Three years ago, I and a group of friends started to dream up what a lot of people considered impossible: a festival that would bring poetry to all 2.6 million residents of Greater Miami.

At that time, Miami’s cultural scene was exploding. Art Basel was in full force, and we wanted to do a festival that was the opposite of the “pipe-and-blazer” readings that most people associate with poetry. We wanted to do a festival that reflected Miami’s diversity and personality.

Last July, Google threw an office party. But this being Google — the third largest company in the world as of January — it wasn't really a standard ice-cream-cake-and-canned-beer office party. The event was luau-themed, so the company hired staff to dig big holes in its Mountain View campus' lawn and fit spits inside for the purposes of roasting pigs, according to people who were there. There were tables full of food and drinks scattered around. Also on offer: a sophisticated wave machine so employees could try their hands at surfing — miles away from the ocean.

Imagine, if we saw social media more like an artist’s studio or cafe and less like a marketing channel?

While walking through the exhibit, Building: Inside Studio Gang Architects at the Arts Institute Chicago last November, I felt like I was seeing into the private design space of the architect.
 

Facebook rules, at least marketing via Facebook is booming. Social Media Marketing on Facebook produces results, builds brands loyalty, and helps define an image. Among several hundred campaigns being run on Facebook, there are few that stand-out and inspire every one of us!

You did what to your pants, exactly? Ooooh, ship! If you’ve been online at all in the last week or so, you’ve likely seen this amusing and suggestive play on words circulating via social media and traditional news outlets. Who can resist a double entendre that alludes to the gold standard of embarrassing situations? Surely not the Internet.

“When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire,” says advertising executive David Ogilvy. You have only 30 seconds in a TV commercial to grab attention. The same applies to a presentation. The first 30 seconds of your talk is crucial. This is the time your listeners form an impression of you, and of what’s to follow.

Facebook is unparalleled for sharing photos of our vacation or a child’s first steps. All of the best moments of our lives look amazing on the Timeline. So what about the worst ones? What about when we have a stomach ache, get fired from a job, lose someone we love? Should expressing those ideas look different? Could something cue your friends so they don’t hit that “like” button inappropriately?

As Urs Fischer stood inside the Geffen Contemporary last month preparing for his big MOCA survey, the museum's much-discussed financial troubles did not seem to be weighing on him.

The leadership of the Metropolitan Opera recently announced that they were lowering most of their ticket prices for next season. At the same time, they announced that it is now clear that their highly successful movie theater broadcasts are cannibalizing ticket sales for their live performances. Neither development is surprising; when movie theater tickets for an opera performance are $25 and seats in the Met for the same performance are $380, audiences are going to change their attendance habits.

If nature abhors a vacuum, the business world adores a buzzword. And for the past few years, data--specifically big data--has been among the most buzzy. That’s been especially true since the 2012 election in which President Obama’s campaign made waves for its surgical use of data in winning a second term.

I had the pleasure of listening to Simon Bradley, vice president of marketing North America at Virgin Atlantic Airways, recently at the Customer Experience Leadership Conference and he shed some light on how they think about marketing... and it might just knock your Virgin Atlantic Upper Class socks off. 

An estimated 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 every day for at least the next 17 years, according to data from the Pew Research Center. And while many of them might choose to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, leaders everywhere are facing the same daunting issue: A great tsunami of Baby Boomer retirement is coming.

Though it’s likely to reshape the workplace for years to come, many organizations say they aren’t prepared for such an unprecedented brain drain. The projections of younger workers entering the workforce are even more shocking.
 

Alright, let’s talk about how we can do some damage and start to take back our discounts!  (Insert revolutionary cheers and french people waving flags and putting up barricades here.)

Yesterday we talked about how the discount sites approval payday loans are beating shows to the box office, because of the modern consumer’s desire for a lower priced ticket, and the easy-to-find codes on sites like BroadwayBox, Theatermania, etc.
 

The New Museum promotes its "New York in 1993" exhibit with 5,000 pay phones that dispense location-specific history from the people who lived it.

The cult hit, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, imagined a future where phone booths served as time machines. Although it doesn’t appear society has yet mastered the flux capacitor, the boothless pay phones of New York currently are in fact serving as time portals--back to the year 1993.
 

It’s April, the second quarter has begun, and spring is here! Springtime isn’t just a great time to put your winter clothes away and clean your a garage. It’s also a great time to review and refresh all of your social media channels, especially if you haven’t reviewed them since after the holidays. Here’s a quick guide:

How does somebody who wants to write about the arts get an audience? In the old days you found a small local publication to write for while you learned your craft, and graduated to bigger publications and larger readership. Readership, and often influence, depended on the reach of your venue.
 

One of the best channels for bootstrapped entrepreneurs is digital marketing. Here's how to do it right.

I personally believe that one of the hardest roads traveled is that of the bootstrapped entrepreneur. The hours are tremendously long, compensation is delayed, and the ability to grab meaningful market share generally will take many years. I found this out the hard way when I launched my company Rise Interactive in 2004.

@NonprofitOrgs only follows nonprofit organizations, nonprofit staff, nonprofit service providers, and activists on Twitter. Each morning I browse those that have followed @NonprofitOrgs in the previous 24-hour period and if they are a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit staff member, a nonprofit service provider, or an activist, I follow them back. Many of these folks are new to Twitter and thus I get to see the Twitter debut of many nonprofits and there are eight very common mistakes that newbies make that unknowingly diminish their Twitter ROI from day one.

Is your nonprofit or museum still operating under the assumption that most of the folks visiting zoos, aquariums, museums, and performing arts venues are doing so with their nuclear families? Think again. Data concerning visitor-serving organizations (VSOs) reveals that travel party constructs have evolved. While only seven years ago a majority of visitors attended VSOs with their nuclear families, the majority are now visiting with significant others.

When the Google Art Project launched in early 2011, it neatly brought the best of the Internet (and more to the point, Google) together in one erudite bundle. Conceived as a virtual art gallery that now houses the collections of 151 major museums around the world, it made accessible to everyone some of the world’s greatest works through super-high-res imagery, a discovery engine, user input, and virtual walkthroughs of select galleries (à la Google Street View). It was the ultimate mashup of art and technology.

No doubt you’ve heard of a marketing funnel, a model whereby prospects enter the funnel’s top (awareness) and through smart marketing are sent further down the funnel, closer and closer to becoming customers.

Typically, it takes multiple touch points along the funnel for a prospect to become a customer.  Smart marketers know they need touch points all along the funnel in order to turn prospects into customers. But with limited budgets, marketers must prioritize where along the funnel to focus budgets and efforts.
 

New York Times best-selling author Seth Godin is a fan. So is novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Ben Folds embraced it to bankroll his new album. Amanda Palmer has used it to raise over a million dollars and game studio Ouya just cashed in to the tune of $5.4M and counting. No longer the domain of the struggling indie artist relying on populist largesse, crowdfunding has gone high-profile. In the last year alone, Kickstarter has had seven projects that topped $1M. But when celebrity or corporate content creators move in, do they squeeze the little guy out?

I have been reflecting on diversity and orchestras lately, prompted by some work we are doing at the League of American Orchestras and my recent participation in SphinxCon 2013 in Detroit, which examined diversity, inclusion and equity in the arts. Many of you are likely familiar with Aaron Dworkin, the gifted violinist, founder and executive director of the sponsoring non-profit Sphinx Organization. Aaron is one of the important voices in our field today and a colleague who serves as a board member of the League.

I have something to say on this subject because I am both a coder and drawer. I have been dealing with this battle between left- and right-brained people, as the kids say, like, forever. As a youngster I wanted to draw comic books, play lead guitar in a rock band, solve famous topological math problems like the Bridges of Konigsberg, invent codes and cyphers, and be an astronaut. It is easy to see that I accomplished none of those things. But I still don't draw a big fat line between what we moderns classify as an art and what we call a science.

Naked Angels, the theater company that has developed plays including Broadway vet “Next Fall,” has partnered with Gotham’s New School for Drama to become the academic institution’s producing partner for its M.F.A. and soon-to-launch B.F.A. programs in theater.

The two sides anticipate a mutually beneficial arrangement that will help the New School professionalize its legit training programs, while at the same time aid in stabilizing Naked Angels and its producing initiatives in a tough time for fundraising.

If you think of marketing as the same thing it was twenty (or even ten) years ago, you're basically screwed. The reason is simple. What works today is the opposite of what worked in the past.

The Old Rules Here's are the rules for marketing that are taught in most business courses, and are common inside most companies (many of whom are struggling):

To appreciate how broken most contemporary models of advertising and promotion have become, listen to Jeff Bezos complain about how Amazon's core values are misunderstood. "One of the early examples...was customer reviews," he recalls. "One [critic] wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?' And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

Video games, as their name suggests, combine the ancient human practice of formal play with moving pictures, a younger form. But the unsatisfying name we are saddled with for this medium — itself approaching middle age, if you date its history to the first home console in 1972 and apply the rule that middle age begins when you are older than every current Major League Baseball player — doesn’t capture the essence of video games.

As our attention shifts to mobile phones—and their smaller screens—ads are becoming vastly less effective. And companies built on ad revenues, like Google and Facebook, should start to sweat.

Reading article after article, you have finally convinced yourself to join the new social media site on the rise, Pinterest. That was pretty much my story with my encounter of Pinterest. I joined the site, setup my Pinterest profile, setup some new boards, and went on to repin some of the content on there.