Instagram is a photo sharing App for iPhone, which allows people to share real-time photos with their followers. Over 12 million people from all over the world are using the free App.

Instagram makes sharing photos, and looking at pictures from the people your following effortless, through an intuitive interface which delivers what could be described as a ‘visual Twitter’, a stream of pictures from around the world which give you a glimpse into people’s lives.

I feel that Instagram can offer museums a great platform to connect with the public, afterall museums are visual places and this makes it easy to capture and share pictures of events, objects and exhibitions in seconds.

Instagram also allows you to share your pictures in to Twitter and Facebook making it even more useful. Rather then seeing Instagram as yet another social media platform that you would need to create content for, you can use it as a tool to put pictures on your existing networks, and in doing so, also tip your toe into this new social arena.

Brooklyn Museum is one of the first institutions to use Instagram, and after posting just 111 photo’s they have 6595 followers. Followers are interacting with Brooklyn Museum by commenting on the images they post, or simply by liking them.

Getting started.

- Download the Instagram App (iPhone / iPod only)
- Secure your museums username
- Post a few pictures and experiment with the filters
- Share content into Facebook and Twitter
- Tell your followers in these networks that your now on Instagram
- Ask for feedback
- Interact with followers
- Show your museum in new and interesting ways
- Use hashtags
- Use the Instagram API to put the pictures on your website

The following presentation was made by MuseumNext founder Jim Richardson at the Gulf Arts and Cultural Leaders meeting in Qatar in November 2011.

Today I want to talk about a vision for the museum for the digital age that we now find ourselves to be living in. You are building the next generation of great museums here in the Gulf, and I think you have an incredible opportunity to move beyond your European and American counterparts by using technology to create a better museum.

I have been told that historically there is not a museum going culture in the Gulf and that this means that to a certain extent your local audiences lack an understanding of what a museum does and why they should visit.

Personally, I feel that this presents an incredible opportunity to move beyond traditional museum models and give audiences exceptional experiences.

In truth, the museum has always evolved. From its origins in Ancient Greece, through the private collections of European Aristocracy and wealthy merchants to the public galleries of the 18th and 19th centuries with their focus on educating the masses.

Today the museum must continue to change. This is in part both enabled and in response to technology in the world around us, and the changing expectations that our audiences have because of this technology.

Consumer technology has put incredibly powerful tools in to the hands of the masses. A cell phone can guide it’s owner around a city, a computer game can be controlled by the movements of a player and Google have put the knowledge of the world at everyone’s fingertips.

One of the biggest changes in technology has been the evolution of the internet from a place to find information into a forum for collaboration, a place to create, curate and share online and I think this could be a metaphor for a museum of the digital age.

Through this more social web, our audiences have found there voice, and I think that exciting possibilities exist in encouraging them to see the museum as another space in which to express themselves.

I am not suggesting that a member of the public can be more knowledgeable about a collection then a curator, nor are they a replacement for this expert. However, everyone can have a valid opinion on art, and even the most unexpected person can add important information to a collection. So perhaps it is naïve to think that the best expertise always exists within a museum.

Beyond the value of this kind of interaction to the institution, I feel that a more participatory experience based on personal observation better facilitates outcomes which are of value to the individual.

Lets look at three examples of digital engage from Brooklyn Museum, TATE and a group of smaller institutions from across Yorkshire in England.

Click! was a crowdsourced and crowd curated exhibition which took it’s inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, which asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals.

Members of the public were asked to submit photographs on the theme “Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” along with an artist statement.

These pictures were uploaded through the museum’s website, where an online community scored the images.

The top ranked 20% of the images submitted were then displayed in the gallery according to their relative ranking from the juried process.

What is perhaps most interesting is that when a panel of experts ranked the images, there were a lot of similarities between their selection and those picked by the crowd.

I think this is a great example of a museum using technology to get audiences to participate in culture. This made people step beyond browsing an exhibition, and offered them perhaps a richer experience by asking them to think about what makes a good photograph, what makes one image more successful than another and whether they represent the “Changing faces of Brooklyn”.

TATE Modern in London also looked to engage audiences with ‘one-to-one with the artist’ a digital project which accompanied the Ai Weiwei sunflower seeds installation which ran from late 2010 till May 2011.

This invited members of the public to record videos in which they ask the artist questions about his art, his work and his life. Just under 23,000 questions were recorded, and Weiwei took the time to answer some of these with his own video responses.

Another example of dialogue around art comes from Yorkshires Favourite Painting, a project which asked members of the public to pick their favourite artwork from over 30 participating museums and galleries and say why you liked it and where they would like to hang a replica, the prize which was offered to those who took part.

Over 600 people participated, taking the time to think about what art meant to them and gave very personal responses to art. So one painting could feature in stories of mythology, marriage, beauty, childhood, home and even prompt someone to respond with a poem.

While these musings on art are far from a curatorial point of view, they give a different perspective on the paintings, and perhaps one which the public will find easier as a starting point from which to explore the collection.

I few this kind of participatory experience as the next step in the evolution of museums, which have in the past century transformed from being primarily focused on their own scholarly pursuits such as collecting and researching to becoming defined more by how it serves its audiences and how they can facilitate the experiences these people have in their institutions be they educational, social, emotional or even entertainment.

While these projects have on the whole proved successful, I think that this is just the start of a revolution that will create a museum with the buzz of the constantly changing social web, a place of exchange where people come together to be inspired, to be creative and learn from each other.

The idea of this museum for a digital age won’t appeal to everyone, and I think that highlights another exciting opportunity that technology provides. Today a museum creates one experience for all it’s audiences, but in our reimagined institution, every visitor could have an experience tailored for them.

Today I am going to look at three experiences of audiences interacting with a fictional museum of the future, our guides on this journey will be Akram, a 12 year old boy who is visiting with his family, Mohammad a student who is studying in a nearby city and Nina, an American academic with an interest in the museum’s collection.

Lets start our journey with Mohammad.

He is introduced to the museum through a smart phone application which he reads about in a newspaper. This app takes archive photographs from the museum and overlays these on the location where they were taken through augmented reality.

This takes the museum collection beyond it’s walls and makes it accessible to the public in a way which makes these old pictures seem more relevant to contemporary audiences. It generates conversations about local history and is perhaps the best kind of marketing, something which spreads virally and gets people talking about the museum.

This smart phone application also invites contributions from the public, so Mohammad can add information to a photograph about a shop in which his grandfather once worked.

This could be just a short note, or perhaps he would use his smart-phone to record a film of his grandfather speaking about working in this place and life during the period when the picture was taken and share this with the museum.

The app encourages Mohammad to visit an exhibition of these photographs at the museum, where he is able to appreciate the images both as large prints and through large interactive touch screens which allow him to zoom into archival photography on an interactive map.

During his visit, he learns that the museum wants to contrast these archival images with contemporary images, which they are asking members of the public to contribute through a competition. As a keen photographer, Mohammad is pleased to have the opportunity to have his images displayed within the museum.

Both the chance to contribute information about the historic images and to participate in capturing contemporary photography of the city give Mohammad the opportunity to feel part of the museum, this is an institution that values his opinion and contribution and therefore, he feels a sense of ownership.

I think this sense of ownership is key to building a community around an art institution.

A contemporary photography competition lets the museum reach out to a large niche audience, those interested in taking pictures. Museums around the world have used this kind of model to attract those interested in video, design, craft and art through similar calls for participation.

While Mohammad is experiencing the museums collections in person, at the other side of the world American academic Nina is browsing the collection online, having discovered it collection through a Google search.

Like most museums it’s website contains information about their collection, displaying a picture and description of each item, but this goes one step further by learning from how the visitor interacts with the data.

For example, as Nina browses the collection the website might learn that she is interested in modern Islamic art, and therefore, tailor the content she sees to suggest other items from the collection, upcoming exhibitions or events that might interest her.

This increases the time that she spends on the site and encourages her to come back.

This kind of feature was made popular by Amazon, and it’s ‘customers who bought this also bought’ feature. Why should a museum website not work in a similar way if it gives her a better experience and makes the museum seem more relevant to her?

The website also lets Nina bookmark items or build collections of items that interest her and invite others to view this and to comment on the items she has selected.

One of the collections that Nina has created has been shared with a group of her students, and she can log-in and join in with the conversation about the items.

This kind of dialogue is encouraged by the museum, and curators and other interested individuals have also engaged with the students, answering questions or discussing the merits of the items that Nina has selected.

The museum might give website visitors the chance to take this experience further, inviting someone like Nina not only to print out a picture of an item, but to print a photopolmer resin replica through a 3D printer.

This technology was recently used by an exhibition in the United States to print a replica of King Tuts mummy for an exhibition on ancient Egypt.

This would allow Nina and her class to look at items from the collection in detail, without ever stepping foot in the museum, it presents a new frontier in the concept of sharing a museum collection.

Meanwhile, back at the museum Akram and his family are arriving for their visit.

When they walk through the doors Akram, and his brothers are given handheld computer tablets which give them access to digital experiences to accompany their visit to the museum.

In the lobby of the museum projections update with the latest activity and comments from around the museum. Two visitors are discussing an object from the collection, one is standing in the gallery space with the object while the other is thousands of miles away in America, viewing the collection online.

Other activity includes visitors collecting objects for their virtual collections, adding addition information to the museum’s collection database and sharing objects with friends.

This shows visitors that the museum is alive and as constantly changing as the internet. This sets the museum very much in the present, rather than being an institution focused on the past.

As his brothers race in to the first gallery, Akram logs into his tablet computer using his log in from the Facebook social networking website, this allows the device to personalise the content for him. Another user can be looking at the same object, and be fed totally different information based on their age, interests and experience that they want from the museum.

Someone looking for a cognitive experience might get a video in which an artist speaks about their work, while someone is more interested in an emotional experience might get questions about how an artwork makes them feel.

For Akram, it has scanned his interests as recorded in his Facebook profile and it suggests a game which will let him compete against other visitors his age by finding facts about the objects in the gallery. He must collect objects and answer questions to unlock hidden information about the collection, giving him an incentive to go beyond the usual six seconds a visitor spends with an item.

Increasingly the way in which children learn is being influenced by computer games, and including games as part of the museums learning experience will appeal to those who enjoy learning in this way.

As Akram walks around the gallery the way he uses the tablet is tracked by the museums computer system, it feeds him content relevant to each object he looks at and learns from every interaction measuring how long each he spends with each item and which digital information is most popular.

This informs not only which information should be displayed to Akram, but also the design of future exhibitions based on how people are moving around the gallery spaces.

In addition to tracking through his tablet computer, some museums are starting to look to the world of retailing to build up data about how people are using their spaces. They run data from close circuit cameras through computer programmes to measure which areas have the most footfall and linger times.

In retail this measures which are the most valuable spaces within stores, and in museums it can do the same. This would allow curators to locate blockbuster items in the spaces where they can be most appreciated.

I was listening to a piece on the radio last week in the UK about a loyalty programme which the countries biggest supermarket chain runs. The person who developed this scheme which awards points which can be redeemed against future purchases for every product bought said that the value in the scheme was the knowledge it gave them about their customers. This knowledge gave them the power to stay relevant to their customers and I think museums could learn from this.

As Akram enters the second gallery, he notices the digital projections on one of the walls changing. This has been triggered by him entering the room and some of the objects this displays now reflect items he has ‘liked’ when browsing the museum’s website.

In other spaces in the museum, these digital projections might show items that will surprise him, challenge him, or intrigue him.

As Akram browses the collection the handheld tablet shows relevant information about each object, but also prompts him with questions, giving him the option to move his experience beyond a passive one, and leave his thoughts and opinions.

But do the opinions of a twelve year old really merit sharing, do they deserve a place within a museum? I believe that they do, because allowing Akram to have a say and validating this by sharing it in the museums digital space is going to encourage him to engage with the museum and strengthen his interest in their collections.

But this digital channel is not only the preserve of the visitors, it is also used extensively by museum staff. If Akram asks a question about an item in the collection, he will receive a video answer from an expert on the subject. This takes visitors virtually behind the scenes and gives the passionate experts working within the museum a voice in this digital space.

As Akram enters the next gallery, the handheld tablet tells him that a Facebook friend has bookmarked an item in this room. This displays the item and the comment that his friend left. This kind of personal recommendation allows visitors to turn the museum experience into a social one, even if they are visiting alone.

Akrams interaction with the museum reaches beyond it’s walls, broadcasting his thoughts and the relevant items to his friends on social networking websites.

When he returns home, perhaps Akram would receive something from the museum to reward his interaction with the collection. An example I like of this comes from the National Maritime Museum in London, where a visitor who uses their compass card to learn about and collect objects receives a personalised ebook, which references the items that they have interacted with on their visit.

In Conclusion

So in conclusion, I want to leave you with five points that I hope you will take away from this stroll through the museum of the digital age.

1. Technology: The scenarios that I’ve spoken about today aren’t science fiction. This technology is all very real and museums are making use of it, but nobody is yet using it to it’s full potential.

2. Expectations: People have access to incredible technology in their homes and I believe that this is changing their expectations of the world around them. If museums don’t do digital, then they risk seeming irrelevant in a digital world.

3. Participation: I believe that offering museum visitors participatory experiences is offering them better experiences. We should want our visitors the opportunity to step beyond passive visits and create new ways to encourage them to think about our collections and their individual place in the world.

4. Personalisation: We need to recognise that different people want different experiences from the museum, and create personalised experiences to appeal to the different motivations.

5. Future: By creating a more participatory culture in our museums, we can learn from our audiences. Giving us the knowledge to stay relevant in a constantly changing world.

What would your museum for the digital age look like?

It has been five months since Google+ launched, and while the initial buzz around this new social network being a potential Facebook killer hasn’t proved correct, the service has ‘slowly’ built a user base of over 50 million.

This week Google+ added Pages, brand-specific accounts for businesses. Companies like Pepsi, GAP and McDonald’s have been quick to set up profiles for themselves, but is there a place for museums and galleries on this new social network, and for those struggling to keep up with their institutions profiles on Facebook and Twitter is it really worthwhile adding Google+ to the mix?

Here are a few reasons to consider it:

1. Landgrab
Google don’t verify that Google+ business page are being set up by someone authorised to do so by the organisation in question, so it is important for museums and galleries grab their pages before someone else does.

2. Google+ doesn’t have to be hard work
You don’t have to create unique content for this new social network. If your already producing posts for Facebook and Twitter, just replicate some of these for Google+ (Disclaimer: though in time you may find this audience does need different content).

3. Video
When Google+ launched earlier in the year it included a ‘video conferencing’ tool called ‘hangouts’. This is also available for business users, including museums and I feel that this has huge potential.

Imagine a curator hosting ‘hangout’ sessions and engaging in discussions with followers, I think that is an exciting prospect.

4. Less competition
While Facebook and Twitter have more users then Google+, they also have the disadvantage of a lot more competition for the attention of users.

Google+ lets you reach audiences through less cluttered newsfeeds.

5. Search
While Facebook uses a walled garden approach where content can only be accessed by members, Google+ is an open platform so someone doesn’t need to subscribe to your newsfeed to read them.

Search is Google’s big advantage over Facebook and you can guarantee that they will leverage this to make it worth businesses, and museums being on Google+.

Conclusion

It is early days and Google+ may thrive or struggle to survive, but I feel that it is worth museums and galleries reserving their Google+ profile and dipping a toes in the water.

Has your museum set up a profile on Google+, what response have you had so far?

While it is easy to get carried away with the number of followers that your museum attracts on Twitter or Facebook, it’s important to be objective about why you are using social media.

Engagement is quality rather than quantity – regular sharing between a number of fans on Facebook demonstrates more engagement than a high number of fans who only leave one post on the wall and never come back. Starbucks and Coke are prime examples of mass scale Facebook groups with low levels of engagement.

At the start of any social media project, you should think about your goals, and it is these objectives rather than how popular your organisation appears to be that matter most when measuring our online success.

There are hard and soft measures for demonstrating success. Hard metrics include standard web metrics such as:

• Visits and referrals
• Search volume terms
• Analysis of stats to evolve procedures into more effective ones
• Numbers of followers, fans, friends

These hard metrics make it far easier to record the return on investment in social media than traditional media, it is for example virtually impossible to accurately measure how many people act on a newspaper advert.

Taking the influence that social media can have on the public further, and trying to measure how many people who interact with you online visit the physical museum is a little harder, but in no way impossible.

In 2009 TATE offered fans on their Facebook page a discount voucher for an exhibition by British artist Chris Odofi. This voucher was redeemed by over 10,000 people, showing a direct link between those interacting with the gallery on Facebook and those paying to attend an exhibition.

In addition to using tools like vouchers to measure the effectiveness of social media, you should also include relevant questions in your annual visitor surveys, finding out if your audiences are active on websites like Facebook and Twitter and asking if they are aware that your museum has a presence on them.

Also measure the quality of your interactions, for example if you ask people a question on Facebook, how many people respond and what are they writing? Facebook’s Insight analytics gives you the tools to measure how much engagement is taking place around your content on the social network.

You would also look beyond what people are saying directly to you, monitoring any mention of your museum on social media platforms and recording both positive and negative responses.

Why measure?

While social media can seem like a low cost resource, it can take a lot of time to manage these platforms and you may need to justify your activities, especially if you have a management team who are sceptical about its usefulness.

Measuring the response to your museums and to social media activity is also important to record progress, record success and to learn from – you will never really know if what you’re doing is having any impact if you don’t record.

I also feel that museums can have tremendous success using social media, and this should be recorded to justify the time managing these websites.

How do you measure your social media success?

Updating the Social Media presence for your museum may seem overwhelming, with Twitter and Facebook updates alone demanding perhaps half an hour in your already busy day.

One way to approach this is with a Social Media Editorial Plan which is used to plan out your content for the week or even the month ahead.

Jesse Ringham, Digital Communications Manager at TATE told me, ‘We have a weekly meeting which brings together people from across our press, marketing, visitor experience and digital teams to discuss what worked in the previous week, what we have coming up and to plan the week ahead. This means that you know each day what you need to do, and it gives you more time to respond to tweets or Facebook posts from the public’.

An editorial calendar doesn’t replace reactionary tweeting or Facebook posts, but acts as a backbone to your social media activity, ensuring that your audiences get fresh and interesting content even when you’re busy.

As Jesse described in the case of TATE, ideally this plan is created through a quick weekly meeting, which provides a forum for people from across your museum to make suggestions. The content should be steered by the overall goal of your social media activity and by the audiences that each network connects you with.

As well as bringing together different voices from across the organisation, an editorial meeting can hopefully share the work which needs to be done across a number of people.

Some activities such as blogging are especially demanding, and it is essential that the burden of creating content isn’t all on one individual, not only because of the time that this takes, but also because you will get better content if a range of voices and opinions are included.

Mark out the content which you will publish day-by-day across the social media platforms that you are active on and try and establish regular features to make your life easier. It is fine duplicate some of content that you broadcast on Facebook on Twitter and vice-versa.

Some museums use web based calendar software such as Google Calendar to share their social media schedule with colleagues. This is especially useful when a number of people are delivering the editorial plan across different social media channels.

Once the plan has been agreed, automated updates can be scheduled using a third party website like Hootsuite. This is especially useful for planning updates for weekends.

A social media editorial meeting can also be a forum for housekeeping, for example agreeing a hashtag for an exhibition or event which will be used across all social media platforms.

How does your museum plan out it’s social media activity? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

In many museums you will find enthusiastic members of staff who understand that social media can play an important role in a museum, but who find it difficult to persuade their management team, board or the local government who manage their service to let them proceed.

Social Media Guidelines are one way to help those with concerns by showing that you are managing any risk associated with social media, and setting clear boundaries around how museum staff will participate on these websites.

Another driver for creating Social Media Guidelines may be that a growing number of people in your organisation want to use social media and as this activity is decentralised you need to provide guidance across your museum.

If you are just starting to use social media on your museums behalf, and your under no pressure to formalise the work that you are doing from management, then you probably don’t need guidelines, but as you get to grips with social media tools it makes sense to share what you learn by creating guidelines for your organisation.

The guidelines will typically contain:

- An overview of what the museum is trying to achieve with social media
- Approval procedures and contacts
- Personal use of social media
- Tone of voice when speaking on behalf of the museum
- How images should be attributed and copyright issues
- How the museum’s brand should be reproduced on social networks
- How to deal with complaints
- A directory of all the social media networks on which the museum is active on
- Measuring success

Your social media guidelines should be a living document; changing frequently as the way that the museum uses social media evolves.

The National Museums Scotland Social Media Guidelines and this list of not-for-profit Social Media Guidelines offer valuable insight into what these documents might look like.

Which of our collections best lends themselves to impulse sharing online?
Which of our collections are people most willing to talk about online?

These two questions have framed a series of small-scale trial projects in Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM) over the past 6 months.

The trial I’ll be talking about focused on compelling historic photography (photographic collections that is, not photographs of objects). Highly visual and immediately powerful archive photographs.

Using our criteria below, photographic collections were carefully selected and shared in Flickr, Facebook and Historypin. I’ll only be referencing our findings from the first two sites. Historypin is well worth exploring but it doesn’t provide account holders with analytics tools as yet.

Try to Define Compelling

We wanted to share images in Flickr that immediately resonated with our audience on an emotional level and without context.

“Immediate emotional resonance” is of course, entirely subjective. But the point of this trial was to share visual content that didn’t require an explanation for it to provoke a response. Images that have historical significance but that are, above all, compelling. Immediately awe-inspiring. Instantly strange, beautiful or funny.

Captions were included to provide context and build on the image but they were secondary.

Well-meaning collections-based museum projects can lie stagnant in a social media platform like Facebook or Tumblr. Why? Often, because not enough attention has been paid to what is likely to compel a response. The source content does not inspire the interaction that defines the platform.

Take an image of a Roman urn. It bears cultural significance. The story behind the ashes inside the urn is fascinating and tragic. The intricacy of the craftsmanship on show appeals to some. But for most people on Tumblr or Facebook (especially those with no previous affiliation to your organisation), does this image immediately resonate or intrigue? Does it inspire the level of response the museum was hoping for?

Without immediacy, we lose the opportunity to communicate with our audience on these sites- however rich the content or however much we can prove it is relevant to their lives.

So what museum images are likely to compel in these online spaces?

The short answer, in my view, is anything that How To Be a Retronaut would share.

The site defines itself as a time machine with ‘capsules’ of historic image collections uploaded every day. The capsules are carefully curated. They are era-specific, event-specific, moment-specific. Abandoned New York movie theatres. Mug shots of destitute Victorian criminals. 1920s Egypt in colour. Yugoslav war memorials. The last surviving witness of the Abraham Lincoln assassination.

It’s a popular site averaging 30,000 visitors a day, and over a million a month. Each capsule is generally shared a thousand times by viewers. The likely reach for each capsule is beyond calculation.

These images are the stuff museums and archives have in abundance. So neatly sidestepping the interminable question of copyright, why are many museums reaching only a fraction of this audience with our collections online?

Chris Wild of How To Be a Retronaut suggests the following “(Museums and archives should) forget about history and think about imagination. (Focus on) the images that tap into magic and the sublime. The images that disrupt people’s model of time, fracture it, break it apart. Looking at these images, viewers should encounter eternity and their own mortality”.

You can watch his full presentation here (try to ignore the clacking marbles sound. That’s his goggles brushing against the lapel mic).

How To Be a Retronaut’s model is powerful because the capsules are immaculately presented. The images are cherry picked, the themes are ultra specific and thoughtfully pitched. Instead of a larger set of images which relate to a more generic theme, they’ve recognised that the strength of the content is in its laser-beam focused nicheness. Nicheness that is designed to arouse human intrigue. To stir your imagination, not demand prior knowledge or interest.

For example, ‘Abandoned Russian Gun Ship’ instead of ‘Russian Gun Ship in World War 2’. One is plainly historical, the other compels exploration. ‘Abandoned Russian Gun Ship’ conjures images of the people who worked on it, shrouds the images in mystery or sadness, encourages the viewer to ask questions about its past.

How can museums, libraries and archives be more creative when theming and presenting collections online?

Enable Impulse Sharing

Bloggers crave compelling photography. And we wanted them to use our images.

Micro-blogging platforms like Tumblr base themselves heavily on impulse sharing and spreadable content. The site makes it as straightforward as possible for users to “reblog” the posts of other users.

Impulse sharing requires very easily accessible content. The images which we’d uploaded to Flickr were downloadable and free to reuse as part of the Commons project. (Not so with our images in Facebook. We were less interested in seeing how the images from Facebook encourage reuse across the wider web. A future trial may well investigate the benefits of doing this).

We found that once a blogger had gone to the relatively small trouble of lifting an image from our Flickr site and dropping it in their blog (and almost always providing a credit and backlink to TWAM), this quickly seeded sharing activity within that platform. It worked especially well in Tumblr.

You’ll see this image has ‘930 notes’. A large number of these notes are ‘likes’ and comments from other Tumblr users. However, about 300-400 of the notes are ‘reblogs’. If we very conservatively estimate each Tumblr account has an average of 50 followers, we could reasonably approximate that this image has been viewed at least 20,000 times. That is just one image in one blogging platform. The likely overall reach for the 300 images we’ve shared on Flickr is inestimable.

How To Be a Retronaut became aware of our freely available images on Flickr and have so far posted up 3 capsules from our collections. The capsules have been shared over 2,000 times.

A key finding from our trial with Flickr Commons was that the mass sharing of images often only became possible when a user defined or redefined the context of the photograph. A context you’d otherwise never have applied to a photographic collection. The best and funniest example is My Daguerreotype Boyfriend Tumblr site- ‘Where early photography meets extreme hotness’. Tens of thousands of users visit this site.

Enabling reuse was not just about increasing the number of people who view our content. It was about letting our audience redefine the value of the content.

Explore the Immediately Personal

We really wanted to test Facebook’s potential for crowdsourcing stories and information about our photographic collections.

While both are powerful photo-sharing platforms, we realised the audiences for Flickr and Facebook are quite different. Flickr is more serious about photography. Facebook is more centred on the photograph’s connection to a user’s identity and relationships.

So, slightly tweaking our maxim on immediate emotional resonance, we opted to share museum images that were immediately personal to a defined audience.

Again, this is of course entirely subjective. All museum collections are personally relevant to somebody. Our take on ‘immediately personal’ was about significantly large and easily targeted audiences who would understand the image’s relevance to their identity on Facebook.

Nostalgia and a sense of place is a powerful focal point for many Facebook users. This was made obvious when we discovered the Facebook groups ‘Old Pictures of Newcastle East End’ (4,926 members) and ‘Old Pictures of Newcastle West End’ (5,204 members). Both are run by enthusiastic Facebook users and are not in any way affiliated with a cultural heritage organisation. A few hundred images were on each site alongside thousands of active conversations inspired by the photographs. (It’s worth mentioning that neither site is updated very regularly any more).

Clearly, there’s a very real appetite on Facebook for old photography that strongly connects to a person’s past.

We replicated the Newcastle photo sites and set up the Facebook page ‘Old Photographs of Sunderland’. Images of towns, buildings, streets, schools, places of works, iconic industries of Sunderland from the past 150 years. Photos we knew would resonate with a defined and potentially large audience (Sunderland was declared Facebook capital of the UK in 2010), and photos that would encourage them to share stories.

Generically branding the page ‘Old Photographs of Sunderland’ with no explicit reference to TWAM was intended to help seed its democracy. We set up a dedicated page instead of sharing the content as an album within a Sunderland museum Facebook profile. Concealing the content within a profile makes it less easily searchable, and without its own brand, not as immediately understandable.

A £300 Facebook advert was used to promote the site to anyone living within a 16km radius of Sunderland.

The response was positive, with 450 people liking the page within 6 months. Most importantly, hundreds of diverse conversations were initiated about the images (NB- not a single conversation took place on the ‘Discussions’ tab!).  Small communities emerged, with a core number of followers assuming an informal admin role. TWAM rarely needing to step in and respond to questions.

Many users spoke to friends and family offline to seek local knowledge which they’d then feed back to the site. Other followers only became aware of the site after they were spotted in pictures and notified by contacts. They arrived at the page to tag themselves in photographs and share information:

The photographs succeeded in engaging an audience on Facebook because they were immediate, personal and directly targeted at a defined and large community of users. They could understand why we wanted to share the content with them; it didn’t require a leap of imagination or understanding on their part.

What opportunities are there for serendipitous engagement with a museum collection on Facebook? Or if explicit personal relevance is key, what themes besides nostalgia and sense of place resonate with Facebook audiences who aren’t already following your museum?

To Android or Not to Android? Should this really be the question? And yet it seems so!

As an ever-present Android user, I feel like a third world citizen in the market for museum-related applications; a sense reinforced by the fact that nearly 6 times as many apps exist for iOS devices – iPhone and iPad – as do for Android devices.

Many have said this is down to museum professionals, and their exposure to the iOS devices, as well as ease and simplicity surrounding development, deployment and monetisation on the Apple App Store compared to the Android Marketplace, but when the figures stack up in favour of Android, in terms of market share, some 50% as of mid-2011, aren’t museums simply spiting their nose?

Of course I shouldn’t tar all institutions with the same brush. Some have developed for a cross-platform world, the British Museum, Museum of London among them. Whilst others, the IMA, Walker Arts, Brooklyn Museum, to name but 3, have gone an opposing, but possibly more sensible route, and developed with existing and infinitely more accessible & cheaper web technologies.

Thus, it isn’t like the decision-makers hands are tied. Moreover, the discussion around #mtogo still rages on and is being developed within the museum community. But in the here-and-now, and as a third-party bystander, it would still seem that the effective choice is simply defined by the availability and quality of resources, the implied cost and a function of the advice forthcoming.

While the desktop PC has opened up so many creative opportunities across many industries, bringing power to the people, it seems as if some sectors remain closeted. In fact, in a day and age where it is even possible to cook-up & sell your own tour guides online, it seems
incongruous on the part of institutions to have a slanted distribution of apps to their expectant audience.

Perhaps institutions should be forgiven on the basis that the plethora of available options is so bewildering, and of course they can only act on the best available advice, and such advice may well fall short, but still, given the wider remit of institutions to provide complete access to all, it would seem odd. What kind of message does this lack of access send out? And who cares anyhow, It’s just an app right? If all the web traffic to a museum’s site is via iOS, should they still be beholden to the Android market share? All questions that swirl around this topic.

No doubt it sounds like I am throwing my handheld devices out of the pram, like a spoiled little child, but I think the argument still stands: that institutions need to think about, not just Android, but wider universal technological access as a whole. In fact, when was the last time you searched a museum website for the word “Android” and it actually returned results?

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Vincent Roman is a freelance developer-designer based in Shoreditch, East London, helping businesses and institutions improve their tech offerings with 10+ years experience in the field of digital technologies. Needless to say he has an acute interest in the field of museum-tech and questions surrounding interlocution between the digital and physical worlds.

Strategy may sound rather grand for what you have in mind, after all is it a strategy to start a Twitter account? But however you take your first steps into social media, I’d recommend that you start small, concentrating on just one social media platform, until you find your feet.

Too often museums try too much to quickly, without the resources to back this up. The time you can dedicate to social media is a factor in deciding where to start. Having the time to get started with social media can be a major obstacle to museums, and in truth you’re likely to have to fit this around your regular responsibilities. But there will never be a perfect time to start and most people can, for example, fit in fifteen minutes a day to manage a Twitter account.

Twitter takes the least time, while creating content for YouTube can take considerably longer. You need to not only consider how you will manage your activity this week, or this month, but how sustainable what you’re starting will be over the long term. This again is a good reason for starting small.

Personally I believe that it is essential to have goals for your social media activity, these will give you a direction to work towards, and importantly provide a context for you to measure you success against.

Your social media strategy is where you should define you goals and I don’t mean measuring how many friends or followers you have attracted.

Social media is another tool to help your organisation to achieve it’s goals, what are those and how can you use this technology to help you to accomplish that?

Creating your own museums social media strategy

Use the following questions to help you to start to draft your own social media strategy.

What are you trying to achieve, what is your goal?
Who are you trying to reach?
What is the right social media platform to achieve your goal and reach your chosen audience?
Could you achieve this better within the museum’s website or traditional media?
How will you tie it into other things you and the rest of the organisation doing?
How much time and resources will this project take, and who will be responsible for ongoing maintenance?
How will you measure success?
How will you brand the content to ensure that it is credited as coming from the museum?
Does this fit with the overall goals of the museum?
What will happen with the project long term?
How will you stay in touch with the audiences it generates?
Is there something similar already set up which you could tap into rather than starting from scratch?

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This article was written by Jim Richardson, founder of Europe’s major conference on social media for museums, MuseumNext and managing director of Sumo, a creative agency with a reputation for developing innovative digital marketing.

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

The Internet of Things is a compelling idea, with its promise of a seamless link between objects in the physical world and associated media in the online world. The implications could be profound: an object will cease to be an isolated entity, but will become the focal point in a web of connected information. Take your dining table as an example. If the table carried a small identifying tag that linked to a central online database of ‘things’, reading the tag would open up the contents of this database revealing, perhaps, the table’s history; the manufacturer’s specifications and the materials used to construct it; its previous owners; the video of a family cat stealing food from a plate left on its top; the written memory of someone who as a child fell into its corner and broke a tooth – and so on.

All that is required to link this digital media – photographs, text, videos or sounds – to a real object is an identifier that can be read by an internet-connected device. One such system, developed in Japan as long ago as 1994, is the QR code. QR stands for Quick Response and the code itself is a square grid of black and white blocks, roughly equivalent to the barcode found on product packaging. But unlike a barcode, which links a product to a retailer’s stock database, a QR code links with a web page or some other online content. These codes are then read by the camera and QR reader software on a mobile phone or similar internet-connected device, allowing the device to open the link.

The appeal to museums of QR codes – and an internet of things – is immediately obvious: digital media can be ‘attached’ to physical objects by means of the small printout of a square code. Although QR codes themselves are essentially just web-address links, when connected to an online database of objects their possibilities become quite powerful. An object in the real world – a museum specimen – can be permanently linked with a growing and editable repository of online material, revealed to visitors through their smartphones or similar devices.

An early, beta version of such a system has been developed by the TOTem research consortium of Brunel University, University College London, University of Dundee, University of Edinburgh and the University of Salford. Tales of Things is a free QR based system that links an object with its ‘tales’ – media left by users who have something to say about the object in question. Tales of Things is being used on objects in the Tales of a Changing Nation gallery at the National Museum of Scotland, as well as in the QRator co-creation project at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology and The Petrie Museum of Egyptology.

‘Whilst there are a lot of QR code readers about and websites where you can generate codes to link to other sites, with the Tales of Things app the key element is the ability to add your own tale to the QR code, so that you are not just reading information but also writing back,’ says Jane MacDonald, administrator of TOTem.

In an age where co-creation and sharing – two tenets of any forward-looking museum – are all the rage, this type of system should be a sure fire hit. It permits people to record their personal reflections on museum objects and ‘attaches’ these reflections to the objects for others to see and respond to in turn. Certainly, Alison Taubman, principal curator of communications at National Museums Scotland, sees potential for QR codes to open up a new type of dialogue with museum visitors, breaking from the ‘usual one way traffic of information’. But she also acknowledges that such two-way dialogue has so far been scant in the Tales of a Changing Nation project.

It seems that despite the appeal, museums are finding that general take-up of QR codes is bedevilled by a few technological restrictions in implementation and, perhaps more significantly, a general lack of awareness. ‘I am not sure if enough people know what a QR code is or have their own device [to read one] for it to have mass appeal at this stage,’ says MacDonald. ‘We are expecting this to come, as they are slowly becoming more common. The more that museums and visitor attractions use QR codes, the more people will interact with them. I really see them as a brilliant way for museums to be able to create a truly democratic and interactive experience for visitors.’

Kathleen Tinworth, director of visitor research and program evaluation at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, presented a small number of visitors with a QR code to find out how many people could identify or explain it. Barely a third could and none of those had ever used one.

‘For those who didn’t recognize the QR code, we got responses that ranged from ‘Native American design’ to ‘puzzle’,’ says Tinworth. ‘So what does this mean for using QR or other identification software in museums and culturals? Is it futile? Worthless? Nope. Not at all. We may need to lay some groundwork with visitors, but the pay-off could be high. In time, perhaps there won’t be a need for an app download or a certain type of phone [to be used], but for now the learning curve may need to be built in to the design.’

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia has also experimented with QR codes. After finding that too few people had a suitable reader installed on their phones, the museum decided to build a reader into a bespoke mobile application that would serve as an object database and QR code reader in one. This app now supports the museum’s Love Lace exhibition by allowing visitors to access an object’s catalogue entry directly by scanning the QR code on the physical display.

But even this simple system hides technological pitfalls. If the code squares are printed too small, phone cameras and reader software have trouble understanding them. If there are shadows, reflections or poor light on the codes the problem is compounded, as the Powerhouse discovered in earlier QR experiments. The provision of free public Wi-Fi throughout a museum space is another potential difficulty.

On the other hand, despite these relatively small technical issues QR codes are extremely straightforward to produce and equally easy to access assuming a visitor has a phone reader installed and there is a good (and ideally free) internet connection available in the exhibition space.

But as with the introduction of any technology to a museum or gallery, there have to be clear benefits to both visitors and museum departments of using QR codes. While the actual act of using a phone to ‘magically’ read a code may appeal to some (it does: to younger visitors to the Tales of a Changing Nation exhibition, according to Taubman), it is what the code is linking to that is the real issue. Even without referencing a co-created database of ‘things’, there are still plenty of appealing uses of QR codes for museums. They can provide quick and immediate links to material that supports interpretation, education or a marketing campaign, for example.

But as Tinworth notes, getting the content of these links right is vital, whether they are to third party sites or to material generated by a museum itself. ‘The QR code is just a vehicle,’ she says. ‘I believe that for QRs or similar technologies to succeed in museums we have to ensure they provide something of value and aren’t just gimmicky. Whether that’s the back story on an object or a video of an artist installing a sculpture is neither here nor there; it’s about the value added through that content. QR codes are simple to make and inexpensive, which has massive appeal to the cultural sector, [but] are we enhancing the visitor experience in the ways people want?’

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Scott Billings is a freelance journalist who write for publications including Design Week, Museum Practise, Museums Journal and Marketing.