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.

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.

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.

You can’t beat the yummy smell and bubbly goodness of handmade soap. I love it, don’t you?

According to the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild, Inc.:

“The industry of handcrafted soap is growing and expanding; the number of handcrafted soapmakers has increased exponentially over the last 10 years and the support services for them, including vendors of all types, has become an industry unto its own.”

If you are an aspiring handcrafted soapmaker, or just a lover of handmade soap(!), below is a sampler of soapmakers’ blogs to inspire you to start your own:

1. DeShawn Marie Handcrafted Soap. She also has a Twitter feed, @deshawnmarie, a Facebook Page, and an Etsy shop.
2. The Handmade Soap Blog. They also have a Twitter feed, @pixiesoap, (with an awesome photo of Mint Chocolate Chunk soap as its background), a Facebook Page, a Flickr photostream page, and an Etsy shop.
3. Yummy Suds. They also have a Twitter feed, @yummysuds, a Facebook Page, and an Etsy shop.
4. The Soap Seduction. She also has a Twitter feed, @soapseduction, a Flickr photostream, and an Etsy shop.
5. Susan’s Natural Soap Blog. She also has a Twitter feed, @susansoaps, a Facebook Page, and a YouTube channel.
6. The Back Porch Soap Company blog is actually focused on how to start and run your own soap company. They also have a Facebook Page, and a Twitter feed, @BackPorchSoap.

According to the Handcrafted Soap Makers Guild Blog post, Announcing the 2010 HSMG Conference Speaker Line-Up and It’s Good!, they will have some sessions about how soapmakers can use social media, if you want to learn more about how to use tools like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to promote your business.

Let me know about other yummy soapmaking blogs in the comments!

Flickr photo credit: Handmade Soaps by Daneen_Vol

1. Live Blogging & Live Tweeting
The smArts & Culture blog reported in February about the Portland Center Stage’s Live-Tweeting Theater experiment. “They invited ’30 or so of [their] closest twitter friends’ plus anyone else who cared to join them, to live-tweet the world premiere performance of the play Apollo.”

The Art of Business Blog also used the Portland Center Stage Twitter experiment as an example in their post, How Businesses are Using New Media for Publicity, and noted that, “The Vancouver Opera invited three bloggers to come and live blog and Twitter a performance of their latest Opera, Carmen. The show was a sell-out.”

2. Niche Social Networks
In his Mashable post, How Broadway Talks to its Audiences Using Social Media, Ken Davenport recommends creating niche social networks for fans like the social network, 80s Rock Fans created for the musical, Rock of Ages.

He also suggests that theaters do outreach in niche social networks that already exist: “Promoters of the play Billy Elliot can find groups of ballet lovers on a site like intermission.ning.com, while Next To Normal might look into DoctorsHangout.com to appeal to psychiatrists and psychologists who would find the subject matter compelling.”

3. Podcasts and Video
Jon Stancato of The Stolen Chair Theatre Company writes in his post on the Jenzabar Foundation blog that, “Stolen Chair participates in at least 3 podcasts a year (often through NYtheatrecast), giving supporters the opportunity to hear the voices of our creative team, often in dialogue with other New York theatre artists.”  The company also creates trailers to build excitement for new productions.

4. Collaborative Content Creation
The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog post, Theaters are taking social networking to a new level, reported in June about the La Jolla Playhouse’s Your Life, Our Stage initiative that invited people to, “submit ideas for a play based on their own lives by uploading videos, photos, artwork and written descriptions via the social networking vendor Brickfish.”

5. iPhone Applications
Finally, in its April post, Broadway in Chicago courts theatergoers with iPhone app, The Chicago Times blog, Media and Marketing Mix wrote about the Broadway in Chicago iPhone application that allows users to check performance times, purchase tickets and preview videos of of shows.

What are other examples have you seen of how theatres are using social media?

Image Credit: Broadway in Chicago iPhone application image taken from www.broadwayinchicago.com/iphone.php

I don’t know about you, but I *love* bookstores.  Yes, sometimes I order things when I’m in a rush from Amazon, but nothing beats bookstore browsing.  I can’t imagine a world without independent bookstores, can you?

Bookselling this Week had an article by Karen Schechner (@KSchechner) earlier in the summer about how, Savvy Booksellers Use Twitter to Draw Crowds, Boost Sales. The article highlights 3 case studies of how bookstores have used Twitter, a microblogging and social networking tool, to improve business:

1. Fountain Bookstore (@FountainBkstore) used Twitter to take questions for authors during book readings from fans who couldn’t come to the event.

2. Skylight Books (@skylightbooks) had a tweet-up, a meeting of their Twitter followers, one night at the store.  Attendees received, “15-percent off all books in the store, and 20-percent off hardcover fiction and graphic novels.”

3. Rainy Day Books (@RainyDayBooks) hosted a contest on Twitter that, “gave indie fans a chance to proclaim their love for their favorite bookshops.”

The Booksellers Blog, by @AnnKingman, which focuses on, “online marketing, social media, and blogging for the Independent Bookseller,” has 7 posts about how booksellers can use Twitter:

1. How to get 700 new visitors in 2 days
2. Making things happen using social media
3. What I Think about Twitter for Booksellers
4. Can booksellers and publishers use Twitter to drive business?
5. How I follow 1700 people on Twitter in only 20 minutes a day
6. A simple way for bookstores to use Twitter
7. Can Twitter really work for small businesses?

Finally, you can see additional examples of booksellers using Twitter by browsing through the WeFollow Twitter directory for Twitter accounts tagged with bookseller and bookstore.

Do you have a  story about how independent bookstores are using Twitter, or other social media tools, to build their business?  I hope you’ll share it in the comments.

Britt Bravo also blogs for Have Fun * Do Good, BlogHer, and WE Volunteer.  She is a Big Vision Consultant.

1. Advertise shows, exhibitions, and festivals like William Baker did on in his blog post, Mudfire Exhibit.

2. Share photos and reflections from shows like Jen Mecca does in her post, Blowing Rock Photos on her blog, Jen Mecca’s Pottery Blog.

3. Show your creative process like Gary Rith did in his post, John Makes My Day, on his blog, Gary Rith Pottery Blog.  He also posted photos from a day in his studio and a video interview of him in his studio in the blog’s sidebar.

4. Share photos of new work like Vicki Hartman did in her post, More New Work on her blog, These 2 Words, and Steven Colby did in his post, 4 New Mugs on his blog, Steven Colby: Potter.

5. Promote your online store like Matt Grimitt did in his post, More Etsy Pots on his blog, Slipware Pottery.

6 Announce sales like Emily Murphy did in her post, Pottery Clearance Sale on her blog Potter Blog: Emily Murphy.

7. Build community with other potters like Doug Fitch of Devonshire Pottery who recently wrote a post about connecting face-to-face with “My Lovely Blogging Chums,” pottery bloggers Ron Philbeck, Ang, Hannah McAndrew, Andrew Douglas, and Paul Jessop

For more pottery blog inspiration, click through the blog rolls and blog lists in the sidebars of Jen Mecca’s Pottery Blog, Ron Philbeck Pottery’s blog, and Pottery Blog: Emily Murphy.

Image credit: Pottery with Malin by Christian Kjellström

Britt Bravo also blogs for Have Fun * Do Good, BlogHer, and WE Volunteer. She is a Big Vision Consultant.