The Birdbath: Digital Tips & Trends, Summer 2024

Greetings from The Birdbath!
This newsletter from Bower Blue takes a look at digital tips & trends impacting the visual arts & design communities.

IN THIS ISSUE:
#1. The Christie’s Website Hack
#2. The State of Websites in the Cultural Sector
#3. Social Media Roundup (More changes to the algorithm)
#4. Client Updates (What dozens of interviews can become)

Well, it’s summer again. Does anyone else remember when things slowed down a bit in the art world over the summer? No? Well, we’re here to tell you it used to. Anyone have any good plans for the summer? Burning questions you need answered? Drop us a line and let us know what’s on your mind.

As always, lots of interesting stories out there, that we will try to make sense of and share with you. Let’s dive in…

Thanks for reading!

#1. ARE WE MISSING A DIFFERENT STORY ABOUT THE CHRISTIE’S HACK?

We are still talking about — and processing the fallout from — the hack of Christie’s website and internal systems. Largely due, we’re sure, to the tireless work of Christie’s specialists and support staff, the sales went off largely without a hitch. For, frankly, decades now, we have all been laboring under the belief that online sales are the key to the kingdom in the art world, that commerce is effectively impossible without it. While at the same time, many have also asserted the primacy — and the irreplicability — of experiencing art IRL (as they say online). How do we reconcile that?

We would not try to argue that this episode means that we do not need to worry so much about our online presence (there are countless great reasons beyond online sales to have a robust digital presence), but rather, proves our ongoing position that digital engagement is only going to be as good as the underlying capacity of the institution. At Bower Blue, we start our engagement by gaining a deep understanding of the client organization — what makes it tick, what its capacity is, and how best to leverage existing resources. And then we build a bespoke digital strategy from there — ask us how!

#2. WEBSITES. THAT’S IT. THAT’S THE HEADER.

In a certain tranche of mid-size institutions in the art world, particularly for artists and galleries, a very small handful of developers and database engineers dominate the market. For the most part they do excellent work, but that is only half the job. Your institution’s website is all too easy to overlook or simply under-utilize in a digital culture that puts such emphasis on social media. But a well-designed website should be the hub of your digital strategy, and it remains one of the most critical elements of digital success.

Recently, the good folks at UK-based digital consulting firm Substrakt released a benchmark report on the state of websites in the cultural sector with a lot of great insight. Nothing particularly new or surprising in it, but it’s a great look into performance and strategy specific to the cultural sector. Check out the summary here, and we’d be happy to talk about what it means to your organization.

#3. SOCIAL MEDIA ROUNDUP

• Museums are really jumping on the TikToker-in-Residence idea, and we’re all for it. The National Gallery in London is one of the latest with 200 (!) of them to mark their 200th anniversary.
• Our clients are increasingly turning to social media marketing for a variety of different outreach strategies. New to this? Setting aside the larger question of shifting trends in digital paid marketing for now, Instagram has a helpful introduction to the most basic campaign, boosted posts.
• For next steps, Adnormal came up with this clever 7-Cs guideline to social media marketing.
• We all know the platforms are constantly adjusting their algorithms, engaging in something of a cat-and-mouse game of sharing what they think we should do, but not necessarily explaining why. So for for all the real social media engagement nerds out there, here’s Social Media Today digging in a bit deeper on some changes.
• Not sure what your strategy should be? Let’s connect.

CLIENT UPDATES!

Last December we were in sunny Miami Beach, Florida. And while we enjoy a visit to Art Basel Miami Beach as much as the next art lover… 👀, we were there to cover an event put on by our client Knight Foundation, Catalyst: Digital Transformation in the Arts. Over the course of the day, our crew covered multiple events, art installations, and talks; and conducted over a dozen interviews with key participants. In addition to the videos of the plenary sessions on the page above, we are in the midst of producing dozens of videos and pages of content for our media partner ARTnews, that will roll out over the following months. After months of work, the first content page was recently released on ARTnews, with many more to follow. For this project we worked closely with Knight Foundation from conception and the development of the overall strategy, goals, and benchmarks, through all stages of production, to living on ARTnews. Drop us a line if you want to talk about how we can do this for you.

Bower Blue produces digital strategy and content for galleries, museums, cultural nonprofits, and design studios. (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.”