing together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present and future”.

The results provide a series of personal journeys through the city, creating a starting point for discussion of shared and alternative experiences in the commonality of the streets.

Mapping users’ emotional connections

For other culture institutions, replicating this project could create a model to help to provide useful contextual consumer research. In particular, it enables an understanding of the place of your institution, in socio-psychological terms, in relation to other places of importance in the city. Taken from an artist’s perspective, or perhaps replicating the process with local residents, it helps enable a more detailed understanding of how your insitution fits with other influences in the locality, as seen through their eyes.

Two broad benefits from this could be viewed as follows: (1) better understanding the emotional connections and influences upon users, in order to better provide for their needs going forward; and (2) placing the institution as one component in a complex web of overlapping emotional connections, thereby providing more chances to identify entrepreneurial opportunities, and the right connecting spaces for these.