Today I came across Art Babble, an online community developed by the people over at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It was created to “showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives” but doesn’t just look like a boring online photo or video album.

Firstly, I love the branding Art Babble – play art loud and the whole feel of the website – It transforms static pieces of art into dynamic works, making them easier to share, comment on and discuss – as well as transforming them into other forms of media, like video and podcast.

This is coupled with a lovely little dictionary entry parody:

Art-Bab-ble [ahrt-bab-uhl]
noun; verb (used without object) -bled, -bling

1. free flowing conversation, about art, for anyone.
2. a place where everyone is invited to join an open, ongoing discussion – no art degree required.

So, the site looks great, the branding compelling and the proposition interesting, but is anyone really interested?

Judging from the social media assets attached to Art Babble it would seem they are, flickr users have been uploading photos or the Art Babble stickers and The Art Babble facebook group has over 3,000 actively engaging fans.

More and more people are also signing up to become members of the Art Babble community – allowing them to create content and comment on some of the collections.

The way arts organisations use social media hasn’t been something that I’ve come across much in my online travels, but as I love art and to a certain extent social media, it’s an area I’ll be looking into more and more…

Today is my first day of being a proud owner of a shiny black iPhone.

Already I’ve read more industry news feeds and logged into more social networks than I have all week. Because it’s just so EASY.

I’m not a massive techy but I’ve never come across anything as simple to use.

So, I guess the test will continue… Will the iPhone make me more social? Or will being even more connected than usual make me implode? We will see…

The first rule about bake club is… Tell everyone about bake club…

This is the new slogan of Lurpak’s new online community, ‘Bake Club’ which encourages people to share and connect via their baking tips and experiences. The about page reads:

Whether you’re brightening up a day in the office, just catching up with friends, or buttering up your mates at uni, Bake Club is the easiest way to have your cake and eat it!

But this isn’t just a place to share recipes, people are called to take actions by email alerts and then take part in a ‘bake off’ – others can vote and rank photos and recipes to decide on a winner.

An innovative way to start building conversation about the brand which isn’t just my pet hate of ‘let’s get on twitter and set up a facebook page’.

I’m really intrigued to see the results of this new initiative – There are already thousands of amazing and tasty photos on their flickr account!

It’s an idea that if it had come up in a brainstorm I’d think, sweet idea but is it going to work? Probably not.

Maybe it’ll prove what I always think about great ideas – they always seem absurd initially.

I’ve just seen a tweet about the introduction of the #TechHaiti hashtag – brought in to make it easy for aid organisations to search for tech companies wanting to help those in the Haiti disaster.

This got me thinking about hashtags.

A hash tag is a simple symbol which is now an integral part of Twitter and the way we communicate. They came about because Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data. Therefore, the Twitter community came up with their own convention – the hashtag – which acts like a web tag that you use in other programs, in that it helps add tweets to a category.

Hashtags have the ‘hash’ or ‘pound’ symbol (#) preceding the tag, like #nowplaying or #followfriday.  Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet. Some use them all over the place, whereas others use popular hashtags that already seem to have a set etiquette. Like, #followfriday. Topics range from things as serious as #iranelection to light birthday wishes for celebrities – it just depends on what the people who use hashtags are talking about.

Firstly, it’s really interesting that this convention is completely user generated – much like retweeting before Twitter introduced an alternative way of doing it. This shows that people like to search within Twitter and in turn like what they write to be searchable.

This proves that tagging things, linking through to things and bookmarking things that are interesting aren’t forced on us by tools such as Delicious and Diggit, they’re activities we naturally do as humans, collect things and let each other know where they are with as little confusion as possible.

However, this tiny function has caused a lot of problems, just look at the Habitat social media case study, in which an “intern” over at Habitat HQ used the hashtags that were currently trending topics as part of Habitat sales promotions. Kind of insulting to those involved having #iranelection next to a two for one deal on overpriced lamps…

And I find this interesting – not only has this convention been defined by the community, it’s been defined along with a set of rules, and when these are flouted the social media community is highly critical and take ownership of it – a social media lesson in itself.

You can track the latest has tags in real time over at: www.hashtags.org

So many companies and brands are trying to get into social media at the moment, often for all the right reasons, reaching different audiences, establishing a two way dialogue and establishing a voice for the organisation.

However, I don’t think every company can venture into this space, especially not with the same formula every time.

I think the key is that a social media strategy must be specifically tailored to the organisation, you can’t offer everyone a Facebook page and a Twitter stream and expect it to be successful because it really doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes you even have to change what you’re going to be using as your central online voice. This reminds me of a post I wrote on the Wolfstar blog a few months back. Mark Pickering, manager of the marketing department for English Rose Hotels felt that he couldn’t just put the hotel organisation online:

“After a little research, it became apparent to me that, unless you are a huge established brand, you are always going to have an up hill struggle to make social media work for you.  Don’t get me wrong, some ‘small companies’ have had great success, but they tend to be ‘cool’ companies to start with and their demographics match social media perfectly – ours unfortunately don’t.”

This led the team to wonder how they could use Twitter without getting lost in the ether of little known brands. And, the solution? Scarborough:

“So we needed a bigger brand, but one that was still relevant to us – and what better than Scarborough?”

This idea worked well, many people have embraced the @Scarborough_UK Twitter stream as the official voice of the town, consulting it for the latest news and events as well as asking questions relating to the area. In turn, @Scarborough_UK can engage with users in order to build a sense of community and a social media presence for English Rose Hotels.

So, it’s great that companies are venturing into the space but they really shouldn’t rush in. There are enough social media fail case studies out there to show you that it takes a well thought out strategy and certainly not a one size fits all approach.

Most people seem to love babies and those that have them ALWAYS want to talk about them – there’s certainly no place where that’s more evident than on facebook – many of my friends who have babies document their every move with photos and updates often in far too much detail.

I’m quite sceptical about facebook – numerous brands seem to think that’s the key to social media, leaving a sea of unpopular unused and redundant pages that don’t really add anything to the brand offer.

However, Evian have begun to roll out a ‘healthy’ social media campaign over facebook following their YouTube success last year.

The Evian advert attracted millions of viewers and included babies roller skating – I have to admit the ad kinda irritated me but lots of others seem to love it, as soon as it started to annoy me I saw it everywhere.

The page has already had over 300,000 fans and many people are already engaging with the brand as well as each other – surprise, surprise mums are sharing photos and stories of their own babies. I guess the page will continue to be successful and the subsequent word of mouth about the brand will be invaluable.

I saw Daybreakers last night, one of the most recent films in the latest craze of vampire related movies, novels and TV series.

It was an interesting concept – the whole world has been infected and are now vampires, needing to farm humans – it was OK in theory but lacked a lot of background and substance. It was also far too cliche at times – the usual stuff vampire stereotypes, the protagonist had no reflection, other characters burst into flames in the sunshine, an overload of buffy-esque killings in which vampires turned to dust, we all know the basic formula.

Overall, I’d give it 2 stars.

There’s always been a fascination with vampire related tales, most cultures have some form of vampire folklore in various shapes and forms from the beginning of time.

The appealing vampire we know and love today, glorified by the likes of Brad Pitt in An Interview With a Vampire and Robert Pattinson in Twilight was born out of The Vampyre by John Polidori as well as Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.

This is the image that popular culture has grown to love and admire – the beautiful, sexually charismatic, youthful yet deadly characters that are flooding our screens. In a culture obsessed with appearances, sex and fear of aging, that’s no surprise.

I just hope we see a few more twists and redefinitions of the classic vampire soon – especially a powerful female character, the feminist in me doesn’t like the fact that women are always hypnotised, sexual pray to the deadly and handsome charismatic males.

Before I start, this isn’t something I strongly believe in – or necessarily think will happen, but Jed and I were having a discussion about it the other day (and people say we’re a geeky couple) and I thought I’d commit my words to paper live writer.

Jed’s point was that as more and more people become involved in social networks, younger people will have this form of communication ingrained in their lives, meaning they will find it normal to live through the internet in this way.

I didn’t disagree but wondered whether there will ever be a backlash – by constantly forcing ourselves to live our lives through social networks in this way will there be a point one day when someone says I’ve had enough? Didn’t you feel more “free” over the Christmas period when you didn’t constantly update your life or think about what others were saying?

Or is it just me who likes to completely switch off from time to time? And maybe this is the whole point – my opinion comes from someone who – don’t get me wrong believes whole heartedly in the power and importance of social media – but didn’t “grow up” with it in my life.

These were all random thoughts brought on by reading an article about predictions for 2010 over at Brain Reserve – interesting and worth a read. I didn’t think that the focus on community – buying locally, “rebelling” against big brands and using social networks in a local way was something that would catch on? – but of course I’m not a trending expert. Jed thought this was inevitable – people using location based applications is on the rise and something he felt people would take advantage of more and more.

I tended to disagree – surely the beauty of social media is that it isn’t location based? Those of us who work in “the industry” may want to update our contacts about where we are – I haven’t used any of these applications personally but when Jed had foursquare on he got random updates saying where PR people were going for drinks. However, for the majority of the normal public I think that the fact social media isn’t tied to a specific location is the beauty of it – particularly those that aren’t in their ideal job and location – they want to meet different people who have interesting lives and revel in that escapism.

I’ve seen a few posts and articles about the work of Curb over the past year but just came across them again so wanted to write a post about their innovative approach to advertising.

Curb refer to themselves as a natural media company, offering high impact advertising solutions using only mother nature’s elements.

Not only is it low cost, high impact and extremely unique but the fact the company integrate traditional advertising and nature means that they appeal to any organisations and brands that want to be more environmentally aware – or at least perceived that way.

The work I’ve seen the most is the clean advertising. The beauty of this is in the simplicity – they’ve just cleaned the pavements and buildings to make an advertisement.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg… Curb also specialise in snow and beach tagging, dust and moss art, crop adverts, sand sculptures and glowfunghi.

I can’t wait to see what else they come up with in the future and watch more big brands take advantage of their unique talents.

I was very lucky to get two more David La Chapelle books at Christmas (from Jed) to add to my collection, La Chapelle Land and Hotel LaChapelle.