Digital Snapshot | 22.05.2020 | The Audience Agency

Hello, welcome to the Digital Snapshot, a round-up of digital ideas, advice and brain food as relevant to the arts & culture sector.

Before we dive in, a few bits and pieces from The Audience Agency that we hope will be of interest, firstly, a reminder about our free one-to-one 'digital SOS' calls (to discuss a digital challenge) and our low-cost mentoring service, to help you work through an issue in more detail. The info on both these services can be found here.

Secondly, our free digital audience survey is now live. Running this will help you understand more about your online audiences, including their Audience Spectrum profile and we'll be sharing the anonymised benchmark data with participating organisations and the wider sector. More details here.

Finally, we have a bunch of new online training courses available, including longer workshops (run over three online sessions) and 3-hour Masterclasses - topics include digital evaluation, online community participation, resilience and lots more.

News

Presumably, Facebook wants a slice of the Zoom pie, with the launch of Facebook Messenger Rooms chat, a new feature that allows you to chat with up to 50 people at once.
Facebook has also bought GIPHY, so expect even more gifs all over Facebook and Instagram.
I'm sure social media managers who are managing large accounts will be happy to know that you can now bulk delete spammy comments on Instagram.
Twitter is rolling out changes to threaded conversations.

Useful / bookmarkable

Doteveryone has released their 2020 Digital Attitudes report, lots of insightful stuff in here - bookmark it.
A couple of helpful posts about accessibility, firstly in relation to email newsletters and secondly, a 10 step guide to making your social media content more accessible.
This is a couple of years old but I was reminded of it this week when discussing useful website metrics, Is Bounce Rate Irrelevant?
Small but very useful tip about how Twitter automatically crops images to focus on text.
'Zoom fatigue' is taxing the brain. An important piece in particular if you're running online community or training events.

Distracting / entertaining

This is brilliant and clever and so creative, Marie Foulston made a party in a shared Google doc.
Tiny Giant wrote about making Instagram and Snapchat filters - one of which, in particular, was *very* popular.
Absolutely one of the best TikToks I've seen - a parody of every Wes Anderson film.
Playing around with delivering entertainment via different platforms, you can now experience all episodes of The Office (US version) on Slack.
A community group in Hastings has set up this really good Facebook page 'Isolation Station Hastings', which is live streaming events and sharing news, all with a specific local angle. Nothing new in that per se but well done I thought.
Yard Theatre has been doing some lovely online events.
I loved these interactive online postcards exploring how lockdown is changing lives.

Good Reads

Some interesting views on VR - firstly from the hugely respected analyst Ben Evans, who suggests that VR still hasn't found the right hook and as a result, it's still not really caught on. And yet Helsinki has built a whole virtual world and many cultural and tourism commentators feel it could be important in a post Covid world.

That's it for this issue, you can find all past issues of the Digital Snapshot here. Remember we can support you with strategy, research, consultancy and a whole range of training, do get in touch. Keep safe.

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The Digital Snapshot newsletter shares the latest, most important news from the social media and digital world - as relevant to the arts, culture and heritage sectors.