Page 175 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015175things that can help a lot. For CPN, it brought us our first wave of readers and members.Early collaborations for CPN included content sharing contracts with art and design blog Creative Boom,16 the Creative & Cultural Skills network,17 the Museums Association18 and the Arts Marketing Association.19 These contractual agreements between the two sites decreed that a set number of articles could be shared between them over the course of a week, month or longer. Permission had to be sought from the editor for each article, to make sure specific features weren’t protected from being shared. It worked because it brought us new readers on other sites, and helped to legitimise the strength of our content and network in the early days when we had little output.Content sharing and marketing contras helped bring our work to new communities.Marketing contras on CPN were also contractu- al but instead allowed the sharing of marketing slots or ad collateral, for example a newsletter promotion slot. Again, these helped to bring our work to new communities. Longrunning marketing and media partnerships include ones with the REMIX summits20 and the Museums and Heritage Awards.21The importance here, like any strong collabora- tion, was to ensure both parties benefited and that an open and honest conversation continued to be had. For some agreements, one side found more gain than the other, so they were openlydiscussed and terminated. Others were strong mutually beneficial agreements that continued for many months. While the network doesn’t honour any contractual agreements any longer, the site still enjoys the sharing of content on an adhoc basis with a range of writers and blogs.Social mediaAn online community can live and die by its social media strategy and use. For CPN, social media accounted for a quarter (23%) of all unique visitor traffic to the site in 2014. While some of that social traffic comes from encour- aging readers to share stories themselves, with their own followers and fans, ensuring CPN has a presence on social media is also important for seeding pieces initially and letting followers know when articles have been launched.Much like the Guardian, the network continues to experiment with new tools and platforms, but two key social networks sit at the heart of its social activity: Facebook and Twitter.Twitter has and will always be the network’s highest referrer of traffic. It’s highly useful mainly because it’s unintrusive, which means we’re able to share the same story several times per day. It’s also a great aid because it’s where the majority of CPN’s followers (20,000 of them22) are.Facebook23 drives significantly less traffic – one post is usually equal to one tweet in terms of clicks – which is partly due to the fact that, unlike Twitter, posting a piece once is enough without intruding on user feeds (and encour-Matthew Caines