Started the Artist of the day campaign today. Everyday now we will be featuring an artist and a piece of art they've created on our social networks! I have to admit, it feels good that I'll be sharing a piece of what I get to see everytime I get to promoting to artists. Today I spent just an hour promoting to artists and saw so many weird and wonderful things, I actually picked 7 artists who I wanted to feature as an Artist of the day! I've scheduled them in so I don't need to do them manually, which provides some security that if for whatever reason I can't make any Facebook and Twitter, they will automatically be created for me. What a wonderful world we live in where we can use technology to do our socialising for us! But that's more of a tangent to the topic really.

The benefits I'm hoping that will come out from this Artist of the day revolve around building a community, we need to have an engaging and responsive community. The state we're at now is we have 100+ supporters, but it doesn't count for much if they don't respond or engage with us. It's merely a testament to how widely liked our project is, this was my old objective; To prove it's a popular project. I've done that, we need to evolve from that now.

After reading from a study paper provided to me by chance at the University, successful corporate social networking requires two things; Emphasis on being pro-active and being engaging with the community. This has influenced by approach to developing the Hire an Artist Facebook and Twitter pages, the Artist of the day campaign was the result. With this I'm hoping to catch and ignite supporter interest to the company, liking/retweeting and commenting their opinions and thoughts.

I am thinking that a 'Firestarter' strategy may enhance this, basically getting somebody (A third party) to comment first to encourage others to join in. Think of it like choosing between going to a restaurant that's half full and another that's empty. People will want to come to the half full one because they feel more comfortable that they'll benefit from it, an empty one can look (On an incredibly small scale) intimidating. That's how most people think anyway, I see this behaviour a lot, in fact I was guilty of this last week.

My only hesitation is that if not done right or done too much, it can seem false/fake or be detrimental in some other way. Hmm, perhaps with our social networks being in the weak state that they are, it would be wise not to risk it. Our supporters are already quiet, the last thing I want is to alienate them because of poor decisions.

Anyway in other news, today the contract between me and my partner has been finalised. Just needs to be signed by us both, I want to see him get some real tangible work done first before we make officially make it public. The marketing plan he's doing is incredibly valuable and there's even chance of him coming to help me pitch in a Dragon's Den style competition (Top prize £500!), if he gets these things done I'd be more comfortable in announcing the partnership. Basically more time and more work is needed to help build our working relationship before it's official.