Arts 11 - Digital Media: History & Foundations

For dance companies that want to reach as wide an audience as possible for their videos, the best distribution options will probably be iTunes, Vimeo and YouTube. You have the potential of reaching a large audience and you can deliver your videos to different platforms, essentially computers and hand-held devices such as iPhone. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, for example, promotes its videos through these three distribution channels on their Connect page. You can watch their videos on iTunes, Vimeo and YouTube.

Most dancers and dance companies have their photos, videos, social networking profiles and other content spread throughout a number of different websites. It's helpful to consider how your audience, friends and followers can easily access this distributed data. One of the simplest ways to let people know about your online dance media is to add social media icons to your website or blog. For example, in the left-hand column of Jody Sperling's dance blog, you'll see that there are four icons, one each for Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and an RSS feed. There are many available sets of social media icons and some are offered for free. In addition, each set often includes two or three sizes of icons so that you can choose the size that works best for your website. To start your search for social media icon sets, you can visit the following pages: - The Best Social Media Icons All In One Place - 600+ Free Design, Twitter and Social Media Icons: A Collection Motherload! - 50 Free High-Quality Icon Sets I would like to find examples of how dance companies provide centralized information about their full range of dance media and online activities. Please share examples that you know of. For more Great Dance Internet and Tech Tips, subscribe to our bi-weekly email newsletter.

I'd like to invite readers to subscribe to the new Great Dance Internet and Tech Tips email newsletter. This bi-weekly newsletter includes a quick round-up of practical tips and recommendations from Great Dance and other sources about how dancers and dance companies can take advantage of the Internet and technology. To subscribe, you can visit the subscription form and enter your email address. You can view a copy of the first issue, which went out today: If you would like your dancer-focused Internet and technology tips considered for upcoming posts, newsletters and meetups, please email me (doug@greatdance.com. Thanks!

If you are a not-for-profit organization, a 501(c)3 entity, you can accept tax-deductible donations from supporters. A popular way for dancers and dance companies to accept and process donations online is to use PayPal. PayPal offers two approaches to accepting financial donations. Their Standard package consists of your adding a "donate" button to your website and the processing is done directly on the PayPal site. And their Pro package lets you integrate the entire transaction on your website. I don't think it makes a big difference which PayPal package you use. I think the more important issue is the question of how you design your donation/support page and what content you include. One possible way to increase donations is to provide online dance video content specifically for supporters who provide financial support for your company.

If you send out an email newsletter, one simple approach to increasing your subscriber base is to add a link within your signature file to your subscription form. This way you will be encouraging all of your email correspondents to sign-up for your periodic email blasts. If you use Constant Contact, select "Contacts >> Site Visitor Signup >> Start Wizard to generate HTML code." Then select either "Buttons" or "Text Links." Generate the code and grab just the link for your signup form and place this link in your email signature file. You can make this link nicer in appearance by either creating a short link with a service such as Bit.ly or creating a redirect page on your own website.

If you use Google Analytics to track your website or blog traffic, you can also track your outbound links--the links that visitors click on that lead away from your site. For example, if you direct visitors to a ticket purchase site or fundraising page, it's helpful to know how many people click on these links. On the following help page, Google provides the instructions for adding code to your links so that you can track outbound clicks. An easier approach if you have a WordPress blog is to use the Google Analytics for WordPress plug-in that automatically configures outbound link tracking for you.

The DanceJam websites hosts head-to-head dance battles as well as dance competitions featuring popular singers and musicians. If you're looking for ideas on how to encourage your audiences, students and others to contribute videos of their own dances, DanceJam is a good site to explore.

I'm delighted to help launch the new dance blog for Jody Sperling, artistic director, Time Lapse Dance. I created this WordPress blog in conjunction with graphic designer Joan Greenfield of Gooddesign Resource. Visit Jody Sperling's Blog Objectives Our goals for Jody's blog are to: - Promote her performances, residencies and other dance programs - Create a compelling, professional design - Develop an effective blogging/content management platform - Optimize her blog for search engines - Integrate her social media content and communities - Encourage visitors to subscribe to her email newsletter, and - Deliver content to iPhones and other mobile devices