My blog post goes here…

In my last post I wrote about how I discovered WordPress as a tool for making dynamic, flexible websites on a low budget for arts and cultural organizations. In this one, I want to talk about using WordPress as a platform for social integration, and some of the things we learned from building a website for the New York Film Festival.

Something pretty extraordinary happened between the time we developed newdirectors.org and were set to roll out the New York Film Festival website. That was, of course, the rapid adoption of the Facebook Open Graph Protocol, and how it almost overnight created incredible new social dimension for sites on the web.

Obviously, it’s no longer enough to just have a Twitter and Facebook profile floating around out there that you maybe link to from your homepage or email newsletter. And so when it came time to build the New York Film Festival website, I wanted to be able to use the tools that the big publishers like Huffington Post and CNN were using. Ambitious? Maybe. But I think that you’ll see that by using WordPress, unlocking those sorts of tools is actually pretty easy.

The New York Film Festival website 2010 incorporated Facebook and Twitter widgets in the sidebar. We specifically set out to make each film page “shareable” content, so each page presented the opportunity to tweet the page content (via Tweet Meme), and to “Recommend” via the Facebook interface.

We also included comments in many of the pages (though not all). For this interface, I chose to use a plugin called IntenseDebate. Many use Disqus for comments, but I liked the numbers of different useful features that IntenseDebate offers, including Facebook and Twitter login, and it also seemed a bit quicker to load on the front end.

Soon after launching, an article that we published by Scott Foundas on The Social Network, went completely viral–spiking up our traffic and leading to a lot of retweets and comments. It was a great launch for a site meant to inspire conversation. I was thrilled to see how many new people were coming to our content via Facebook and Twitter. The question was…would the effect last, and would people start using the tools that we had put into the site to share and discover?

Favorite features

Some of my favorite features might be a little hidden from the casual glance. Chief among them were a number of “recommendation tools” that go to one of our central challenges of offering a number of movies from all over the world during our film festivals. A plugin called “Related Posts” was easily tweaks for our use to return a list of related films at the end of each page.

Categories and tags helped us out in another way: they allowed us to create (and automate) customized feature pages for various aspects of the program: French, Latin American, Documentaries and many others. Finally, one of our incredible digital media assistants, Curtis Laraque, came up with another fabulous discovery tool via a dynamic tag cloud on the homepage:

What’s to come

While presenting to WordCamp NYC 2010 this year, I explained to the assembled crowd of bloggers and small businesspeople that we learned by doing, and how some of the mistakes that we made were as instructive as our successes.

Chief among those mistake was selecting a theme to customize that is no longer being actively developed. When I learned all of the things that are being developed around WordPress 3.0, I see even more potential as a vehicle for nonprofit web development. Multi-site holds a lot of potential for developing a number of sites around one branding, and custom taxonomies could potentially make WordPress a much more powerful content management system. I’m already attempting to experiment with Twenty Ten, and I’m impressed by all the variations and innovations that are already happening amongst the WordPress community.

Is a DIY approach for you?

I’d never claim to know every organization’s inner workings, goals or capabilities, and I’d certainly never suggest that there’s a one size fits all solution for growing a nonprofit via the web. I know too many experienced professionals–information architects, digital strategists, filmmakers and content creators–to respect the fact that every project has its own unique demands and parameters.

Plus, a DIY approach to web development can be crazy-making. In environments where it’s easier just to do nothing or where trying something new could inspire criticism, why try? (As an aside, just imagine my chagrin when I was called out by an SEO blogger in Texas for my insufficiency in deploying the optimal number of keywords in an article! When you make a site that performs at a high level of visibility, nobody cares how you made it, or how limited your resources were).

But another lesson from the world of filmmaking occurs to me know. For years I worked as a teaching assistant for NYU’s beginning film immersion class. It was an intensive film production class where we handed the kids a couple of rolls of black and white reversal film, an MOS camera, and a gigantic list of what they couldn’t do: no sync sound, no complicated story lines, no budget. There were always a few student who came back in and gleefully smashed all of our rules. That’s what made the class such a joy. Later on, when the same students were given bigger resources and more options, they froze up. Their work became less inspired and less inspiring.

Anyone can make a serviceable website with an “appropriate” amount of resources. What is exciting to me is seeing the innovation that comes from limitations, and how WordPress can allow even resource-strapped publisher achieve and perform on an extremely high level.

Long before the web became social, I was writing about how the medium transforms the message.

It was the first time I got paid to write actually, during the heady days of the dot com boom, when you could barely walk down the street without a venture capitalist hitting you with a sack of money.

Picture, if you will, the late 90s. I was recently out of the NYU film program, scrapping together a living writing coverage on zombie film scripts for Dimension Films and working as a camera assistant on independent films. Those were more profligate times, and luckily enough a plum writing gig landed in my lap: a start-up entity called Indieplanet.com needed someone to write for their film “channel.”

My beat was how technology was reshaping the independent film scene, notably how digital video was creating an atmosphere where anyone could make a film.

At the time, I was a bit enamored of true celluloid (I was a camera assistant, can you blame me?). I cast a slightly cynical eye on the disappointing flatness of the video technology of the day. If you can score a name actor for your film, I remember thinking, couldn’t you shell out a couple of bucks for some short ends?

A decade later, video technology has come a long way, people are shooting movies with digital SLR cameras, Indieplanet is long defunct (thanks for the launch party, though, guys, it was raging!), and yet somehow I’m still preoccupied with DIY uses of technology.

Only, now I’m not as focused on lenses, grain and the inherent limitations of digital. These days, the DIY technology I care most about has to do with the web, and specifically how the little guy (whether that’s an independent artist, a nonprofit, or a small business) can create compelling, socially integrated website on a low budget.

Toward a more social web

I’m talking about WordPress, of course. But I’m also talking about an approach to web development that is more than the sum of its technological parts.

Everybody’s needs a website these days. We all know that. But having a website is not enough.

Your website needs to be a jumping off point to a whole set of aggregated conversations, peripheral social networks, and connections.

It’s simply no longer enough to give users a destination on the web.

Now, when we are successful as website creators, what we are giving users is just an entry point, a fluid, dynamic and evolving way of touching and engaging in a conversation that happens well outside of any particular web address.

This year, in developing a website for the for the New York Film Festival, I was cognizant of that significant change, and so all of our efforts were aimed at achieving a sophisticated social integration with the website. Twitter and Facebook live on top of all pages; we opened up many pages to comments, and via Facebook Open Graph, were able to offer our users an easy way to hook into the conversation with their Facebook logins.

Shareability was central to our vision of how this site would look and perform, and in many ways, we were hugely successful. It helped that we were able to push out the web’s first review of the new David Fincher movie, The Social Network. But more than that, we were able to take advantage of the trend toward greater social integration to create a website that does a lot more than simply serve up information or transactions.

Not bad for a blogging platform and a virtually nonexistent budget.

The background

Another lesson from independent film still resonates with me now: limitations breed innovation.

Before coming to the Film Society, I had only worked on large websites with large staffs and sophisticated divisions of labor. Being in a nonprofit setting forces you to handle web projects in a completely different way. I knew the organization needed web properties that were dynamic and socially integrated. But when resources for significant web development projects were scarce, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wanted us to be able to be in new spaces and platforms.

View from the Avant-Garde 2009

The first custom project my team took on for the Film Society was for a yearly film series called Views from the Avant-Garde. The programmers of that four-day series of film felt that the web didn’t fully do justice to the visual and innovative nature of their series.

This unfortunately happens with many organizations that handle many different types of content on the web; the infrastructure you build to treat core issues comes up short when confronting the specific or the idiosyncratic.

The Views microsite, 2009

So in confronting this challenge, I set out to make some specifically suited to Views, something highly visual and something that would offer the web visitor an entry point that was as enticing and unique as the program itself. WordPress was an obvious tool for such a task, and this early experience in hacking a template and reverse engineering proved to be a fruitful one.

Newdirectors.org

Onto a biggest festival and a bigger set of challenge: New Directors/New Films.

My second major custom web development project for the Film Society brought two major brands into one coherent web destination for the very first time.

For many years this wonderful festival of new works has been stymied by a diffuse set of web presences on the Film Society side and the MoMA side. Newdirectors.org changed all that, and helped this festival gain a stronger purchase in the consumer’s mind and lifted this year’s fest to it’s best ever sales performance.

It was great to be able to deliver a streamlined consumer-facing product, but some of the most exciting things we developed during this project took place on the backend. Instead of static HTML we had easily editable pages. Pages we could schedule for publication. Slideshows that impressed but didn’t have to be painstakingly developed by our graphic design team.

I was ready for a bigger challenge. This year, the venerable new York film festival opens with none other than the social network, a film about “the Facebook” as it is referred to in the film.

I had talked the social media talk, but had I really walked the walk?

With this new website, I knew I needed to raise the bar considerably.

In Part II of this article, I’ll talk about some of the successes, and challenges, we faced in creating a socially integrated film festival site for this year’s New York Film Festival.