Well, if your are reading this news post, then you may have noticed some of the exciting new changes we have made to the Killswitch site! For those off you familiar with our site, immediately you will recognize the new format of the KSC homepage, which we think will make navigation of our site even more user-friendly than before. The new format brings to the front our Perspectives Blog and allows for quick viewing of the best we have to offer in terms of programming and strategic musings, and we have added a simple but effective API that gives the user Real Time viewing of what @KSCollective is posting on twitter. Finally, we are also proud to announce our "Interviews" initiative, through which Killswitch will profile trend-setting personas from all walks of life such as artists, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, industry-leaders and more. As always, we love to hear feedback, so let us know what you think by emailing us!

If you are an avid reader of my blog posts (I mean, who isn't, right?) then you probably know that I tend to write on the topic of social media. I write about social media primarily because I personally enjoy using the services on which I extrapolate and because it happens to be my job to sell folks on the benefit of engaging target audiences using these services. Having said this, what I am writing about today may at first glance seem somewhat contradictory to my profession (and might even smack of blasphemy to some of my socially-strategic brethren!) but I feel that it's time to lay down some brutal truths.

You see, in my profession I have the sometimes-duplicitous role of building up a client's expectations at the onset of a social media campaign while, at the same time, tempering those expectations. The buzz surrounding social media makes it an attractive marketing tactic, especially with the many successful case studies one can reference. However, the social media landscape is laden with pitfalls and barriers, and even the best laid schemes of mice and mad men often go awry. It is in the best interest of the client, and the agency itself by way of cultivating a long-term relationship, that this reality is addressed and not mitigated in the hopes of of winning the account or project.

To better describe what I am trying to explain, let's take a look at the imaginary company BetterButter. BetterButter is a medium-size, B2C provider of organic peanut butter. They have been around for roughly three years and have had modest success in the Northeast region of the USA. The Powers That Be at the company have decided that it is imperative to establish a social presence. After a brief review, BetterButter chose Agency X to help them achieve this goal. Agency X begins to set into motion the development of a Facebook fan page and a Facebook application, as well as a twitter-centric promotional campaign.

Now fast-forward a year. The Powers That Be at the company are perplexed. They have invested a fair amount of time and capital into growing the brand socially, but the results have been far from a commercial success. The Facebook page has only 150 fans. The application (a nifty peanut butter recipe-generator) has only been adopted by 40 people, 25 of which are employees and their family members. The brand's twitter account has 230 followers, 30% of which consist of attractive women with x-rated links for viewing and the several twitter promotions have not increase the company's presence on the service, let alone any substantial increase in sales. The Powers That Be can't understand why this campaign hasn't yielded the results they projected and Agency X inferred.

If you are a small-to-medium size business, this scenario may sound eerily familiar. If it does, it's because your internal marketing team or third-party agency that carried out your campaign either didn't know what they were doing or were simply to eager to take advantage of the buzz surrounding social media. This scenario, whether fictional or close-to-home, is indicative of what's wrong with our industry right now. It is our responsibility when providing these services to our clientele to be forthright in stressing the substantial barriers of entry that exist in the social realm, rather than take advantage of an organizations eagerness to "get social." The following are several things I think every client must know before strategy can be discussed, let alone executed:

1. Social media is not the end-all, be-all answer to an organization's marketing goals. It is merely a component, albeit an increasingly crucial one, to your overall marketing mix. The core parts of that traditional mix, most importantly branding and corporate identity, must be strategically developed and executed. As with all of your communications efforts, you want a unified communications front. If your brand or corporate identity is not established, then your social presence will lack a real-world tangibility.

2. To expand on the subject of the importance of branding, I'd like to note the correlation between brand-loyalty and successful social marketing. The largest asset an organization can have at the onset of a social media campaign is a brand-loyal consumer base. Brand-loyal consumers provide you with a pre-established network that is already exicted and knowledgeable about your organization/product and therefore likely to be receptive to any attempts to socialize with you. From a viral standpoint, you need to use this group as your mavens. If you are lacking in brand-loyalty, then one of the long-term goals of your social campaign should be to build that base. Think quality over quantity in terms of followers/friends.

3. Has your organization developed an application for one or several of the major social networks? If so, you probably spent a good chunk of change on it and have not received the ROI you expected at the onset. Here is a sobering statistic that you should be aware of: only 1% of the applications on Facebook account for 77% of volume in terms of usage. Last I checked, there were over 17,000 applications on Facebook. That means that only 170 applications are being adopted by the majority of users. I'm not saying that applications aren't great viral tools (I may just put myself out of a job if I were); rather I am stating that your application had better be engaging and useful to your audience if it is to succeed. If your social media presence is in its nascent stage, it is probably not a wise idea to launch an application. If you do have a firmly established social presence, make sure that what you application offers is unique and, most importantly, serves a useful purpose.

4. What is the status of your organization's current digital presence? (Note that I said "digital" presence and not "social," and by this I mean any and all web-related endeavors. What's your website like? Is it dated? Slow? Informative? What's level of traffic does your site experience? These are important questions to ask before launching a social media campaign because what you distribute socially should be, in terms of best practice, short and sweet. The real bulk of information is located on your website, and one of the primary goals of any social media campaign should be to increase traffic to your site.

5. Does your company have a blog? It should and, while there are great third-party blog sites available, that blog should exist within your own domain. A blog is the best opportunity you have to: establish thought leadership and expertise, display your corporate identity and personality, optimize your site's search engine ranking and allow for direct dialogue with the community your are seeking to build or grow through trackback and comments features. More often then not, engaging an audience through social media means participating in a conversation that is directed by the community itself. Your blog is were you set the agenda.

There are still other things to consider when planning a social media strategy, all of which should be determined by conducting a preliminary audit of your marketing mix and digital presence. As communications professionals, it is our duty to make sure that we are honestly and accurately assessing our client's strengths and weaknesses at the onset of any social media endeavor. It can be difficult, especially in these trying financial times, not to be blinded by dollar signs when approached for this type of service. To best serve our clients, we need to be brutally honest about the barriers of entry that exist in social media, as well as communicate the importance of traditional marketing, PR and advertising.

Beyond all of this (and thorny subject matter to be further elaborated on in a future post) we need to redefine - for this specific medium - how we measure the success of these campaigns. Promising a lofty, or mollifying a more realistic, ROI goal does not accurately reflect the value inherent in participating in this medium. I have worked in public relations, where there exists a similar debate on attempting to quantify the value of a media hit. I've always been of the camp that believes that a story in the New York Times speaks for itself and need not be quantified through the application of the Advertising-Value-Equivalent method (measuring the size or length of the placement, using current ad pricing to determine what an ad of that size or length would cost, then multiplying by 1.5 or up to 3). In social media circles I've heard others refer to ROE, or Return On Engagement, which I think is much more representative of the nature of this beast. Simply put, we need to work with our clients to categorically determine how "success" is to be defined at the onset of any social media campaign.

Monika Weiss is an American artist, born in Warsaw and based in New York City. We've had the opportunity to work with Monika on several projects over the years, including two of her publications--Vessels, an exhibition catalogue published by Chelsea Art Museum, New York in 2004 and Five Rivers, a survey of her work published by Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York in 2006, also in conjunction with a monographic survey exhibition--as well as her website. Monika is a wonderful client to work with, but even more so, she's a fascinating individual and artist. As we love her work so much, we thought it only appropriate that she be our first interviewee.

To give you some background, Monika Weiss' work combines ancient media (drawing) with technological media (video projection) to explore the relationships between history, memory and presence. Through drawing, sculpture, video, performance and sound, Weiss creates work that merges symbolic form reminiscent of medieval paintings with the formal simplicity of Minimalism. The use of her own body directly in her art as both the maker and the inhabitant of the artistic object is characteristic of her work in which she explores concepts of absence and presence, the seer and the seen, the world and the human being.

Weiss' works have been most recently on view in The Prisoner's Dilemma at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami (2009), as well as exhibited at Concentart, Berlin (2009), Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2008), Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk (2007), Kunsthaus Dresden (2007) and North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2006), among others. In 2005-2006, the artist's first major and comprehensive survey exhibition was on view at the Lehman College Art Gallery (City University of New York) and reviewed in The New York Times. Weiss' works are represented in multiple public collections including Museum Albertina, Vienna, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami.

www.monika-weiss.com

You began your education studying piano and musical composition in Warsaw, where you were born. At what point did you start to become interested in performance art?

Meredith, first let me thank you and your company for a very rewarding collaboration over the years and for thinking of me as your first interviewee. You are a wonderful designer, and it is always inspiring to work with you and your colleagues.

It's interesting to me that you combined music and performance in your first question. Performativity is musical. It's about what happens in every moment, about the change... But I wouldn't call myself a performance artist. Life presence is often less important in my work than the fragile and fleeing recollection of presence. Virtual traces are embedded in the projected video and in the layers of sound composition. Physical traces are the drawn marks left on the surface of paper.

Does your musical background influence your art in any way?

Music is about ephemerality and transition. It's also about drawing the lines, melodic lines, that create a web of relationships together, forming a new harmony. It's like water that you cannot keep in your hands. Yet you know it exists, your body and mind react to it. Playing piano for hours everyday has left a mark beyond my childhood, leading perhaps towards my interest in repetition. Another influence of musical background is my way of working, sort of polyphonic, in terms of mediums or genres that coexist in installations, independent yet in dialogue with each other, creating those harmonies or dissonances. Polyphonic also in terms of my interest in working with parallel visual and conceptual narratives.

Let's briefly talk about inspiration.

It's hard for me to pin down inspiration. Often, it happens backwards, the connections come after the initial concept is born. At first I am usually working with an idea. Then suddenly a text or a poem comes my way, that feels very close to that idea. Over the years, I have developed a kind of a visual vocabulary, a set of idioms and concepts that lead me further and further down the road. The inspiration comes within the trajectory of the work itself.

Some of your performances have lasted for long stretches of time, such as Ennoia (2002) in which you were immersed for six hours, curled up like an embryo in a water-filled octagonal basin, reminiscent of a medieval baptismal font. What does the duration of time feel like during these multi-hour performances, and what is your relationship with the outside world?

In Ennoia I treated my body as a vehicle of expression. I was tired and cold, but what I counted for was the video image, which was first recorded life by a camera that I suspended above the basin. This is important to me, to always be in charge of the video and photography, not only in the editing process which I do myself, but even and especially during a performative act. I often work with sensors and attachments so that I can shoot photography and video via remote systems. The image in Ennoia shows delicate changes, for instance the movement of my arm, the shortness of breath. The work is not about myself though. It's about any being. My sense of the self and of my body was no longer subjected to the everyday needs or goals such as basic comfort. The sonic experience came as a surprise--my hearing got extremely sharp, to the point that I felt hurt by any noise or sound arriving from the outside world. Later, I was told by a Zen master that some forms of meditation create a similar physical condition.

Some recurring motifs in your works are octagonal spaces, curling up into an embryo-like position, closed eyes, immersions and the outlining of one's body. Can you talk about a few of these motifs in relation to a few specific installations?

Our presence in the world is both unique and anonymous. In my work, the Self (any-body) is humble and quiet, perhaps even muted. It exists lying down, curled up or moving slowly and only within its own reach, as if attached to earth by invisible forces. This can have many open-ended connotations. I am interested in both poetic and political expression. Perhaps it is an expression of resistance towards the military, the powerful, the marching, and the loud...

In Drawing Lethe, a large-scale public project at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in NYC, passersby were invited to join me in complete silence inside a space of a landscape-like canvas covering the entire floor of the building. We would lie down and draw with charcoal, leaving abstract marks around our silhouettes. This simple gesture resulted in a gradually changing and darkening drawing where lines and marks felt like a living organism or like waters of a river (Lethe is the mythological river of Oblivion). I installed sound composition in the pits around the palm trees. When people entered the installation they could hear soft layers of noises and voices that I recorded on the site of WFC, several months prior to the installation. It was September 2006, and the project took place just a few steps away from Ground Zero.

A similar installation happened the same year inside a 12th century castle in Portugal, bordering with Spain. While working on Anamnesis (Swiatllo Dnia), I discovered that I was more interested in the quiet preparations for the act of drawing than the drawing itself. I filmed hours and days of sewing the sheets of white canvas, sometimes blowing in the wind like waves of the ocean, as we worked with a group of local women. I recorded their voices, asking them to list all things they ever did with the earth (most were farmers at some point in their life), and I also asked them to say specific words like "silence" or "light of the day," all in Portuguese. Hence, for audiences that don't speak the language, in the video the melodic lines of the voices feel like abstract sounds. This piece will be on view on September 13, part of Perform Williamsburg 2009 organized by Urban Art Projects.

Phlegethon-Milczenie and Keimai 3 on the other hand, are examples of installations that are more enclosed and solitary, and they both are involved more explicitly with historical events. In both projects, I have gradually collected different groups of original documents, mostly from 1930s Germany, which I then composed together as a kind of sculptural collage. I self-shot on video and self-photographed the encounter between my body and the documents. I drew with my eyes closed around my body, leaving marks on the surfaces of the Archive. There are other motifs and forms that come back in my work. In my large-scale drawings there are semi-abstract figures, who appear to be awaiting, as if suspended in space and time. An architectural form of a medieval baptismal font, which you mentioned previously, recurs in a series of installations, White Chalice (Ennoia). The octagonal sculpture is filled with water, and projected into the water is a video image showing a curled-up figure moving along the walls of the vessel, as if permanently trapped inside, a virtual memory of my own filmed immersion.

You have said that your "work is about observing from the inside towards the outside, while being inside of an artistic object, surrendered to it." In your artistic career to date, what would you say has been the most challenging experience for you? And which has been the most rewarding?

Being an artist is a little like being a poet or a shaman. The economic and social uncertainty comes with this basic paradox: as an artist, one is needed and admired while at the same time, superfluous and unwanted. This creates a context for the eternal struggle for survival. It's not only about facing continuous economic uncertainty, regardless of the advancement of one's career. There is also a deeper kind of responsibility, which is not towards yourself but towards your work. So you need to tend to the ideas that you give birth to, like a self-employed gardener. You remain alone in that act. The greatest rewards come from exactly the same source as the greatest pains...

One of your more recent works, Keimai 3 (2008), was inspired by the life of Helene Mayer, a German-Jewish fencer who was invited by Hitler to take part in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. In this performative video and photographic installation, you create a parallel between drawing and fencing. Tell us a little about this project and what themes you reflect upon.

Helen Mayer was a young German woman and a successful Olympic fencer who, while still in high school, loved to write long papers about Goethe's and Schiller's poetry. After 1933, it was discovered that her father was Jewish. In 1935 the Nuremberg law took her citizenship away. She became a citizen of no country. This paradoxical case of "double body"--German and Jewish--speaks among others of the fragile state of our democracy which, according to Giorgio Agamben, poses still exactly the same threats as it did during the upheaval of the Nazi regime. Quite recently, in an enlightened country in Europe, certain people have suddenly and legally become non-humans. Through this mirror of history, I want to look into current times. As you know, for instance in France today, you can be stopped at the Paris airport for no reason at all, and you will be kept captive for up to 4 days, with no legal rights. Perhaps you have brown eyes or you smiled in a wrong way... We tend to be very secure in our sense of freedom and we assume these things will never happen to us. So did frau Helene... Going back to Keimai 3, (in Greek "I lie down") drawing here is a gesture towards history. The ancient sport of fencing is also one of the oldest forms of fight. Cutting the body with a saber corresponds with cutting and wounding the fragile surface of paper with a chunk of charcoal. The figure in Keimai 3 holds a saber and at times a Chinese sword. Her body is anonymous, gesturing with the ancient sword while as if merging with the documents, her skin is as fragile as the surface of the papers.... The third element in the video installation is a musical composition, collaged from about 20 tracks. I recorded a vocalist whom I asked to sing fragments of medieval anonymous compositions. I then merged and altered these tracks to create a sense of a chorus-like waving of voices.

You've worked with children quite a bit in several of your video performances, like Drawing Meadow (2005) and Drawing the City (Day One, Day Two) (2004), where groups of children have joined you in drawing and painting onto large-scale canvas. What words of advice would you give to any of them who aspire to become artists?

Children are like water or like fire. Uncontainable, unpredictable, fluid, free, perhaps violently so... They bring with them contingency, which I am very interested in, while I work with otherwise carefully designed installations. I set up a controlled environment--even a charcoal drawing involves such a controlled structure, where the rectangular shape of the paper becomes inhabited by marks and by accidental traces. In the installations, it is the canvas covering the ground or the sculptural object and the designed duration. But then the work invites contingency through the material used and the interactivity itself, like with children inhabiting my drawing. Ephemerality resulting from contingency allows for a dialogue between the composition of the work and the outside forces.

I think for an aspiring artist of any age, the main thing is to listen to one's intuition, even as a child, and to find avenues that feel extremely close and moving. It may be books, music, etc. When something, like a painting or a poem moves you deeply, that usually is a sign or a hint for a young mind, it tells you where to go... Being an artist is not about external circumstances as much as it is about how much you can grow inside. So, my advice would be to build your own ideas, collect feelings and hopes, narrow down your passions, and then, build your portfolio...

I see that you became an Artist in Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (CSW) in Warsaw and that you received a 2009 Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work from New York Foundation for the Arts. That's wonderful. Can you tell us about any new projects you are currently working on?

I am delighted to have been this year a recipient of the two awards you mentioned. The artist residency at CSW will have a continuation in a solo exhibition scheduled for spring 2010. For this exhibition, I am developing a series of new works, including an object-based installation, a group of video projections, photographs and drawings as well as a sound piece, all titled Sustenazo (in Greek "lamenting together"). The fragmented and poetically altered historical narrative inspires this series of works, as based on actual events. At the moment my initial documentary impulse is gradually morphing into a new poetic composition...

One final question... from The Proust Questionnaire: Who are your favorite heroines in world history?

So hard to choose... Hildegard von Bingen comes to mind, the 11th-century composer who was also an amazing writer and mystic. Most recently, like many people around the world, I often think of Neda Agah-Soltan.