MuseumNext

YouTube is an incredibly useful tool for museums, here are five ways that your institution can use YouTube.

1. Meet the artist, curator, historian etc
The TATE YouTube channel contains beautifully produced films including ‘Meet the Artist: Mat Collishaw’ shown below. Posting films of artists talking about their work to coincide with exhibition openings is both a great marketing tool and a brilliant way to extend the gallery experience on to the web in a way that adds to it’s audiences enjoyment of art.

Of course an artist isn’t the only person a Museum can interview, for example the National Media Museum in the UK has an interview with Director John Carpenter to coincide with the showing of his film The Thing.

2. Ask people what they think!
The Smithsonian Institute wanted the public to give them their opinion on what a museum in the digital age should look like. They posted a video on YouTube asking people what they thought and received both text and video responses, including the one below:

Other good examples of asking for public opinion are iConfess which asked visitors to the Matress Factory in the United States what they think of the Museum and The Black list Project at the Brooklyn Museum.

3. Have a crowd-sourcing competition
During the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturday on October 6, 2007 visitors were invited to film a one minute video and upload it to YouTube. The entries in this competition were very impressive, my favortie is “Art Thief” shown below:

4. Extend the Museum
As a physical space a Museum has certain limitations, for example you don’t get many live animals within a typical Museum and few include a rain forest! The Manchester Museum YouTube channel extends what the venue can do with natural history (among may other subjects) with a series of films about Amphibians shot in Costa Rica.

The Manchester Museum have 340 films on their channel, making them one of the most active institutions on this social media platform. the variety and quality of what they have produced, makes them stand out as an organisation we can all learn something from on YouTube.

5. Be viral
One of the great tools on YouTube is the ability to embed the films within blogs and websites. This lets people who like what you are doing, spread the word about your organisation (or television programme as shown below).

Many of the Museums which I’ve looked at on YouTube don’t allow their content to be shared in this way, and in doing so, they are losing out on this potential viral marketing.

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This article was written by Jim Richardson, founder of MuseumNext and managing director of Sumo, an agency with a reputation for developing innovative digital marketing.

Jim regularly speaks at conferences and contributes to publications on social media and digital marketing.