What is happening at Mediamatic Travel

We are working on making Mediamatic Travel more visible and our efforts have a varied range of success. To start with Meral and me thought we could improve and extend through the participation in message boards and fora. Thing is: they don't look kindly on people advertising on their websites. So after being called a troll, a spammer and over 10 deleted forum-accounts, we figured that that was not the way to improve our network.

Furthermore there is this Facebook-page. This is going well although it's painful to see that some of our articles did not get the response we were hoping for. If you take in account the time spent on writing articles, the number of viewers for an article (for instance this one) is to put it mildly a waste of time. Maybe even a little naive of me to put a lot of thought into it. Still the Facebook-page is growing and we are extending our network slowly but steadily. At the moment about 10% of our traffic comes through our Facebook-page. (compare this to the 7% that comes from the Mediamatic site If this continues we will be more then happy keeping it up to date.

The next step might be a Twitter page. I don't know but it seems a logical use of the potential that new media offer us. Personally I am not a big fan of twitter, but if it increases our traffic who am I to argue? I mean it is a way of advertising and if you use it wisely it could help you get traffic from all kinds of areas not reachable by other media or web 2.0 applications.

So what is happening offline your wondering? Well first off we have 2000 glossies left. This means we can distribute these through out the country (the Netherlands, as it is only printed in Dutch) to maybe reach Dutch markets full of travelers that are unaware of us. Think of museums, academies of the Arts and the such.

Furthermore we are trying to work out ways to integrate ourselves in systems. This is all on a very conceptual level still. We would like to finds ways to be a part of international exchange projects, artist in residency programs and the such. But before anything happens we have to find the right modes of communication. Like I said this is still on the sketching board internally at Mediamatic and we hope to make progress with this soon.

Lastly we are looking for new partners that could help us broaden our usergroup. Think of international cultural foundations or as simple as small art collectives with a knack of getting their message out there. Anyway like the proposal I wrote before this, this is still in a conceptual phase and we are just looking around for now. I hope to get more out of this in the near future. And if I do, I'll get back to you.