Fusion View

We went along to a private view of an art exhibition for the South London Women Artists (SLWA) at the Dulwich Library last week. It was a bit surprising at first when we arrived as we could not see any paintings or photographs - just a convivial party of people drinking wine and eating nibbles amongs the bookshelves. But, rather like a treasure hunt, after a bit of nosing around and asking around for clues, we found the artwork hung on the ends of bookcases and tucked in amongst some book racks. The artists were on hand, too, so it was interesting to chat with them and find out more about how and where they worked.

SLWA was formed about 18 months ago by Jenny Sweeney, to offer a meeting point for women artists in South London to help them promote their work and also as a space where they can come together with other artists. Many of the artists I spoke to that evening told me how much they enjoyed being part of the group, especially for the opportunities it gave to hook up with other artists. There are now 100 members and a waiting list.

The group is run on a volunteer basis with members chipping in their time and skills. One of the artists designed the flyer, another member worked on marketing the event and still others organised and curated this exhibiton at the library as well as the one now also running concurrently at the Cafe in Dulwich Park. The Dulwich exhibtion is on till 27 March.

Their next exhibition is at the Bankside Gallery from 28 April to 03 May.

I find it fascinating how people use public spaces in urban landscapes. This is a video I grabbed of some amazingly talented young girls practicing a dance routine at More London Riverside. They told us their group is called Esteem and they were in a show at the Unicorn Theatre in March. (The ambient sound on the vid is from inside the restaurant where I was having lunch when I happened to glance round and see them strutting their stuff - for music, they were in fact playng tracks from their mobile phones!)

This is a post that I wrote for Dulwich OnView that may be of interest to you if you’re visiting London and fancy a semi-countryish walk in the big city.

The sprawling mass that we call Greater London is actually made up of lots of little villages, which is often easy to forget as we are worn down by trying to get around this built up metropolis. But every now and then, it’s nice to be reminded that there are in fact many green spaces and quaint little corners to enjoy - especially when you get out to the farther edges of the city when the original ancient villages still bear some traces of their rural origins.

Dulwich Village is of course one of those but if you fancy a pleasant walk to discover other villages in London, we did this good one is from Blackheath to Greenwich. It’s around 2 miles as the crow flies but you can extend it by taking meandering detours around either of the villages and exploring Greenwich Park.

Take the train from London Bridge to Blackheath (about 10 mins) and from the station, turn left and walk up the slope towards the heath. There are plenty of smart boutiques, cafes and restaurants to browse en route. At the heath, take the little path to the left of the church and aim for the rooftops of Canary Wharf across the open expanse where Wat Tyler gathered his men to invade London during the Peasants Revolt in 1381.

Cross the main road towards the ornamental gates of Greenwich Park. (There are toilets here for those of you who worry about that sort of thing - I do!) If you then head straight on down the avenue, you’ll get to a viewing point over the river but it’s much more fun to have a wander round the park first - heading right will take you alongside a charming flower garden, for example.

We found One Tree Hill where Elizabeth I apparently came to think and meditate. In her day, she would not have had the site of the Millenium Dome or the Maritime Musuem or Canary Wharf or the Gherkin to clutter up the view north across the river to London!

From here, you can head downhill to the University of Greenwich and it’s rather grand buildings before making your way into Greenwich village by the Thames path, via the Cutty Sark (sadly still under wraps for restoration). There are food stalls in the covered market and also restaurants and coffee shops, though the latter seemed less smart than the ones in Blackheath (no doubt primarily catering to tourists and students).

The train from Greenwich takes you back to London Bridge - again around 10 mins.

My verdict: A pleasant morning out, with gentle walking and great views. But next time, we’d do it the other way round - climbing the hill from Greenwich and ending up in Blackheath for lunch at one of the smarter restaurants there, good food being one of our priorities on such excursions!

Do you have a South London walk or outing you would recommend? Pls email us (dulwichonview[at]googlemail.com) with a description such as the one above and include any photos and map* and if it’s right for the blog, we’ll publish it!

* To create your map, use Gmap Pedometer, save the route of the map you create and send the link to us.

As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a community blog, in my local area, Dulwich OnView, which is the blog of the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery. We were invited to give a presentation on our strategy and volunteer strategy at a conference for the museums and heritage sector last week. This is my report from that event (which is also appearing on Dulwich OnView):

You may have caught The Virtual Revolution on BBC last Saturday night, which gave on overview of the way that social media has been changing our society and culture. According to the programme, 18 million people in the UK read blogs - that is about a third of the UK’s general population of 61 million. Blogs, social networks, Twitter and the like are now pretty much mainstream and and it’s not just businesses who need to adapt to these new ways of communicating. Museums, galleries, libraries and the heritage sector are more keen than ever to find out how to use these tools to engage with their visitors and users.

Which is where the Social Web Conference, organised by the UKOLN comes in. They are part of the University of Bath and are “A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities” and last Friday, they held a conference about Web 2.0 and social media for the heritage sector at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Marieke Guy, UKOLN’s research officer and organiser of this cutting edge conference invited our editorial team to give a presentation to the delegates about Dulwich OnView. It was a further opportunity to showcase our “online magazine” to the heritage sector as an example of how blogging is being used to raise the profile of the Gallery and build an online community around the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery, the charitable group that raises money and supports the work of the Gallery.

I was first up and outlined the strategy and context behind Dulwich OnView. One of the aims of the Friends is to invite more people to join as members and to encourage a diverse range of people to come along to Gallery and Friends events. The Friends put on a lot of events - films, talks, concerts and more - and the Gallery of course arranges many exhibitions with with associated art classes.

But Dulwich OnView, the Friends’ blog covers more than just these events and includes articles, videos and photo-stories about loads of arts, culture and music in Dulwich and South East London. Why? Well, we reckon that if you’re interested in all those things, you’re going to be the kind of person who’s going to enjoy Dulwich Picture Gallery - but you may not have initially thought of yourself as a “Gallery type” because, maybe, you’d never heard of the Gallery or it seems a bit too posh or stuffy and serious and is not for you. On Dulwich OnView, we hope that our readers can see that people involved in the Gallery and the Friends are just like anyone else who enjoys arts and culture in the local area and that you’ll be tempted to check out Gallery exhibitions and Friends’ events as a result.

We’ve been really lucky in attracting writers, photographers and filmmakers as well as wine experts, historians and just ordinary folk who love arts or the local area to contribute articles to the blog and to become part of the regular Dulwich OnView team - all on a voluntary basis. What this shows is that the Friends and Gallery are becoming more and more part of the local community through this blog as much as the local community becoming more aware of what the Gallery and Friends have to offer!

So how do we do it? How do we manage a team of volunteers on no budget at all and with no central office space? Next up was Angie Macdonald, web designer and Dulwich OnView trainer and editorial co-ordinator. She explained how we devised and set up a virtual system, working entirely online, to allow our bloggers and editorial team to be self-managed. There’s no “boss” although there are a handful of us who help co-ordinate the team. We all contribute a range of multimedia items about whatever we feel like (in keeping with the mission of the blog: “celebrating people and culture in the Dulwich area”). To avoid duplication of content and chaos, we note down what we’re going to post on the blog on an online editorial schedule hosted on Google Docs which our regular team can all have access to from any computer. There is a library of “how-to” online manuals which explain how to upload posts to the blog, how to add photos to our Flickr site and also sets out procedures and policies for our rota of editors. One of our team is in fact now in Belgium for her day job but can continue her role as one of our editors due to this virtual system we’ve set up! But we’re more than an online team - those of us who are around in South London meet up once every 4-6 weeks in the local pub for a drink and a catch up as well as to discuss future article ideas and plans for Dulwich OnView.

Freelance writer and museums consultant Steve Slack picked up on this theme and told the conference how his involvement in Dulwich OnView has led to some good friendships with people on the team, as well as offering opportunities to meet loads more locally through covering local events and interviewing people in the area for the blog. Articles on Dulwich OnView range from art to fitness, dancing to allotments, tattoos to wheelie bins - as well as events put on by the Friends and the Gallery. But being a blog, our posts publicising Gallery events don’t offer the usual PR blurb but we give them a quirky twist - for example, an opera themed event inspired a blog post with a special opera themed recipe for our readers.

Ingrid Beazley, former Chair of the Friends and e-learning project developer at Dulwich Picture Gallery, acts as our liaison with the Gallery and Friends. She rounded off our session with some stats that show how Dulwich OnView is having an impact on drawing more people online to the Gallery. Most of the organisations we have written about link to us from their websites. 53% of our incoming traffic comes from these local supporters. Although 98% of people visiting DOV are not searching for Dulwich Picture Gallery, 33% of onward clicks go to the DPG website, mainly to exhibitions and events pages. The Gallery links to DOV in places and 14% of our incoming traffic comes from mainly their events pages as people click through to find out more from the enhancing articles written by locals. DOV is the 9th largest driver of web traffic to the DPG website.

As to how much of that translates measurably to new Friends memberships or extra tickets bought for events and exhibitions is difficult to say at this stage as there is no system in place as yet that specifically tots that up. However, we reckon that increased web traffic to the Gallery’s main website via Dulwich OnView can only mean increased awareness of the Gallery within the local community and that can only be a good thing.

One last thing I should stress. Blogging and social media may be making headlines right now but they in no way supercede traditional marketing, which continues to play a key role for heritage organisations. Kate Knowles and her marketing team at the Gallery reach a very wide range of people through traditional media such as the BBC, broadsheets and other national and international outlets. Dulwich OnView complements their activities by making connections with a different community, especially those people who might not initially think of themselves as Gallery going types.

We are all thrilled that this blog that began as an idea over drinks among local neighbours has managed to have this small but significant impact for the Gallery and the Friends - and continues to impress the heritage sector: Dulwich OnView has been showcased at conferences in Iceland, Montreal and London and will also be featured later this year at the Museums and the Web 2010 conference in Denver, Colorado.

If you’d like to find out more or to join our team of regular contributors and editors, or if you just have the occasional article or multimedia story you’d like to submit, please email our Acting Editor via dulwichonview[at]googlemail.com (substituting @ for [at]). We’d love you to become part of our community!

Further articles about DOV:

Dulwich OnView in Iceland

Dulwich OnView in Montreal

A Museum Blog By The Community For The Community

The British Malaysian Society put on a great event the other evening at Jom Makan, just off Trafalgar Square, for the talk that I gave with my co-author Silvia Cambie on using social media for business. There was a good crowd there - a mix of Malaysians and British folk ranging from representatives from the Malaysian High Commission, Malaysian students and British and Malaysian business owners and solo professionals. Silvia spoke about the use of social media by global business, giving examples from multinational companies and also international associations. Changing gear, I focused on small business and solo professionals who use blogging and social networks, throwing in a mix of Malaysian and British case studies.

Here are some pics from the evening:

There were some interesting questions and also a good discussion after our formal presentation. To give you a flavour of the issues of interest, here are my notes on two of the questions that people wanted to discuss further:

How useful is Twitter for business use?

In Silvia’s response to this question, she gave some examples of how Twitter can be used to encourage delegates at a conference to participate in the discussions through Twitter - she is implementing this strategy for one of her clients, the European Commission, at an event coming up soon. The Twitter comments and conversations can be collected through tactical use of hashtags (a way of attributing a common keyword to a Twitter conversation eg including “#leweb” in your “tweet” to reference the Le Web conference will enable it to be collated via a search of that hashtag) after the event and analysed/ reviewed by European Commission ministers.

For small businesses or individuals, I suggested that Twitter is also a good way in every day usage to make an initial contact with people who may be tweeting on topics you are interested in and this contact can then be followed up by email, for example. It’s a good way as well to ask questions and invite opinions, especially if you are researching an issue eg for an article or a book. You can also raise your profile and expertise if you tweet about your speaking engagements and projects you may be working on as well as engaging in discussions on topics of relevance for your industry.

Can you make money using social media?

Silvia highlighted that sales of virtual items on the Chinese social network QQ brought in revenue for the owners of that network. There are ways to monetize social media through such innovations but it is a matter of identifying the right market and products that can be sold in this way.

I offered the counter view that the value of social media is not necessarily in direct sales but rather in creating networking opportunities. It falls in the ball park of sending out mail shots and newsletter or taking clients out to lunch or coming along to networking events such as that night’s events where you might learn something useful for your business and also meet some interesting contacts. There may not be direct monetary value but the value comes through making contacts and building relationships with them.

Thanks …..

And as a last word, Silvia and I would like to thank Haliza, Louise and Zehan as well as the other committee members of the BMS for inviting us and for organising such a pleasant evening!

I’ve been invited to speak at the British Malaysian Society on Thursday 21 January, along with my co-author Silvia Cambie, on how to use social media to boost your business and networking. We’ll be discussing some Malaysian, UK and other international case studies showing how businesses are currently using blogging, social networks and Twitter for their business purposes.

If you’re interested in finding out more about social media for business - or would just like to meet up with some cross-cultural British and Malaysians, please do come along. There’ll be some Malaysian food, too, as it’s held at a Malaysian restaurant!

The details are below:

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