Are you a mid-career museum, preservation, or historic site professional with a desire to change your institution and engage your community? Do you wants to learn how innovators in cultural institutions apply the tools of successful businesses, and acquire the skills of an entrepreneurial leader?

If you just answered yes and yes, consider applying to be a fellow for the First Cultural Entrepreneurship Institute at Cooperstown happening May 2-5, 2010.  According to the call for applications on the Museum Association of New York’s site, 20 fellows will be selected to receive the 3 1/2 day training, plus room and board, for only $200. The deadline to apply is March 22, 2010.

The Institute is a joint program of the Cooperstown Graduate Program and the Museum Association of New York.  Major funding was provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

For more information about how to apply, go to the Museum Association of New York’s website.

“On the business side, blogs are designed to help promote creative wares or services, and if done well, they can be an invaluable business tool.  Those who blog for business live creatively; their businesses, their personal lives, and friendships are all approached through their creative spirit and it shows in their blogs.  Whether they promote products and services through their sidebar links or talk about business in every post, their blogs are beautiful and inspiring.”

-Tara Frey, Blogging for Bliss

I just finished reading Blogging for Bliss: Crafting Your Own Online Journal:  A Guide for Crafters, Artists and Creatives by Tara Frey, and highly recommend it.  Frey covers everything from what to write about, how to choose a blogging platforms, how to customize your blog’s look, ways to increase traffic, and the basics of blogvertising.

In addition to all kinds of fantastic practical information, she also has profiles of over 50 bloggers, many whose blogs help them promote their creative businesses like:

• a stitch in dye
• Curious Sofa Diaries
• Naughty Secretary Club
• Sommer Designs
• Teresa Sheeley
• Twisted Sister

Whether you are a new, or experienced blogger, I think you’ll find something practical and/or inspiring in Blogging for Bliss to help you take your creative business blog to the next level.

You can learn more about Blogging for Bliss and Tara Frey on her blog, tara frey {typing out loud}.

My last stop is at the Inscription Rock Trading & Coffee Co. where I sit at the cozy bar and chat with its owners, Jonathan and Pam Pickens.  As I had learned that the Old School Gallery across the street is so much more than a gallery, I learned that this gift shop is so much more than a gift shop.  Inside the shop they have a small café that serves everything from cappuccinos to pastries, but then outside they have a stage and patio for outdoor performances.  I was blown away that a community of this size had a music venue!  Jonathan, a musician himself, moved from Nashville Tennessee back in 2001 to the El Morro Valley with his family.

While in Tennessee, Pam ran a similar shop and sold native gifts.  As her and Jonathan traveled back and forth across the country to get more supplies for their shop they fell in love with New Mexico and decided to relocate.  Today, many of the gifts and crafts come from the local Zuni and Navajo tribes, the Cherokees in North Carolina, and from indigenous nonprofits from around the world.

Jonathan, who is also an elementary special education teacher, tells me that they’ve had 6 shows so far at their new venue and attract people from as far as Albuquerque, Gallup, Grants, Zuni and Santa Fe.  The stage has the most beautiful backdrop with a mesa and rock cliffs, which has become the inspiration of the title of their performances “Music Beneath the Mesa.”

When I asked them about what challenges they feel entrepreneurs have in the area, several things came to mind.  Jonathan comments, “Getting supplies, even groceries, is in excess on 65 miles away, so that takes precious time out of the week.  Additionally, financing is difficult for small businesses and finding start up money.”  Pam adds, “There is the responsibility that you feel towards the community.  When you’re buying from one another it’s so much more than just a transaction, as you know that the people you’re buying from truly depend on you.”

As I wrap up my visits in El Morro, I can’t help to think how welcoming everyone has been.  This is a community that truly understands relationships and the importance of cooperation and collaboration, and they all have a vision to build the community in a sustainable and entrepreneurial way.

And, listen to a sample of Jonathan’s music by clicking on Drop In The Bucket.

As I make my way into the Ancient Way Café for lunch, I wonder if I can skip lunch and go straight to dessert as I see a listing of their homemade all organic pies.  But I’m good, I eat my lunch first and enjoy dessert with the general manager and head chef, Maqui.  I learn that Maqui was a potter for years but fell into an opportunity at the Café as he says, “I have become an artist of food and now I get to create edible glazes!”  As a long-time resident of the area, he was one of the founding board members of the El Morro Area Arts Council and understands the challenges that both the artists and community face.

As Maqui has been with the Café for several years, he said, “In the first two years I doubled revenues by creating gourmet meals utilizing local and organic ingredients, and by establishing regular hours and a dependent staff.”

Maqui comments that, “In order to be successful you have to be fresh and cutting edge and you always have to show up.”  He also believes that you always have to affect other people in your work.  He loves the constant interactions amongst the public and friends, and feels the restaurant is the community hub.

Maqui understands the need for attracting tourists and is working with Sharon, the owner of the Café and campground, to provide more options for tourists. They offer massage and reiki in one of the studios on the property and are considering building a yurt to offer weeklong yoga retreats.  They want tourists to experience the way of life, not just get a taste of it.  This is cultural entrepreneurship at work.

Maqui has some great ideas for further development of the area.  Up the road there is an old gas station for sale.  He thinks it could be a great place to turn into a local market or even a co-op.  Even though there is the farmer’s market in nearby Ramah, it’s not enough for local farmers and gardeners so they have to bring their veggies to places over 50 miles away, like Gallup, to sell.  Maqui says, “It’s all about creating and thinking outside of the box.”

As of this writing, the Anaheim Ballet Company’s YouTube Channel has 25,571 subscribers, and 885,139 channel views. It’s most popular video, Ballet: Dancers, has been viewed 5,493,785 times.

While online videos are an obvious medium to showcase a dancer, or dance company, other social networking tools can also be effective for marketing and community building. Below are a handful of blog posts with suggestions for how dancers can use social media, along with a few dance-specific social networks.

Posts

• S.T.E.P. Your Way to Social Media Success on Dance Advantage
• Share Videodances using Twitter on Move the Frame
• Dance Studio Owners: Using Social Media on 4dancers
• A New Internet and Social Media Strategy for Dancers and Dance Companies on Great Dance
• The Top Five Reasons Dance Studio Owners Should Embrace Social Media on My Dance Place

Social Networks

• Dance-Tech-Net
• DancePlug
• Movmnt Magazine Network

How have you seen dancers use social media effectively?

Flickr Image Credit: Big Range Austin Dance Festival uploaded by Andrew Baron.

It’s easy to drive right by the businesses of El Morro Valley, but you can’t miss The Old School Gallery, with its brightly colored exterior.  Several artists within the El Morro Area Arts Council established the gallery 11 years ago to find a place for local artists to display their art.  The building itself was built in 1944 and served as a one-room schoolhouse for many years.  Today, the space is used for a gallery and so much more.  Attracting people from as far as the Acoma and Laguna Pueblos the space is used for art workshops, community meetings, yoga and tai chi classes, musical performances, and youth programs.  The gallery has one staff member and the rest is volunteer-driven.  It represents artists from approximately a 50-mile radius and displays new art shows quarterly.

What I love is that here, in this small rural community, they function as a social enterprise.  The gallery incorporated as nonprofit to help bring in income but found that its income had to be diversified beyond contributions and foundation support.  So now through their programs they generate enough earned revenue to maintain the gallery.

As I talk to Paula Tripodi, the executive director of the gallery, I realize not only do I have a social entrepreneur but I have a cultural entrepreneur as well.  Paula has played the guitar since she was 10 and now she sings and writes songs too.  Initially shy about performing, she found she enjoys it as she performs at the gallery and at local festivals in such an accepting community.  She even recorded an album several years ago and is working on her next one.

As we talk about the gallery and the community she said, “Even with the gallery there is a constant challenge to get everyone’s art exposed.  Not everyone has galleries or studios, making it difficult to have regular hours to show their work.”  Additionally, things like having a website or even business cards, sound simple enough, but are lacking here to help move their art beyond El Morro.  However, one of the opportunities and something that they’re working on with the New Mexico Tourism Department is to find affordable ways to create studios along the Ancient Way Arts Trail and to have signs that show people driving by that the studios are a part of the Trail.

Paula further commented that, “Even though there aren’t many businesses in the area, we are working together to create packages and incentives for people to come and visit and make a day out of it.  For example, someone could come a see a show at The Old School Gallery, have a gourmet dinner across the street at the Ancient Way Café and then spend the night in a cabin at the campground.  The next day they could get up and get a great hike in at El Morro or El Malpais.”

They are also looking at acquiring more land to create a sculpture garden and hopefully construct another building where the programs can be held and not disrupt the gallery as much.  But this all takes resources, both human and financial.  As I mentioned earlier, much of the gallery and its programs are volunteer-driven, which can be a good and bad thing.  Lots of people have ideas but everything takes time and people often get burned out, making this an additional challenge for the community.

Foursquare is a location based social networking program you can use on your iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, or computer. People who use the program “check in” at locations such as restaurants, bars, stores, and tourist attractions. When they check in, they have the option of sharing their location with their friends on foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter.

If they want, they can also leave a “tip” about the place they are visiting. For example, if you look at the the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s page on foursquare, you’ll see that (as of this writing) 1,215 people have “checked in” (773 of them are unique visitors).

Some of the “tips” people have left about the SFMOMA include:

“Great selection of books and jewelry. Great place to buy gifts. You don’t need to purchase a museum ticket to go to the store.”

“Check out the Richard Avedon exhibit (until 11-29-09). He rocks the camera lens!”

“Head straight for the rooftop garden, stopping for some Blue Bottle coffee on the 5th floor. Admittance to the MOMA is free on the first Tuesday of every month.”

The person who has checked into a location the most is given the title of “Mayor,” which they will keep until someone else checks in more times than them.

You can also receive badges and points on foursquare. For example, ReadWriteWeb recently posted that foursquare is partnering with Zagat so that when you check into a Zagat rated restaurant with foursquare, you will receive a “Foodie” badge.

Clearly foursquare users are excited to share where they’ve been, and what to do, making it a perfect tool for the tourism industry to embrace. So, how can museums use foursquare? Here are four ideas:

1. Join

Join foursquare and search to see if your museum is listed. If not, add it.

2. Listen

Check your foursquare page on a regular basis. Notice what people are saying about your museum, and who is your mayor of the moment.

3. Share

Let your supporters know about foursquare. The Brooklyn Museum has incorporated their foursquare page into the community section of their website.

4. Reward

Foursquare will allow you to add a special feature to your venue to reward frequent foursquare visitors.

For example, the Vancouver Police Museum has a special offer for the mayor of their museum. Their foursquare page advertises:

“Show staff you’ve checked in to the Police Museum and The mayor will receive a 25% discount in the gift shop, plus free admission for themselves and a guest.”

The Brooklyn Museum also has a special offer on their foursquare page:

“If you’re our mayor on First Saturday, show the Membership desk and we’ll honor you with your very own 1st fans Membership for one year. “

Avi Kaplan (@MeshugAvi) posted a good idea on Twitter that could be used by museums with multiple branches, or in collaboration with other museums:

“Wouldn’t it be cool if @smithsonian had a @4square badge for visiting 5 different museums from their offering?”

Is foursquare going to blow up like Twitter and Facebook?  Who knows, but for a pretty minimal investment of time, you can set yourself up so that if it does, your museum will be ready.

Related posts:
Foursquare for Museums on the Museum Marketing blog.
Foursquare Signs a Deal with Zagat on the New York Times Bits blog.

Based on some web searching, and suggestions from my Facebook and Twitter pals, I’ve begun a list of organizations and groups supporting Haitian artists and artisans. I hope you’ll help me add to the list by adding more names and websites in the comments. Thanks!

Organizations Supporting Haitian Artist and Artisans

• Aid to Artisans
• BRANDAID Project
• Caribbean Craft
• Haitian Artisans for Peace
• Haiti’s Back Porch
• Santa Fe International Folk Art Market
• Ten Thousand Villages (Cananda)
• Ten Thousand Villages (United States)
• Vassar Haiti Project
• World of Good

Image Credit: Handmade Cut Metal Tree of Life from Ten Thousand Villages.

As I continue to venture around New Mexico taking in the sights, food and culture, I head southwest of Grants down the Ancient Way Arts Trail towards the El Morro Valley.  Along the way I pass the El Malpais National Monument and the Ice Caves, go up and over the continental divide, and arrive in El Morro.  Once here, I find the brightly painted Old School Gallery and a feed store on one side of the road and the Inscription Rock Trading and Coffee Co., the Ancient Way Café and a campground on the other side.   And practically in their backyard is the El Morro National Monument.

This is an area with truly extraordinary geographic and cultural significance.  El Malpais National Monument displays a landscape of lava flows, mountain ranges, and mesas, while providing much evidence of American Indian history.  Today, Indian groups including the Puebloan peoples of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni, and Ramah Navajo, make their homes here and continue their traditional uses.  And, its neighboring National Monument, El Morro, is home to many ancient carvings and writings alongside sandstone cliffs.

My visit was filled with meeting practically the entire community and lots of food!  I had the opportunity to talk to Paula Tripodi, the executive director of the Old School Gallery, Maqui, the chef and general manager at the Ancient Way Café, Jonathan and Pam Pickens, owners of the Inscription Rock Trading and Coffee Co, and many more who were interested in learning about what I was doing.

This is a community that is using cultural entrepreneurship to come up with ways to attract more people to the area in hopes of building their community.  They truly depend on one another and wear many hats in order to survive.  In the coming weeks, you’ll learn more about the individuals I met and how they are using cultural entrepreneurship as the foundation to build their community and economy on.

In preparation for an upcoming social media training, I asked the participants what social media tools they would most like to learn more about. I was surprised by how many of them said that they would like to better understand RSS feeds, so I thought I’d share a little overview with you, in case you’d like to learn about them too.

RSS is often described as standing for “really simple syndication.” The Wikipedia definition is a pretty good one. RSS is a, “family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.”

Now, you might be wondering, why should I care about RSS feeds?

Four reasons:

1. RSS feeds help you follow recently updated web content without your having to visit each site individually. By reading feeds in a feed reader you can; for example, read all of your favorite art bloggers’ newest posts in one place.

Some popular feed readers are Google Reader, FriendFeed and Bloglines. Just this week the Google Reader Blog announced that even if a site doesn’t have an RSS feed, you can use Google Reader to follow changes to any website.

2. RSS feeds allow you to keep up to date on news about specific topics. For example, The New York Times has dozens of topical RSS feeds. You can subscribe to a feed of all of their Arts news, or just their Dance stories.

3. RSS feeds can de-clutter your email in-box. For example, did you know that you can subscribe to Google Group updates, Google Alerts, and Google Blog Searches by rss? (You do have a Google Alert set up for your name, you business name, and news about your art form, right?).

4. By providing an RSS feed for your supporters to subscribe to, you make it easy for them to keep up with your latest news. Many social media tools automatically publish an RSS feed. If your site doesn’t come with an RSS feed, the Wild Apricot blog post, No RSS Feed for Your Website? No Problem, has a list of tools that can help you create one.

Also, if you have a blog, or podcast, I recommend you “burn” your feed with a service called Feedburner to help you track your subscribers.

All that said, many people are still not familiar with RSS feeds, and still rely heavily on email. When possible, offer a way for people to follow your news by email too, whether through an e-newsletter, or by allowing them to subscribe to your blog by email, which Feedburner and Feedblitz will allow them to do.

Flickr photo credit: RSS Diagram uploaded by Jason Rhode.