Welcome to the The Digital Snapshot, containing all the news, innovations and interesting ideas in the world of digital, as relevant to the arts, culture, museums and heritage sector. The eagle-eyed among you may have notice that we inadvertently skipped a week but we're back on track and ready to get you up to date with all things digital.

News & Updates

Blogging platform Medium has launched a Snapchat/Instagram Stories clone called Series. I think it has interesting potential as a way to capture events, festivals or longer term projects.

Snapchat is still growing but the growth is coming from older users.

Facebook has added to the functionality in its ad targeting Lookalike Audiences so that advertisers can now create Lookalike Audiences that include multiple countries (great if you're aiming to attract tourists). And if you need to upskill yourself about how to advertise effectively on Facebook, here's a shameless self-promotion for our Facebook advertising webinars.

No immediate output from this but one to keep an eye on for sure, Pinterest has launched Pinterest Labs. This comment from the launch piece makes you realise the value of collecting all that data:

"With more than 100 billion objects, we’re working with the world’s largest image-rich       data set that mixes technology and human curation. This unique opportunity enables us to analyze trends, understand intent and predict consumer behavior."

Useful & interesting

Smartify is a new app that identifies works of art just by scanning them, as the article says, it's "like Shazam for art".

Good case study about how Scottish Ballet use "micro-moments" to improve their digital marketing.

Back to Facebook advertising, here's an introductory guide they've put together (opens pdf) that you might find useful if you're a beginner.

If you run a festival or event where you'd like to capture the tweets connected with a particular hashtag take a look at TAGS, a free tool to collect tweets based on a search string. As always with free tools, there is some manual setup work you'll need to to do get it running but if you don't have the budget for paid monitoring, it's a good alternative.

Ideas & Inspiration

A wonderful example of collaboration for mutual benefit, sixteen Boston Museums swapped Instagram accounts for the day to promote the overall cultural offer.

Bit of a clunky name but the "net based award", for art that is digital only, attracts some ground-breaking entries. Take a look at this year's shortlist.

Virtual Reality is coming at us fast. This new conference, Exploring Digital Futures is aimed at the arts and culture sector and focuses on ideas and innovations in the use of VR, AR and 360 films. Solid set of speakers including Sarah Ellis from the RSC.

Excellent data visualisation from Nesta who have mapped all of England's accredited museums onto a map. Read more about the project here.

Good Reads

This issue's if-you-only-read-one-thing article is the results of a piece of research into whether all that time and effort you put into building up the likes to your Facebook page is of any value when it comes to making real-world sales. At the risk of sounding like click-bait, you might be surprised by the results...

Good insights and takeaways in this piece by Russell Dornan, which debates whether or not a museum should have a 'personality' on social media.

                                                                                                                                          That's all for this issue. If you need any support with your digital work I'd love to help. You can email me or find me or The Audience Agency on Twitter. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, you can sign up here.  

Katie

head of digital

The Audience Agency