The Boston Museum of Science has launched a campaign to raise $ 2,500 needed for the reopening of the planetarium by asking it’s Facebook fans to donate to attend a fundraiser through the application Fundrazr .
This quick and effective tool, launched by Paypal (the most used international payment method) allows you to manage donations, making fund-raising campaigns, but also sell tickets and manage membership fees.
This use of Facebook to raise donations can promote philanthropy among the younger audiences. With its low cost and simplicity, it is a really interesting method of raising micro-donations.
The Boston Museum of Science on Fundrazr accepts donations of $5 to $100. In exchange for their generosity, donors will receive tickets for shows at the planetarium, can attend ‘VIP’ events and a will be named on a plaque in the planetarium.
—
Diane Drubay is an expert in communication, online and new media for the cultural sector, she is the founder of Paris based agency Buzzeum.
With funding cuts biting, many museums are developing or redeveloping online shops to compliment their onsite retail offer. How do you get the most out of e-commerce for the museum?
1. Don’t let your online shop seem detached Too often online shops on museum websites feel separate from the rest of the website. Try and integrate the shop seamlessly with the same look and feel as the rest of the site.
2. Cross selling Take the opportunity to promote your online shop throughout your website.John Stack, Head of TATE Online told me ‘One of the things that has been very successful for us is featuring the shop products around the site. We believe that most pieces of content on the site could be cross-selling some kind of related product (shop, membership, magazine subscription, donation, etc.) and this is what we’re working towards’.
3. A picture is worth 1000 words High street stores know the importance of using beautiful product photography, but this lesson seems to have been lost on many museums. Taking the time to write proper product descriptions is equally important, and remember that these also help you to rank more highly on search engines.
4. Don’t forget social media Most museums have been quick to integrate social media sharing tools into the events, exhibitions and collections sections of their websites, but potential to increase shop revenue by allowing website visitors to share the products that you sell online through social networks is often overlooked.
5. Call to action ‘Simple, obvious wording and buttons can make a big difference’ Hugh Wallace, Head of Digital at National Museums Scotland told me.
Don’t underestimate the need for good signposting to show visitors where to click to add something to a shopping basket or to make a purchase.
6. Test, test, and test again Getting your shop design right cannot be done in isolation. You should test your shop with members of the public from the earliest design through to the finished product. This can be done by giving people simple tasks to perform, such as buying a product, is it as easy as you thought?
7. Off-the-shelf or bespoke There are many off the shelf solutions for online shops. These can be cheaper than a bespoke design, but you should consider whether something built to your specification could bring in more money in the long run when picking the right solution for your museum.
8. Email marketing Collect email addresses from your customers and keep them up-to-date on your latest products and offers with monthly emails. It is easy to track how many recipients are clicking through to the store and to measure which messages resonate the most with your customers.
9. Personalise content Amazon.com personalises the products it displays to each visitor based on the items which they have looked at before and this is something which museums are also starting to think about.
‘We’re looking at personalisation technologies that will tailor content and products to user’s interests, although we aren’t implementing this yet’. John Stack, Head of TATE Online told me.
10. Track, analyse and evolve Designing your online shop doesn’t end when it launches. This is merely the start of the next phase of your work. Use a stats package like Google Analytics to track the progress of your customers through your online shop and tweak the design of any areas where a bottleneck of incomplete purchases is occurring.
—
Have you built an online shop for your institution? Please share your tips in the comments below.
—-
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.
Facebook offers museums a way to connect with over 500 million people, and it is not surprising that many institutions have taken steps to make it easy for the public to show their appreciation or affiliation by adding a Facebook Like button to their museum websites since Facebook launched them in April 2010.
The Facebook Like button provides an easy way to spread the word about your institution virally, and with the average Facebook user having over 130 friends, you can quickly gain a lot of attention through this simple tool.
When clicked on, a Facebook Like button posts information about the website, exhibition, painting etc that the user ‘likes’ on their Facebook where their friends can see it and share it with their friends too.
Research suggests that the people who click Facebook Like buttons are more ‘social’, having on average twice as many Facebook friends as the typical Facebook user, so this is a valuable group to appeal too.
Jasper Visser, Project Manager for new media and innovative technology at the Nationaal Historisch Museum in the Netherlands wrote about his experience with Facebook Like buttons in a recent blog post ‘I’ve been adding Like Buttons to many of our websites and the results are significant. Conversion is high and traffic from Facebook increased.’
This experience isn’t rare, and Facebook itself quotes statistics suggesting a large increase in referrals from the social network is the likely outcome of adding Facebook Like buttons to your website.
However while museums may note that they have a Facebook fan page on their homepage or in a website footer, most are not applying the Facebook Like buttons to the extend that they could to leverage the maximum exposure for there institution.
A Facebook Like button works best when it links to specific content rather then say a website or an organisation as a whole, so making it possible for a visitor to your website to ‘like’ individual items in your collection or individual events will be more effective then encouraging them to ‘like’ your museum.
Ultimately technology may take this kind of sharing into the gallery.
A prototype developed at a workshop run by MediaMatic in Amsterdam lets visitors swipe an RFID tag next to a real world Facebook Like button to make it appear on their Facebook page, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this technology to start to appear in museums over the next 12 months.
If you have added Facebook Like buttons to your museum website I hope that you will share your experience in the comments below, if you are interested in adding this to your website you can find out how to on the Social Plug-in section of Facebook.
—-
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.
Technology is often used by museums and galleries to create moments of interaction that encourage a deeper consideration of a collection or subject. At the same time, using hardware and software can bring an element of theatre and magic to exhibition spaces. But choosing and developing interactive technologies can be fraught with pitfalls: What is available? Is it too expensive? Is it reliable? Will people understand it? And the most important question of all, is it appropriate?
One option for building visitor interaction into an exhibition space is to use an RFID system. RFID stands for radio frequency identification, which perhaps sounds complex, but it is a simple, relatively inexpensive and reliable method of making connections between visitors and installations or exhibits.
If you have ever used the Oyster card travel system in London, you have used an RFID card and reader. Handling thousands of passengers every day, Oyster offers a robust, quick and seamless communication between your personal account and the network of transport connections.
The beauty of radio is its invisibility. Passing a card near a reader, which can be embedded in another object or ‘prop’, creates a direct and instant communication with computer software, without the need for any other physical input from the user. In a museum environment, RFID tags and readers can be used to trace an individual visitor’s path through an exhibition, perhaps building up a record of responses to themed questions, or a record of achievement in interactive games.
In the Amsterdams Historisch Museum’s A’DAM, man & fashion exhibition, which runs until 1 February, an RFID-based interactive element runs throughout the space. At the start of the exhibition visitors create a personal profile which is then linked to their A’DAM ID card. At various points in the exhibition this RFID card is used to register personal preferences relating to clothing, self-image and fashion, including choice of brands for things such as beer, shoes, jeans and underwear. Each selection is logged, just like a journey across London on the Oyster system, and at the end of the exhibition the data are used to reveal a profile of the participant, showing how his or her self-image compares with other visitors. As the museum says, ‘the visitors themselves become part of the exhibition’.
The A’DAM ID concept was developed from a workshop between the museum’s curators, graphic designers, education staff and marketers, along with design group Buro Koos. According to Hester Gersonius, the museum’s head of social media and web, there were a number of elements which everyone wanted in the exhibition, including a personal ‘questionnaire’, a photograph and profile of participants and something for people to receive via email after their visit.
‘We have used the RFID system as a kind of prototype test for future exhibitions,’ says Gersonius. ‘One thing we have learnt is that you have to keep things very simple for people to understand – some visitors were swiping their cards over the screens with the instructions on, rather than over the pillars where the readers are embedded, for example. But now people have got used to it I think they will expect something similar in future exhibition. We have invested in the hardware and will be using it again in our upcoming permanent exhibition.’
A similar use of RFID featured in the Science of Survival, a touring exhibition created by The Science Of…, where installations asked visitors to make various lifestyle choices relating to the content of the exhibition (including zones on eating and drinking, and transport and building). Again, each decision was recorded and compiled into the final display, Future City, which forecast the environmental impact of these lifestyle choices on a community in 2050.
In both these examples, the RFID card and reader are used as a simple way of embedding the visitor’s responses in the content of the exhibition itself. This helps promote a cognitive interaction with the ideas at hand by making thematic connections between different areas in the exhibitions.
Other input technologies, such as keyboard and mouse, physical buttons, touch-screen devices or barcode scanners, could have been used to gather the same information, but for a simple tracking of responses RFID is probably the most elegant. As a bonus for the museum, the RFID readers can be used to record anonymous, but nonetheless individualised, visitor usage and dwell times for later analysis. Similarly, at the British Music Experience at the O2 in London, visitors may use the RFID tags in their tickets to ‘collect’ the objects and exhibits they are interested in so that they can view them at leisure online after their visit.
Another benefit of RFID is its relatively low cost, especially when the cards are bought in bulk. Cards and readers operate over different ranges, with the shortest range usually being the cheapest, so it is worth choosing carefully, depending on the needs of the installations.
But the magic of RFID really comes to the fore when the readers are embedded inside (or near) other objects. A good example is iTea, a teacup reader created by a collaborative team of Amsterdam-based designers and programmers at an RFID workshop hosted by Mediamatic. Drop your ID card into the cup and information about you, sourced from the internet, is projected onto the tabletop before you.
A ‘hidden’ RFID system is also used at the Nobel Peace Center exhibition in Oslo, Norway, which features interactive technologies designed by US-based Small Design Firm. In the centre’s Nobel Chamber, a ‘book’ of Alfred Nobel’s life uses projections to create its pages and infrared sensors to detect where on the page people are pointing. RFID chips are embedded in each page to tell the computer which page is open and therefore which to project.
As with any technology in a museum environment, careful consideration of the exhibition’s aims and requirements, content, objects and stories, project budgets, design plans and the physical environment itself will all determine what interactive approach, if any, is most suitable. But as the examples here show, RFID can offer a simple and often enchanting interface between people and digital installations.
—-
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist who write for publications including Design Week, Museum Practise, Museums Journal and Marketing.
Even though it is still only a few short years since the introduction of multi-touch technology in the first iPhones, already we have become familiar with the way that communications devices seamlessly integrate the internet’s vast information resources and social media networks. High-end interaction technologies are now so commonplace that many of us carry them around in our pockets all day long. And with the rise of smartphone apps, we now routinely expect these products to be endlessly adaptable and updatable.
For museums and galleries looking for new and inspiring ways to generate interactions between visitors and collections, this democratisation of technology is perhaps both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, visitors are no longer wowed by touch-screen and computer software installations per se. On the other hand, the availability of adaptable, mass-market products gives museums easy access to cleverer hardware for less money. At the same time, visitors will often be familiar with the hardware platform already and may even be able to use their own personal devices to access or interact with multimedia exhibition content.
The latest consumer products to lend themselves to museum and gallery use – and probably the most suitable so far – are the tablet devices such as the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy. Apple’s iPad is obviously the leader and major player here and already there are examples of museums harnessing the device to deliver content and interaction to visitors, despite it being less than a year old.
In some cases, iPads are being used by museums to deliver richer and expanded versions of their existing iPhone apps. The American Museum of Natural History has launched an iPad version of its Dinosaurs app and SFMoMA’s Rooftop Garden iPhone app, which provides a tour of its sculpture garden, has also been enhanced for the iPad.
But Melbourne Museum decided to build a dedicated iPad app as part of its tenth birthday celebrations. The free Please Touch the Exhibit app makes use of the iPad’s large, book-sized screen and shake functions, allowing users to explore the museum’s collection through ten specially curated science and social history themes. Similarly, highlights from MoMA’s Abstract Expressionist New York show are only available on the iPad. The AB EX NY app offers high-resolution images of selected works, videos and deeper information about the art and artists. It also includes an NYC history featuring a multimedia map of studios, galleries, bars and other points of interest.
One of the key appeals about apps like these is that they offer people a rich, tour-like experience away from the institutions themselves – before, after or indeed instead of, a physical visit. ‘One of the uses that we’ve realised people have really come to enjoy [about our app tours] is the takeaway,’ said Dallas Museum of Art multimedia producer Ted Forbes at the 2010 Tate Handheld Conference. ‘Maybe they participate in some of the tour while they are in front of the objects, but they can also go home and preview tours after their visit. It has a lot of application in the those areas, so it’s really important for us to be able to [offer these] tours.’
One of the questions that emerged at the Museums Association’s All in Hand: Working with Handheld Devices conference, held at the Royal College of Surgeons in July 2010, was whether a cultural institution can afford to develop mobile applications and whether the organisation might hope to recover its investment. In short, do mobile guides generate revenues?
There are no simple answers to these questions because every project and museum has its own requirements, target audience and budgets, but it is interesting to note that iPad apps have a higher average price point than iPhone apps, perhaps implying a higher user expectation for the iPad. Although most museum iPad apps have so far been offered for free, there is the possibility of using Apple’s App Store as a mechanism for generating revenue from multimedia content, something that would have been all but impossible with traditional gallery kiosk applications.
The success of the Guardian’s photojournalism iPad app, Eyewitness, has led to plans for an enhanced but paid-for version in the future, according to New Media Age. Whilst Eyewitness sits outside the museum sector, it is not hard to see how the evident appeal of high production quality multimedia content might also be a source of revenue and brand building for museums and galleries.
Exhibition-related games in particular might deliver a source of revenue, if they can be sold as standalone gaming apps in the App Store. As Jason DaPonte, former managing editor of BBC Mobile, told the Tate Handheld Conference: ‘You might not think about the games world and gaming as being that important to museums, but I challenge you to think about it very, very seriously. If you look at the app stores, typically the most popular apps – eight or nine of the top ten – are always games. So go where your audiences are, see what they are doing and see how you can get in there.’
At the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, an in-gallery game called WaterWorx was delivered via eight iPads in the exhibition space. This is where larger tablet devices differ from smartphone based multimedia content – they are big enough to operate as gallery based ‘kiosks’. At the same time, the app or game can be used by iPad owners at home. According to Seb Chan, head of digital, social and emerging technologies at the Powerhouse Museum, the WaterWorx game may now be augmented for commercial release on the App Store, creating revenue for the museum.
So perhaps the loss of technology’s wow factor is no curse at all. It may just mean that interactive installations are developed on the basis of relevance and content and not because of a perceived obligation to include a technology element in an exhibition space. As Silvia Filippini Fantoni, senior producer at digital media consultancy Cogapp, says on the group’s blog : ‘Mobile interpretation is not about the technology. It is about the user experience and particularly the content. Museums should focus on telling a story that answers questions, creates emotions, inspires a response, rather than using the technology for the sake of it.’
Chan echoes this, while also noting the new role of consumer technology in museum multimedia development. ‘[WaterWorx] brings with it an explicit acknowledgement that the entertainment and computing gear that visitors can get their hands on outside of the museum is always going to be better [than], or at least on a par with, what museums can themselves deploy. So rather than continue the arms race, the iPad deployment is a means to refocus both visitor attention and development resources on content and engagement – not display technologies.’
—-
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist who write for publications including Design Week, Museum Practise, Museums Journal and Marketing.
Museum budgets are coming under increasing pressure, and this are likely to get worse before they get better. European governments are talking up the concept of ‘American style philanthropic funding’ replacing public money.
This kind of philanthropy can take decades to develop, and for smaller and regional venues large scale corporate sponsorship is unlikely. This is a huge challenge for those leading cultural institutions and a move towards a more entrepreneurial way of doing things is vital. The concept of what a museum is has constantly evolved since the first privately owned collections, and perhaps this funding crunch will accelerate this change.
The museum must looks to its assets both in terms of premises, collections, programme and skills to look for new ways to generate revenue.
For me the centre of any change should be engagement between people and the museum, breaking down the barriers between the institution and the community, embracing the idea of the museum as a third space and inviting the people that we serve to suggest new ways of using the museum.
One idea which Jon Pratty suggested in 2009 was based upon the model of the extended school:
The Extended Museum is a physical embodiment of the social media we now know and love. It’s just that it’s set in the museum or gallery we are all somewhat challenged in finding new modes of use and funding for.
In the extended school, people meet and greet after hours. All sort of activities happen in every part of the school, and it draws in many sorts of people, often those who didn’t like school and don’t like ‘education’. Senior citizens do evening classes. Yoga groups sweat and stretch. People bring new streams of income into the space by doing this. Not just private groups, but also local education and social services agencies use the space.
In the Extended Museum, we can work round traditional barriers to ’opening out’ that are obvious – collections and security can still be uppermost in our minds. Within traditional culture modes we could still actively solicit curation ideas and interactions.
Instead of art appreciation classes that serve the traditional, we could be Provoking people to re-curate, to spark off new interpretations of old collections. We could look at our collections and public art spaces and try to imagine what other social purposes they could serve: meditation classes in cast rooms; youth offenders doing community service surrounded by relics of the first world war; people new to the country learning English in the midst of collection objects from around the world.
We talk about museums containing evidence from the past to help us decode the present – but have we actually tried to explore this ‘relevance’ working with in a more consensual, participatory way?
So here we might have a museum that is merged more with local social meanings and needs – one that access funding streams from across the community, that is part of the social, educational and cultural landscape of a city.
This is the kind of radical thinking that the sector needs, and it isn’t hard to see how it could fit with the mission of most institutions.
In challenging times we need to innovative thinking and inspirational leadership, but both seem to be lacking in a sector which is used to having the time and money to move slowly.
—-
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.
When I was four years old my father brought an reel to reel tape recorder home with him, it had been discarded at the place that he worked and he fixed it up and used it to record my sister and I talking and singing.
Fast-forward thirty-something years and while that reel to reel tape recorder has gathered dust in my parents’ attic, technology has, of course, moved on.
Today, my eight-track tape recorder is my iPhone. This travels with me and I can record my children’s lives and share these experiences with my wider family through email, photo messages and social networks.
The sound quality that my iPhone gives me may not be much better than the soundtrack of my childhood, but this ability to share the experience so easily is revolutionary.
A few years ago, this kind of sharing may have seemed like the preserve of the geeky few, but sharing your activities, opinions and your creativity on social media is now the norm – there has been a socio-cultural shift where it has become acceptable, almost expected, that you will share intimate details of your life in a way which would have seemed incredibly narcissistic just a few years ago.
While technology can enhance oral history, it can’t change the essential appeal of good story, and StoryCorps is all about good stories. Over 30,000 have been recorded by the project since it was founded by radio producer Dave Isay in 2003.
Its mission is to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs.
They started in October 23rd, 2003 with a StoryBooth in Grand Central Station in New York City, a sound proof booth where people could go to record their 40 minute interviews.
StoryCorps interviews take the form of a conversation between two people who know each other (as pictured above). They can be friends, family, or just acquaintances, though someone from StoryCorps is at hand to give advice on how to get the most out of a session.
Once an interview has taken place, the participants receive a CD of their interview and, with their permission, a second copy of each interview is archived at the American Folk Life Centre and the Library of Congress for future generations to hear.
The stories also appear on the StoryCorps website, tagged and categorised to make them easier to search. As well as allowing people to listen to the stories, visitors to the website are also encouraged to share the stories through social networks.
A quick search of social media websites finds that people are taking the time to link to the stories, virally spreading the word about StoryCorps and sharing personal favorites.
The animation shown above is one of a series created by StoryCorp based on recording which were made by members of the public. I really love this animation, I think that it will take these oral histories to a completely different audience.
One of the really nice things about these animations is that you can embed them in your own website, blog or facebook page, taking this Storycorp content and sharing it with your own networks.
The way in which the StoryCorps stories have been recorded was quite traditional and could have been done in a similar way thirty years ago but the way in which the content they are capturing is then distributed by members of the public who choose the share these recordings virally through their own networks, is very new.
Earlier this year, StoryCorps launched an iPhone application featuring stories which have been recorded by the initiative. This is another innovative way of sharing their content, but what interests me more is that they are also using this as a tool to collect more stories.
The app includes a ‘how to’ guide and links to an audio recorder, giving people the tools to record and share their own stories. I especially like the part of the app which suggests questions which you might want to ask the person you’re going to interview. These are categorised by the person you’re speaking to or life experiences.
Looking at StoryCorps you get the impression that everyone must have a story to tell. And it made wonder if other websites were collecting stories in this way.
Digging through the web I came across StoryVault, a UK based website which is trying to position itself as kind of a social network for oral histories – a place where you can upload the life story of your friends or family.
While I love the idea of this website, I have to admit that I found it quite intimidating; the featured stories which appear on the homepage are perhaps too good, with eye-witness accounts of everything from being a Japanese Prisoner of war to seeing the Berlin Wall come down.
While, as a viewer, these are really interesting stories, these world-changing events are quite a contrast to the kind of things most people could talk about, and I couldn’t post a story about my own life in this context, whereas StoryCorps seems like it is open to anyone.
Perhaps this is a good thing, and over time StoryCorps may become buried underneath so many reflections on ordinary lives that the great stories will be lost in the clutter, while StoryVault will be more focused a few ordinary people who witnessed remarkable events.
This idea of stories becoming lost in the clutter is an important point to make, if technology is making it easier to collect stories, how do we make that data accessible, mass starts to become a problem.
Both Story Corps and StoryVault use tags, descriptive words to help you to search through the content. These are added by the person uploading the video, this is good, but it only allows one perspective that of the content creator to be recognized. An idea that these websites could steal from online museum collections, is allowing the public to also add tags to these videos.
The picture above shows an object from the Online Collection on the Brooklyn Museum website, the tags next to this object have been added by the public. I really like this because it allows the public to interact with the collection and add value to the search information.
To highlight one of these tags, the descriptor ‘Bird Lady’ has been added as a tag to this object. Reading the official description of this object it is clear that ‘Bird Lady’ doesn’t have any curatorial meaning, but if a member of the public thinks that this is a valid descriptor, then this could make an object easier for another member of the public to find.
I think the same could be very true of audio or video for oral history projects, where giving the public the ability to tag content could make it easier for the public to find the stories which are most valuable for them without any additional work for the producer.
Looking at StoryVault again and seeing past the contents focus on great world events, I wondered if video is a barrier to entry or if asking members of the public to record their own oral histories is asking too much of people.
Forrester Research categories six different ways that the public interact with the social web in their social technographics tool, these are:
Forresters research suggests that only 24% of American’s might be willing to create video content and upload it to a website like StoryVault, but this statistic is misleading, or at least wildly optimistic. Lets compare that 20% statistic with the percentage of YouTube visitors who upload video to the world’s biggest video website. Just 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content to the website, the vast majority of YouTube visitors are active in other ways, whether that is commenting, scoring, collecting or just viewing content.
Anyone who has spent time using YouTube will know how light the bulk of the content on that website is, dancing cats come to mind. So if only 0.16% of people are prepared to upload pointless rubbish to YouTube, how many will sit down to record there life stories for StoryVault.
I think we need to acknowledge that even if we are living in a world of status updates, sitting down to record an oral history and share this through a website is still a large barrier to entry and if we want to make the most of the opportunities that this offers us, then we need to make it as easy as possible for people to do this.
I think that the StoryCorp suggested questions that I mentioned earlier is a great example of making it easier for the public to get involved.
But as well as making it easier for the public to get involved at that top Creator motivation we should also be aware of the other ways that people want to participate online and think about how we can let people score content, add comments and share content.
Afterall you wouldn’t create an exhibition for just 0.16% of visitors and with online projects we need to also think about how we can serve as wide an audience as possible.
Another innovative project which is championing participation is UK SoundMap which was launched by the British Library earlier this year. This is an audio project, but they are not interested in oral history, this is instead an attempt to map the sounds of the United Kingdom.
This archive of the sounds of everyday life in Britain will act as an historic record of life at the start of the 21st century.
Recordings range from a car park in Hull to a supermarket check-out in Ipswich, from a gale in the Shetland Islands to a cat walking on gravel in Plymouth.
While the sounds are quite everyday, the decentralized way in which the UK SoundMap is being made is quite innovative.
The project allows any individual to contribute by uploading a recording through Audioboo, a social media platform which lets people capture recordings through their mobile phones and share these with people through the web.
Anyone can sign up for a free account with AudioBoo and get started in minutes, and, having made a recording, I simply have to tag it with the project id UKSM and it is pulled straight in to the project website and added to the UK SoundMap.
Ian Rawes the editor of UK SoundMap told me that the content submitted to the project is moderated, but the vast majority, 93%, is approved. Reasons that the recordings have been rejected vary from rights issues, typically recorded music being too prominent in the upload, swearing or hateful language, issues of quality or recordings where the person making the recording is talking but no environmental sounds are present.
Over 1000 recordings have been added to UK SoundMap, with contributions ranging from an individual recording through to 45 recordings added by the most prolific contributor.
Looking at the number of recordings each individual has added I wondered what makes one person add only a handful of recordings and another to add dozens.
I mentioned earlier the way in which the Brooklyn Museum have asked the public to help them to tag there collection, and they have used an interesting method of encouraging participation by awarding points for each tag that you add.
This points scheme gives recognition to those who contribute towards making the collection more accessible. As the leaderboard shows several users have added thousands of tags, and it is easy to see how something as simple as a points system and a leader board could encourage the people who are contributing records to UK SoundMap to be more active.
This crowdsourced approach allows the project to reach the whole of the UK, while keeping the costs at a minimum, and with spending cuts hitting heritage organisations across Europe, I think we can all see a benefit in empowering our audiences to help us to create this kind of project.
Another pioneering project is The Black List project – an exhibition which took place at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. It brought together twenty-five portraits by internationally renowned photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders which looked to explore being Black in America.
The education team at Brooklyn Museum wanted to gather visitor responses to the exhibition which typically they would have done with an electronic comment book. But it was felt that video would better capture the more personal stories that they were asking people to share.
Originally they intended to set up filming times to take video responses in the gallery, but concern over the amount of time it would take to edit and collate responses made them look for a more automated solution.
The solution came in the form of YouTube and their Quick Capture feature, which allows anyone to use a webcam to directly record a video to their YouTube channel.
During the Black List Project’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, of which 236 were shown on the Black List Project YouTube channel. Those which were rejected were mainly people messing around or pressing record and then walking away, only one of the 482 recordings was removed because it violated comment guidelines.
The 236 films which made it on to the Black List Project YouTube channel received 43,386 views from the public, though roughly half of these were for one video which was featured by YouTube.
The large amount of traffic that a website like YouTube receives is one reason that using an established website to host your video may work better for you, because rather then having to entice people to come and view your video on your own website you can simply post your video where lots of people are spending time online already.
Moderation of the videos was done at the end of each day, and typically took the staff at Brooklyn Museum no more then 15 minutes.
While the videos were generally within the comment guidelines set out by the Brooklyn Museum, one problem that using YouTube as a platform presented was the websites user base have a reputation for posting offensive comments. Sadly this allowed people to post racist comments under the films and staff from Brooklyn Museum needed to delete these comments and ban a number of users from being able to make further comments.
I think that it is testament to the Brooklyn Museum’s inclusive values that they didn’t switch off the ability of all users to leave feedback on the videos, preferring to moderate the vocal few rather than ban all feedback.
So at the start of this article I asked the question ‘what can social media do for oral history?’.
I’ve pulled out five main points from the projects that I have highlighted.
1. Social media can change the way you collect content
As we saw with the projects I have talked about today, technology is giving us new ways to collect content through webcams, mobile phones and crowdsourcing.
You no longer have to sit face to face with the person your interviewing, perhaps by empowering people to tell their own stories you will come across people and stories that you wouldn’t have found through traditional methods.
2. Social media can educate and empower our audiences
I think that these tools can help you to educate people about how to tell their stories, as StoryCorps are doing by giving people the tools to ask the right questions and record their own oral histories.
Social media also allows us to empower our audiences, making them think differently about themselves and their place in the world.
3. Social media can make your content more accessible
As we saw with the Brooklyn Museum online collection, we can ask our audiences to help us to make our content more accessible by tagging content with keywords.
4. Social Media can make your content viral
Content has become easy to share through the internet and I think this brings both opportunities and challenges for oral history projects.
On a positive note I can take brilliant content like the StoryCorps animation which I showed you earlier and embed this in my blog, spreading the word about storycorp and letting people see content which they might not have come across otherwise.
I think this kind of sharing can be incredibly beneficial for both the public and oral history projects, but I am aware that some content is very sensitive and the ability to share content might not always be wanted.
5. Social media is evolving
I started my presentation by talking about the shift which has taken place which has made it the norm to share the details of our everyday lives with others through websites like Facebook.
While it would be foolish to guess how this will continue to change, change is inevitable and just as I can stand here laughing at the state of the art technology used by my parents to record my childhood, I am quite sure that my iPhone, Facebook and the internet as we know it will seem archaic in far less then thirty years.
But something’s never change and even as someone who passionately believes in the benefits of social media I have to say that all the technology in the world is pointless in the context of oral history without a good story, and while technogies may change a good story and good storytelling is timeless.
—-
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.
The big internet success story of 2009 was undoubtedly Twitter, the ‘micro-blogging’ platform which, with the help of celebrity endorsements, grew from an estimated 6 million users to 18 million users in just 12 months, and which is predicted to rise to 26 million in the coming year.
The growth and success of the website didn’t escape the attention of museums, and by the start of 2010 over 1000 institutions in 34 countries had joined Twitter, attracted by a potentially large audience and an easy-to-use, free platform.
So what is Twitter?
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ platform; a website where people share what they are doing or what they’ve found with others by sending and receiving messages known as tweets.
What defines Twitter is the short format of these tweets, each message is limited to just 140 characters of text, making it quick and easy to update.
These messages are sent and received through the website Twitter.com or through third party applications which bring these messages or tweets on to a computer’s desktop or a mobile phone.
As well as tweeting a message, you can also retweet or forward a message which someone else has written to your followers. If you write engaging, informative and entertaining messages on Twitter, you should find that people retweet what you are writing too.
While tweets and retweets are public and anyone can read these, direct messages are private and can only be read by those who you send them to. However the person you wish to direct message must follow you, for you to have permission to send them a direct message.
How is Twitter useful to museums?
Most museums are attracted to Twitter as a marketing tool; it can act as a modern day mailing list, allowing a museum to quickly broadcast information to a large number of people who have opted to hear more about your museum.
However once a museum joins Twitter it will quickly realise that the website is more about community, and using it to only broadcast advertising messages will quickly turn people off. Instead a museum can speak with those who choose to follow them, to entertain, engage and inform Twitter users with a behind-the-scenes and up-to-the-minute account of your institution. This can build a loyal following; a kind of museum membership for the 21st century.
Twitter is also a great way to share information with your followers; the majority of tweets feature links and by linking to content on other websites, you can advance your museum’s educational aims through the web.
How to get started with Twitter I would recommend anyone thinking about setting up a Twitter account for their museum first joins the website as an individual. This will allow you to get to grips with how Twitter works and learn from museums who are already tweeting.
It is easy to find museums through the search facility on Twitter. You can follow as many institutions as you like and you don’t need to confine yourself to any one country. MoMA (their Twitter name is @MuseumModernArt) is seen as the leading institution on the website and they are a great Twitter account to follow and to learn from.
One thing which you will learn from MoMA is that even though this is a large and prestigious museum, they identify the person who writes on behalf of the institution and allow the tweets that they write to have personality.
With only 140 characters of text to work with, tone of voice is incredibly important on Twitter and your museum will need to become comfortable with writing in a more down-to-earth, snappy style.
This research period is also a great time to look for people speaking about your museum, because even if you are not writing about your museum on Twitter, the chances are that your visitors are. You can use the search tools on Twitter or an external site such as SocialMention.
Get those around you involved in thinking about how Twitter could fit with your organisation and start to map out some ideas about how you could launch and manage a Twitter account for your museum.
The activities that you’ll need to think about are:
Listening – every day you should do a search on your museum name and look at what people are saying about your institution – are they asking a question which you can help them to answer?
Broadcasting – you should broadcast two or three tweets a day. I recommend that you plan the majority of these out in advance with themes like Museum Fact Monday, Guess the object of the day, Behind the scenes pictures of an exhibition being built or links to video of an event on YouTube. Asking questions is another great way to encourage your followers to engage with your museum – if you’re wondering what a particular audience group would like from you, why not ask them?
Replying – you should set aside some time every day to reply to messages on Twitter. You should also discuss with your colleagues issues such as how you will respond to negative feedback. Most museums have guidelines for dealing with complaints offline and these just need to be revisited to consider how they can work on Twitter.
Don’t let the thought of negative feedback put you off joining Twitter, though, the chances are that people would make the same negative remark if you were not on the website and having a presence there will allow you to change opinions and learn from your mistakes. When you look at the Twitter feed for other museums, you’ll see that there is usually a very positive, sharing vibe since their Twitter followers are some of their biggest fans.
When you feel that you have a good grasp of how the website works from your experience with a personal account, and you have thought about how you will manage Twitter day-to-day then you are ready to set up an account for your museum.
Attracting followers Unless you set up a feed to your website or Facebook page, the only people who will see what you write on Twitter will be those who choose to subscribe or follow your museum’s tweets, so it is important to keep attracting new followers.
The easiest way to get started is to add a Twitter logo to your museum website and to spread the word virally to staff and through them to their friends. You may also want to add your Twitter name to leaflets and to promote it in the museum.
With your editorial plan in place, you will have lots of interesting content to share and your followers should hopefully retweet this to their own network of followers and start to virally spread the word about your museum.
You can also try offering incentives like a prize draw for tickets to a new exhibition, or reward your 1000th follower with free merchandise from your shop.
What next? Twitter is predicted to grow over the next twelve months, but it has also spawned something of a cultural shift with more and more people sharing their experiences in real time.
In late 2009 Google started to index these real time live casts in its searches and now it is becoming more likely that the first result that someone finds when they search for your museum will be a review from someone who has just visited your venue, rather than your official website.
In terms of the opportunities for sharing, casting, connecting, surveying, broadcasting and reaching your audience, the Twitter possibilities are endless.
—-
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.
On the same day that Tony Blair’s memoir, A Journey, was published to considerable media reaction and controversy, discussion of another topic entirely was topping the trend charts on Twitter. Remarkably, it was an initiative to stimulate dialogue between the public and museum curators that had become the hottest Twitter subject in the world by mid morning on 1 September 2010.
The one-day event, called Ask a Curator, was the brainchild of Jim Richardson, managing director of Sumo, a branding and design group which regularly works with museum and gallery clients. Frustrated that social media are usually used by such organisations to push out ‘bland marketing messages’, if they use them at all, Richardson wanted to harness Twitter’s networking power to drum up some direct engagement with curators across the globe. The idea was that a curious public would be able to question the keepers of cultural heritage about the objects in their care and what it is they do with them.
‘With Ask a Curator I wanted to do something which asked more of both the public and museums, something that could create dialogue and real engagement. I hoped the project could give the public unprecedented access to the passionate and enthusiastic individuals who work in museums and galleries and also break down barriers within these institutions, where all too often social media is still the remit of the marketing department,’ says Richardson.
The initiative comes at a time when many museums are just beginning to consider how online platforms and social media might dovetail with their on-site activities. Some institutions, such as the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, have blazed a trail with their online services and an open attitude to dialogue with the public. But for some organisations, taking part in Ask a Curator was a foray into largely uncharted territory.
According to Conxa Rodà, project coordinator at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the event was the first time curators there had used Twitter. ‘[The event gave] museum professionals a real proof of the reach and influence of social media and it can awake an interest in what Twitter is all about,’ she says.
So was Ask a Curator a success? In many ways, yes. Despite being promoted solely through Twitter, the idea eventually garnered participation from over 340 institutions, each offering a curator to take part in a question and answer session at some point during the day. What’s more, together these museums and galleries span the globe and cover a huge breadth of subject matter and collection material – from the Museum of East Anglian Life in the UK to the Museum of History of Medicine in Brasil.
Questions ranged from the general – ‘Have you ever had a piece that you wanted to exhibit but was too large to get into the museum?’ – to the specific – ‘What is your vision for creating a participatory interactive experience with visitors using mobile guide technology? – to the analytical and academic – ‘Is a visual art exhibition a collaborative project between artist and curator? Is there a dominant player?’
‘For us, Ask a Curator was the start of an ongoing conversation,’ says Wenke Mast, events and website assistant at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. ‘Our communications department will now screen Twitter every day and pass relevant questions to our curators. We will keep on answering questions.’ Perhaps this is a first step towards breaking down the ‘barriers’ between curators and marketing departments that Richardson observes.
And if volume of traffic is a measure of success, the event was barnstorming. The rapid rise of #askacurator – the ‘hashtag’ linking Twitter messages to the subject – led a range of media, including the BBC, to report on the activity. Although these reports largely focused on the social media phenomenon of a trending hashtag, they also discussed the event’s principal idea of connecting museum curators and the public all over the world.
The day’s activities also increased Twitter followers for the organisations which took part. ‘We received 403 extra followers from Tuesday 30 August,’ says Maryam Asghari, online and digital marketing manager at the Barbican. ‘The average is 443 extra followers per week, so to get this number in three days is good.’
In short, Ask a Curator generated lots of activity around a worthwhile objective, namely giving the global public ‘one-to-one’ access to curators of cultural heritage collections, many of which are publicly held. This huge response reveals genuine interest in the sector’s work, says Museums Sheffield marketing officer for campaigns and digital Dominic Russell-Price. ‘When the calls for scrapping arts funding get ever louder it was heartening to know that the public want to engage and know more about how we work, particularly with questions being about collections, not just exhibitions.’
But there are also limitations to the Twitter platform and in many ways Ask a Curator was beset by problems of its own success. The popularity of the event and the fast trending of #askacurator swiftly led the hashtag to be hijacked by spam messages, polluting the stream of genuine messages with rubbish. Because #askacurator is the only identifier of relevant messages it becomes difficult to track associated questions and answers as they stream in from multiple sources. Additionally, many responses were made directly to questioners rather than ‘tweeted’ publicly, further obscuring the exchange.
Another inherent limitation is Twitter’s short-form message format of no more than 140 characters. Does this preclude the meaningful and detailed conversation needed to discuss complex curatorial work? Is Twitter actually better suited to providing basic visitor information?
‘I think it all lies in the expectations of the Twitter audience,’ says Richardson. ‘Everyone enters Twitter knowing that the messages are short and I think people expect short answers and a certain amount of chaos. Personally, I don’t equate depth of engagement with the length of the answer; the tone and speed of response are for me just as important as they can show that an institution is open and keen to engage with the public.’
Certainly, whichever online platform is used for engagement, it is not so much the mechanics that are important, but the content and intention. In this regard, Ask a Curator raised its own valid question: Is there an appetite for this kind of dialogue, from both sides of the exchange, and how can it can enrich the work, understanding and enjoyment of museums and galleries everywhere?
—-
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist who write for publications including Design Week, Museum Practise, Museums Journal and Marketing.
From time-to-time somebody will make a negative comment about your museum on social media websites. If this happens you shouldn’t take it personally.
The latest social media applications for mobile phones make it easy for people to make comments on the move, and these are often flippant, throw-away remarks.
In truth we all make this kind of comment, whether we aren’t happy with having to queue in a shop or whether we don’t like the food in a restaurant, we don’t think twice about these kind of remarks and they often are forgotten as soon as we have made them.
While in the past this kind of comment might have been made to a handful of friends, social media amplifies every complaint, broadcasting them to anyone searching on for a related subject on Google, sometimes for years to come.
While this idea may seem like a good reason not to venture on to social media platforms, it is worth remembering that these comments would appear on social media platforms whether your organisation is active on them or not.
By engaging with users on social media websites you can influence the way that your institution is seen by the communities which exist on these websites. One of the ways that you will do this is by being seen to take negative comments seriously and responding to complaints.
For me, the most positive implication of social media making everyday complaints more visible is that it gives us feedback that we would not have previously had access to, and makes it possible for us to learn from our audiences.
A museum which welcomes constructive criticism and responds by constantly striving to improve is only going to become better, and for an organisation with this mindset, social media can be invaluable.
So, while you don’t need to take negative feedback to heart, you do need to take all comments serious and be seen to act.
How to reply to complaints
How you deal with feedback will depend on your organisation, and how comfortable the management are with social media. Some museums believe that to be truly transparent, they need to answer any complaint made through social media on the platform that the remark has been made, so that other users can see that you are taking feedback seriously, and to invite further debate on the subject.
This level of transparency will not suit every museum, and I believe that it is important not to overstretch your organisation.
The more conservative approach to negative feedback would be to acknowledge the complaint in the public arena of the social media space that it has been made, and to invite the individual who has made the comment to discuss their concern via email, telephone or in person.
To me this is a safer starting point for a museum looking at social media, it makes the venue seem responsive, but lets the organisation deal with the complaint in private, just as the museum would with a complaint made in a venue.
It is worth remembering that it is easier for a museum to start with a more conservative approach and then move towards a more transparent model, rather than the other way around. The most important thing is that the organisation takes onboard feedback and develops a culture of continual improvement to benefit from the knowledge that it’s audiences have chosen to share with it.
Who should deal with complaints will depend on your organisation and the seriousness of what has been said, as most social media spaces are person to person networks, you may choose to address a complaint as an individual working within your organisation, or you may prefer to respond as the museum.
Both routes have there advantages and disadvantages, while it may seem more official to respond as the organisation, this can also jar with the informal nature of these platforms and that in turn, can make the museum seem distant and out of touch.
Personally I feel that it is better to approach a complaint as an individual working for the museum, rather then the museum itself, I feel this makes it easier to build relationships and to build the perception of your organisation being a collection of passionate individuals rather then a faceless institution.
If someone does make a negative comment you may decide that it isn’t appropriate to respond. Much of what takes place in a museum can be interpreted differently by different people and you may choose to ignore a negative response to an exhibition and leave that conversation to be debated by other members of the community.
One thing which you must be careful to avoid is a member of museum staff joining the conversation without identifying their link to the organisation. One example of this backfiring badly was when staff from the Southbank Centre in London added positive reviews of the stage production of The Wizard of Oz to www.whatsonstage.com.
The Guardian newspaper reported in August 2008, that ‘Three posts expressed surprise at the criticism and lavished praise on the show. There was only one snag – the gushing paeans were written by staff at the Southbank Centre; just 75 minutes later, they were caught red-handed. A beady-eyed moderator noticed that the three rave reviews had all come from computers that shared the same IP address, the code that identifies an internet connection.’
The Southbank Centre later admitted that the three reviews had been written by their staff.
When to ignore comments
While most people will be pleased or even bemused to find that their complaint has been recognized by your museum, occasionally you might encounter someone who wishes to make a lot of noise for no real reason. The internet slang for this kind of activity is a ‘Troll’.
A Troll is less likely to make a complaint about your organisation, and more likely to try and be disruptive to your online communities, they may post off topic messages or inflammatory comments to try and deliberately provoke response.
Your starting point in dealing with a Troll, is to decide if they have a genuine point to make, or whether they are just trying to cause trouble. It is important to give them the chance to make a legitimate complaint and I would suggest that you invite them to do this via email, so that it can be dealt with officially. This is important to protect yourself from any claim that you have not given the individual a route to have their complaint heard.
If you do believe that the individual is being disruptive rather than trying to make a constructive criticism or comment then you have various ways in which you can deal with the problem depending on the social media platform.
If the trolling is taking place within a social network, then it is possible to ban a user from posting to your group, while moderation of blogs will allow you to delete any inappropriate comments before they are public.
Sometimes having a guide to acceptable behavior for community members can solve the problem, make it clear that your museum has a wide audience including children and that you can therefore not allow offensive language or vulgar comments to take place on your network.
Having these kind of guidelines also gives the community using these social networks a framework for policing itself, and you will often find that those breaking the rules will be told that they are out of line by other group members.
What to avoid
Ironically, one of the things which can cause the most negative response, is the way in which a museum is seen to deal with a complaint in the first place.
In 2009 New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz made a comment on Facebook about what he believed to be a very low representation of women artists on the 4th and 5th floors of MoMA. Kim Mitchell of MoMA sent Jerry Saltz a reply, which he posted on Facebook at her request.
“Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation. And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women’s Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you’ll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going.”
MoMA are very active across the social media space, and it isn’t surprising to see them answering criticism and trying to take part in the conversation, but rather than this comment being seen in a positive way, it drew a lot of criticism not only from those participating in the Facebook conversation, but also on Twitter and in blog posts where people commented that the reply seemed impersonal, PR-like and that the institution was not interested in being part of the conversation. Others have defended the tone of Kim’s email saying that dealing with a ’serious and contentious complaint in a less formal way would have been incredibly bold’.
The response that MoMA have recieved to Kim Mitchell’s email could be enough to put any museum off the idea of proactively responding to criticism in the social media space, if an organisation perceived to be ahead of the curb can fall fowl of the conversation, then is it safe for any institution to respond to criticism on the web.
I personally feel that responding to comments about your museum, whether they are positive or not is essential. This will show that you’re listening, that you want people’s opinions and that this will build trust and social capital in your brand with your audiences.
The majority of feedback that you find written about your organisation on social media platforms is likely to be very positive, but positive action can come out of even the most negative comment, giving a museum the knowledge it needs to keep getting better.
—-
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.
1. Film is not hard
I think film being difficult is a state of mind, after all, in the age of YouTube a movie does not need to have Hollywood production values, and something which looks a little rough could look more honest and more real.
2. Video is all about presentation
Video on the Internet does not need to be perfect, but it can not be boring. Think about what your going to say before filming starts and do not ramble.
3. Film does not need to cost a fortune
Expensive equipment is not essential to make a film for the web. A flipcam, a webcam, iPad 2 or even a smartphone will do the job.
4. Watch the sound quality
The picture on any of these devices tends to be pretty good, but the sound is something which needs more consideration. Especially when filming in a busy public space.
5. Avoid the editing
It is easier to film everything in one shot (or long takes), rather than spend hours trying to edit a movie together.
7. Composition
Think about the composition of your shot, everything does not need to be filmed straight to camera. Look at television programmes for inspiration.
8. Keep editing simple
There is a lot of fantastic video editing software, but try and keep it simple and focus on something which will get the job done, rather than lots of extra features.
9. Have a transcript
Do not forget to include a transcript. It makes your film easier for search engines to understand, and makes your content accessible for those with hearing difficulties.
10. Share your film
Film does not need to live on YouTube, share it on your Facebook, Twitter, Blog and allow other people to embed it in their social media spaces.
One of the defining features of Twitter is that it is very much a person to person network, and this holds both dangers and benefits for an organisation like a museum.
To project the right image for the museum it is important to consider how you use Twitter, for example it could reflect badly on the organisation if someone who identified themselves as a member of staff made political remarks, talked about ‘going out to get wrecked’ or used inappropriate language amongst tweets that referenced their work.
Whilst we would like to see people from across the organisation use twitter to engage with the public and to talk about the work that they do, we would suggest that this needs to be done as a member of staff and as such you should consider having separate personal and professional Twitter accounts.
If you do set up a Twitter account for professional use, then it is important to identify yourself as working for the museum to avoid any confusion about your point of view. For example, it could seem dishonest to the community on Twitter if you posted comments about how good a new exhibition looked without identifying yourself as a member of staff.
The easiest way to show your link to the museum is to mention this in your profile.
What should I write about? Your starting point should be to listen to what others are talking about on Twitter and to think about how you can best contribute to the conversations which are taking place on the social network.
Twitter is an eco-system of thousands of niche conversations and as a museum we are perfectly positioned to benefit from this by engaging with people who have a passion for the subjects we cover.
Use the Twitter search facility to find these interesting conversations and follow and engage with individuals who are saying interesting things.
As well as listening and responding to others, you will want to write about your own work within the museum. Museums are fascinating places and you will find that a lot of people are interested in what goes on behind the scenes; just be careful not to announce anything confidential before it is in the public domain.
As well as writing tweets, you may also find Twitpic.com a useful service. This allows you to share pictures on Twitter and with such visual collections, this can really add something special to your tweets.
Responding to the public
Twitter is a person to person network, and your part of using this social media platform is speaking to the public. They might reply to something that you write on Twitter or could ask you a question.
It is important to reply to these messages in the same friendly and informative manor that you would if they came up to you in the museum.
If somebody has a criticism about an exhibition or the museum in general, inform them that you appreciate their comment and have passed this along to the relevant person in the museum, and then forward the comment to ——— so that they can deal with it in line with our complaints procedure.
Tone of Voice Getting the right tone of voice for your tweets is essential when joining Twitter, this website has a large and passionate userbase and anyone stumbling in to this space and posting in an inappropriate way will quickly be ridiculed.
Twitter has a friendly and informal style. This is a person to person network and you should write your tweets to suit this, rather then posting anything that sounds to ‘corporate’ or ‘PR’ like.
Looking at how more experienced users are writing tweets on the website is often a good way to learn what works and what seems inappropriate.
Retweeting One of the most popular features of Twitter is the retweet, this is essentially forwarding a message that someone else has written to your followers. When selecting something to retweet, consider how appropriate it is for someone who is linked with the museum to be associated with the original tweet and whether it may appear to be an endorsement of third party content.
You may wish to consider adding your own comment to anything that you choose to retweet, making it clear why you are forwarding it.
Following people
While it is best practice to follow those who choose to follow you on Twitter back, it is important that you look at the profile of each person you are considering following and consider whether it is appropriate for the museum to have a link with this individual.
Once you have started to follow an individual, you should keen reviewing what they are posting to Twitter and stop following them if you think that their tweets are inappropriate.
Abandoning Twitter
Once you have made a commitment to use Twitter, you should try and tweet at least once a day. In reality you’ll probably find it quite addictive.
If you find that Twitter isn’t for you, then consider handing over your account to a colleague rather then abandoning it, this is also the best course of action if you are leaving the museum.
If you can not find an appropriate person to take over from you, then you should delete your account, rather then leaving an abandoned account online.
When it is okay to pretend to be someone else Whilst transparency and honesty are key to the way that we should act on social networks, there is one exception to the rule.
Some museums have made good use of Twitter to bring historic figures back from the dead, and to write tweets as either a famous person or a fictional character in order to educate the public about a certain period of time or an event from history.
This kind of activity can be very effective, but needs to be well planned with consideration given to how you could respond to the public if they ask questions, or try and engage this person in conversation.
—-
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.
Museums have long survived on the generosity of volunteers who carry out vital work to support the everyday work of the institution. Today I want to look at how volunteering is evolving for the digital world, with interesting projects which ask the public to volunteer their time online.
Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is the term used to describe people coming together online to collectively solve a problem. A task is collectively shared by those taking part, whether that is to label objects in a digital collection or to build an exhibition.
Here are few interesting ways in which museums are using crowdsourcing:
V&A – Search the Collections
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a collection database of 140,000 images, these are selected from a database automatically and don’t always show the object to it’s best. The V&A recently launched a crowdsourcing project to ask members of the public to help them to select the best images to use in the collections database.
There are over 116,000 objects which the V&A hopes the public with volunteer to help them sift through. You can sign up to help them and give the V&A crowdsourcing project project a go yourself here.
Memorial Exhibition Archive
Most history museums do not deal with something as recent as the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, and the unique position which The September 11 Memorial and Museum holds, has given the organisation the opportunity to ask the public to contribute to the creation of their collection through their website.
The memories, mementos and pictures added to the collection will all contribute to ensuring that those lost on September 11th will never be forgotten.
Democracy Democracy was an exhibition of graphic design which took place in October 2009, this project asked the public not only to submit work, but also to curate the final selection by voting for which artworks merited inclusion in the final exhibition.
Once the exhibition opened, the public could still vote and change the layout of the exhibition space, which was digitally projected on to the gallery walls.
Lets face it, some Museums don’t use Twitter for much more then broadcasting events listings, and press releases about upcoming exhibition, but to attract a good following on Twitter, you need to create content that people really want to read.
Here are a few tips for creating more interesting tweets for your Museum:
1. Add pictures There are lots of ways of getting links to pictures in to your tweets, Twitpic pictured above is one of the most popular. You could post pictures of a new exhibition being built, an event or exhibition opening or even objects from your collection.
2. Fact of the day
Did something relevant to your collection happen on this day in history? Do you have an interesting fact about a historic figure connected to your exhibitions which you could share with your followers? Why not have a fact of the day?
3. Visitors video and pictures
Have you found pictures posted onYouTube or Flickr by your visitors? If not have a look and you might be surprised how many you find. Could you link to a picture or video of the week?
4. Ask a question
Ask you followers something, this could be for their opinion on something or it could be a weekly Museum quiz relating to your collections.
5. Twitter as a historic figure
Got an exhibition connected to a historic figure? Can you get your curators to help you to write tweets as that individual, do you have a diary which you could tweet extracts from?
6. What is going on behind the scenes
Museums are interesting places, and people are interested in what is going on behind the scenes, tell your followers about some of these experiences.
7. Retweet
Has somebody said something nice about a visit to your Museum on Twitter? When they do, be sure to share that with the rest of your followers by retweeting their comment.
8. Talk to people
Check daily for people talking about your Museum using the Twitter search facility, and answer peoples questions and contribute to these conversations.
—-
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.
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.
—-
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.
It’s the time of year where everyone tries to predict the next big thing, and while I take most of these with a pinch of salt, the Trendwatching briefing is always worth spending a little time reading.
One trend that they have predicted for 2010 is ‘the rise of real time reviews’, this is described as:
In short, with even more people sharing, in real time, everything they do, buy, listen to, watch, attend, wear and so on, and with even more search engines and tracking services making it easy to find and group these ‘live dispatches’ by theme, topic or brand, 2010 will see ready-to-buy consumers tapping into a live stream of (first-hand) experiences from fellow consumers.
This piece on Trendwatching reminded me of some statistics that I’d seen from Deloittes about online reviews. This said that 62% of consumers read consumer-generated reviews on the internet, and of that group 82% subsequently made a purchase.
Of course online reviews aren’t anything new, for example they have been a major element of online stores like Amazon for many years, but the rise in social media means that people are now reviewing their experience of your museum, even if you don’t ask them to.
The Trendwatching briefing made me wonder, are any museums using online reviews on their websites?
I asked the question on Twitter and I was pointed in the direction of a small number of museums who do encourage visitors to share feedback. The MilestonesMuseum in England asks visitors to leave reviews on their website (shown below).
The museum has received sixty reviews and have an average rating of three out of five, that isn’t an overwhelming advert for a visit. I guess that this is the reason that more museums don’t ask what people think. They are frightened that they might not like what they hear.
Trendwatching say that organisations who are brave enough to ask for reviews need to adopt a ‘Beta-mindset’ and embrace any feedback as a positive thing that allows you to involve your visitors in the development process, co-producing a better museum experience.
That is a major factor in asking for reviews from the public, it’s not enough to just ask for people’s opinion’s, you really need to have a plan in place for what you do with that feedback and how you will communicate progress to your visitors.
Although there is the possibility of negative feedback and the work that it would take to manage this are factors to consider, the statistics from other sectors suggest that adding reviews to your website could be a great marketing tool.
I am really interested in learning more about the experiences that museums have had, positive and negative with trying to implement reviews on their websites, have you tried this?
It seems like there is always something new to get excited about on the internet, conference backchannels buzz with talk of web 3.0 and museums using the semantic web, augmented reality and crowd sourcing. So why am I talking about blogging, isn’t that so 2005?
Why museums should blog
Blogging is a brilliant way for you to give audiences the chance to see a different side of the museum. There is a genuine interest in what happens behind the scenes in a museum or gallery and a blog gives you the chance to give those interested in your organisation a deeper understanding of the work that goes into an exhibition, research, event or education programme.
It can also provide information in bite-size chunks, perfect for casual browsers, and can give you an outlet to create build-up for something, such as with posts about the stages of preparation for a large event.
A museum blog is a brilliant way to increase the website traffic that you get from search engines, because a blog is regularly updated with rich content full of links. In my experience a museum can expect its traffic to rise by around 10% by adding a blog.
What to write on a museum blog?
Your starting point should be to think about your audiences, who are you writing for, and what would they be interested in? Remember that your visitors are fascinated by what goes on behind closed doors, so think about photographing exhibitions being installed, write about your exhibit of the week or talk about the ghost in the basement.
I would recommend that you are very careful not to post any press releases about new exhibitions on the blog, as the formal style of a press release would jar with the informal written style of a blog. You should try and keep your blog posts to under 500 words and use sub-headings to break up the text and make it easy to skim read.
Who should write your museum blog?
I think it would be a mistake to try and write a museum blog alone. A client of mine recently decided to set up a blog, they decided that they would to have two new blog posts per week and decided that it would take ten members of staff to accomplish that. They asked for volunteers from across the organisation, and asked those interested in being involved to write a sample blog post (to check they could write). One important thing to note here is that these individuals came from across the organisation, each bringing a unique perspective on the work that takes place behind closed doors.
How often should a museum blog?
A blog is meant to be updated regularly, and I’d suggest that you aim for a new blog post every week, to do this you really need to have a number of people writing the blog and encourage people from across your organisation to put idea’s forwards.
Get ready for a conversation!
Though at first glance a blog may look like a publishing medium, every blog post tends to invite comments from readers and you need to be ready to respond to these comments. This is a great way of gathering feedback and connecting with and getting to know your audience. It is worth thinking about how you will respond to feedback, some of which may be negative. Be open to the points that people put forward on your blog and always be prepared to learn from your audiences.
—-
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.
Photo sharing website Flickr has long been a favorite social media space for museums, it is cheap, easy to use and has a large and active community of users. Museums have been very inventive in the way in which they use the site, stepping beyond simply using it to share pictures, here are five ways that I’ve seen museums using Flickr in 2009:
Opening up the archives The Brooklyn Museum is one of many institutions around the world who have started to share their photographic archive through Flickr. The public are free to download and use these out of copyright images, but this isn’t simply used as a photo sharing tool, the Brooklyn Museum also asks those looking at the images to help them find out more information about the pictures, for example ‘do you know where this is?’.
If your interested in sharing your archives on Flickr, you might want to read about The Commons on Flickr.
Contributing to exhibitions Tate have used Flickr to alongside a number of exhibitions, for example earlier this year they ran a competition to find 36 pictures which were used to create a poster to coincide with their exhibition Colour Chart.
The gallery has previously done similar things with How We Are Now and Street & Studio.
Crowd-sourcing advertising
“It’s Time We Met” was a marketing campaign for the Metropolitan Museum of Art which ran earlier this year. To find authentic images of the museum from the visitors point of view for the campaign they used Flickr.
I think that the images are all the more striking, because you know that they are real experiences, shared by real people.
Crowd- sourced curating on Flickr The Luce Foundation used Flickr to invite the public to help them to select the right item to fill gaps in their glass display cases left when pieces are away on loan in a project called Fill the Gap.
Flickr provided a low cost way to get people involved in this project, giving them a space to debate what should fill the gap.
To engage audiences with games The London Transport Museum used Flickr in a very creative way to create a scavenger hunt game in July 2008. Participants were broken in to groups, who were given a series of clues which were answered by uploading a picture to Flickr.
As well as one team winning on the day, the public also voted for the best picture of the day in a public vote on Flickr.
—-
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.
A young woman is strolling down the street in a medium-sized British town. Rounding a corner she is confronted with an altercation between a white man and an Asian store-owner. It is not clear what has caused the confrontation, but the aggression has a palpable racial element. As the shouting and gesticulating heightens, the observer takes out her phone and grabs a couple of photographs, as well as a short, ten-second video, all the while making sure she is out of sight.
Later, as she comes into the city centre, the woman decides to pop in to the local museum to see what’s on and to pass half an hour before a meeting. As it turns out, the museum has just opened a temporary exhibition looking at the history of race relations in the city, offering oral histories, photographs and cultural objects imported to the town by its Asian immigrants. She notices that one section of the exhibition is soliciting visitor input, encouraging people to share their own stories, experiences and images. These contributions will be collected on a special microsite, built to accompany the exhibition, elements of which form part of a constantly updated digital display inside the museum.
Recalling the incident she witnessed in the street, the woman decides to upload the pictures to the museum’s Flickr group, set up especially for the exhibition, where she is able to geotag the exact location of the event using Google maps, as well as the time and date it took place. One of the pictures – a decisive photographic moment – captured the white man’s grimacing face, his first finger rigidly poking towards the anxious looking Asian shopkeeper. Shorn of context, the image could of course have any number of meanings; but the photographer is able to provide a firsthand account of the racist abuse she overheard and which she duly records in the image’s caption.
With this contribution the exhibition has become live and dynamic. The museum has taken a difficult subject, with historical and social dimensions, examined it and opened it to the public for further and ongoing discussion and interpretation. Although focused around the physical exhibition itself, much of this public participation is made possible using online services which are constructed along the social media principles of interconnection, sharing and collaboration – an approach to web-based services encapsulated in the term web 2.0.
But more than this, in planning for the exhibition the museum staff decided to engage people outside the organisation to work through the design process itself. This participatory design sought input from a small number of community groups, local businesses and residents. One of the outcomes of this ‘outside’ contribution was the decision that the microsite, while hosted and branded by the museum, would be maintained and moderated by two volunteers. One of these volunteers works for a community outreach programme which organises events promoting integration and positive interaction between different sections of the community. The experiences and learning derived from these events continues to be fed into the microsite in the form of a blog.
And so on. This fictional scenario, presenting a museum operating on the tricky frontiers of social debate, begins to illustrate some of the possibilities of incorporating participation – by design – into the processes of creating exhibitions, as well as the way those exhibitions engage the public. Of course, engagement and collaboration may well form the backbone of many existing museum programmes without the term participatory design (or indeed design for participation) ever being mentioned. But a conscious decision to build participation into the design process itself and/or into the way users will interact with exhibitions once they are installed is an approach which may yield benefits for the institution and visitors alike.
Nina Simon of US consultancy Museum 2.0 explains: ‘Participatory design can help museums deliver on the oft-repeated but rarely demonstrated desire for museums to become essential civic spaces, social environments that encourage the democratic process.’
Participation can be as complicated or as simple as deemed necessary, depending on resources, experience and objectives. Engaging and organising people (the public, experts from areas outside the museum, community groups and so on) to take part in a truly collaborative design process is certainly an undertaking, as is inviting visitor contributions and dialogue with the exhibitions themselves. But at its simplest level, participation might be encouraged by asking visitors to caption or comment on objects by sticking Post-It notes around exhibition displays.
An example cited by Simon is The Post-It Project, conducted at Sweden’s Västernorrlands Läns Museum a few years ago, ‘in which visitors were solicited to write down comments – about anything in the museum – and post them wherever they wanted.’ As she suggests, the value and goal here are perhaps too vague to be genuinely useful, but the ‘open-endedness also makes this kind of project a great starting point for a museum to explore the inclusion of visitor content. Start-up costs and development time are minimal, and the project can be aborted at any time.’
But for many museums, the catalyst for building visitor contributions into their activities has been the proliferation and mass uptake of online social media services – sites such as Flickr, Facebook and, more recently, Twitter. Flickr in particular is well known, easy to use and allows museums to garner relevant photographic material from the public, not just locally, but anywhere in the world. An event-based extension of this might be to organise a scavenger hunt, as the London Transport Museum has done, sending teams of people into the city to locate and photograph various London Transport related objects. All the pictures were uploaded to Flickr, allowing a vote for the best image to be thrown open to the public and in turn utilising Flickr’s social network aspects to build awareness of the museum’s brand amongst online ‘communities’.
Similarly, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s World Beach Project, devised by artist Sue Lawty, asks people worldwide to create sculptures and images on beaches using gathered stones, recording the process and finished art in up to three photographs.
Rather than using Flickr, the images are uploaded to the museum’s dedicated web page and embedded Google world map. Again, the project is conceived specifically to create participation, engaging visitors and non-visitors alike in content generation, while marketing the V&A online at the same time.
These last two examples are competition and art project respectively, so arguably outside a museum’s core public-facing activities, which are delivered via exhibitions, collections and interpretation. But participation can seed exhibitions too.
The Minnesota History Society’s MN150 exhibition and book invited public submissions of the key people, places or things that have shaped the state’s history. This engagement was partly conducted online, but the bulk of submissions came from community outreach, demonstrating that participatory design need not be technology-led – it is mostly about approach and intent. The result was an exhibition populated with content gathered directly through public input, albeit curated by the museum.
A nice example of design for participation is the National Maritime Museum’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, set up this year so that entries are submitted via Flickr, where they are held in the public domain, while a partnership with Astrometry.net allows each image is ‘astrotagged’ so that they can all be combined and compared in a growing photographic chart of the night sky. The collaborative nature of this project – along with the content created by the public – is its strength. And again, it builds awareness of the museum’s activities farther and wider than could have been achieved otherwise. It is competition, exhibition, research and marketing all in one, but would not be possible without public input, professional collaboration and web-based services.
Yet another example is Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, an investigation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ in which artists’ photographic responses to the theme of the ‘changing faces of Brooklyn’ were assessed by the public online. At the final exhibition, held in the museum last summer, the artworks were installed according to their relative ranking from this public jury process.
Participatory design, then, can take many flavours. Naturally, not everything will be appropriate for every institution, exhibition or subject theme.
Traditionally, museums have delivered knowledge and learning in one direction: from institution to the public. Although it adds another dimension, participation need not supplant this model. Of course, it is valid to ask whether participation – and by extension participatory design – is actually necessary or beneficial at all. Perhaps one way to answer that is to consider changing expectations. As cultural sector consultant and Flow Associates director Bridget McKenzie notes, a recent flurry of events centred on participatory culture seem to indicate that ‘the public expects to participate’.
—-
Scott Billings is a freelance journalist who write for publications including Design Week, Museum Practise, Museums Journal and Marketing.
Twitter is becoming an important communications tool for museums and galleries. Here are seven tips to help you get more out of the social media platform.
1. Tell your readers who is speaking.
Twitter is a person to person network, and the people who use it like to know who they are talking too, so even if your tweeting on behalf of an institution, you should let people know who you are.
Here is an example of how Brooklyn Museum do this on their Twitter profile.
2. Be a person, not an institution.
The big advantage of saying who is writing on behalf of your institution is that it allows you to be a human being rather then an institution. The way that people speak to each other on Twitter is very informal and if you start to send messages that sound like they have been written by the PR department, then you’ll stand out as having not taken the time to understand the way people use Twitter.
3. Tweet often, but not too often.
Getting the frequency of your tweets right is a tricky business. Remember that you’re still a museum, not my best friend and I really don’t need to hear from you three times a day.
4. Follow people It is polite to follow the people who have taken time to follow your institution, it also means that people can send you direct messages.
5. Take twitter in to the real world Many institutions set up a Twitter account and don’t link it to their real live venue.
Take a look at this card I noticed recently in Brooklyn Museum, are you sign posting your visitors to Twitter?
6. Show a different side of your organisation Think about the interesting things that happen in your organisation which might interest your followers (in fact write them down). Museums are fascinating organisations, and while it wouldn’t be appropriate to post pictures of your stuffed baboon being cleaned on your corporate website, Twitter is the perfect place to share stories of what happens behind the scenes.
7. Don’t just broadcast Twitter is a platform for conversations not just another space to broadcast information about your latest exhibition. Get involved in discussions with the people who follow you, and take the time to reply when someone mentions your institution.
