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.

Twitter

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 21^st 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 1000^th 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.

Kickstarter is an interesting new website where crowdsourcing meets fundraising, you will find films, comics and arts projects all asking strangers to help make projects happen by donating money towards the project.

Each project is given space on Kickstarter to give a pitch, explaining the aims, financial goals and what is in it for the person donating (limited edition print etc). The website seems to be doing a great job of linking projects with generous individuals and a quick flick through Kickstarter shows large sums of money have been donated (if a project doesn’t reach it’s fundraising goal within a limited timeframe then the money is returned to the people who donated it).

At the AMA Museum & Galleries Day which I attended yesterday, everybody was talking about the funding cuts which are going to hit the cultural sector in the UK (though the funding crunch is an international problem for museums) and I wondered if the Kickstarter model is one way of making the museum more sustainable and more relevant to it’s audiences.

Could a museum invite members of the public to propose exhibitions to be held within a gallery space over a set space of time and then ask people to vote with their money for the exhibition which they would like to see. The money would be like an advance ticket purchase with even those who pledge just £1 receiving a free ticket to visit the show.

I don’t know, perhaps it is crass and the public should not be able to buy an exhibition, but looking at Kickstarter, I think the result could be really interesting.

I’d love to hear what you think!

I think it has come as a surprise to many of these organisations when I have told them that they should think again. While there are an estimated 2.5 million iPhones in the UK, this is only accounts for about 10% of the smart phone market and it is better value for a cultural organisation to look at creating mobile friendly web content, then a more expensive application which only a minority of their audiences can access.

I think this is especially true of museums and galleries, where organisations have a real responsibility to make their content accessible to as many people as possible.

In the UK 53% of the mobile phones have built in internet access and this now accounts for over 3% of web traffic. Museums and galleries who I spoke to have experienced a large rise in the amount of traffic coming from mobile phones with some receiving over thousands of web visitors every month from mobile devices.

To me, it seems like better value to put resources in to creating website which will work for all smart phones, rather then an App which will only work on an iPhone.

A recent blog post from Ted Forbes at Dallas Museum of Art highlighted this, his museum chose to create a ‘smARTphone Tour’ which would guide visitors around their collection rather then develop an iPhone App.

Ted writes ‘I was completely blown away when I got to the museum to see people on all kinds of phones not only curiously checking out the web app, but also in the exhibit taking it all in!’

To make the ‘smARTphone Tour’ even more accessible, Dallas Museum of Art also had iPod touches available for visitors to use in the gallery, these can access the internet via a wifi network, making the web based tour accessible to these users as well.

With 16 months being the average time that a person keeps a mobile phone, we can expect the number of smartphones to keep rising over the next year.

As we start to roll out mobile friendly websites for museums and galleries, I am really interested to see high the number of visitors browsing these websites from smart phones rises.

Will we have over 10% of website visitors coming from mobile phones by the end of 2010, or will more accessible websites push this even higher?

Increasingly companies like Google are operating in a permanent state of Beta, as they use the constant feedback, which they receive from their users to constantly improve their service.

Social media is shifting other sectors towards operating in a constant state of BETA, as they open themselves up to a world of real time reviews, where the public share their experiences, good and bad of everything from the restaurant they ate in last night to their visit to your gallery today.

Museums have embraced social media as a tool to engage with their audiences, and I suspect that many have done this without realising that part of taking part in a conversation, is listening to what the other person has to say (or at the least management of most venues are unaware of this).

How can a museum really build a community around it’s brand if the feedback which is given isn’t used to continuously make the institution better.

I feel that to do this, we need to embrace BETA, and be brave enough to open ourselves up to a never ending cycle of development, one in which we partner with the public to create the museum of the future.

With the current climate of cut backs, it may seem like a crazy idea to promise continuous development to the public, after all it would be worse to promise something that you simply can’t deliver then to do nothing at all.

However, I think that it is fair to be honest with the public about what is possible within your existing budget, and as partners, to work together to fundraise if there is a demand for something that is beyond the museum financially.

The fact is that the public are making statements about where they think you need to improve anyway, both publically on social networks and privately to friends and you can either ignore or act on this.

The idea behind the mobile friendly website is that a regular website doesn’t work particularly well on a mobile phone and with 3% of web traffic in the UK coming from mobile phones (2.5% in the US) museums can benefit from having an alternative website which mobile users are redirected to automatically.

This first test shows first the user trying to find the address of the museum on it’s regular website using a mobile phone, this takes them about 30 seconds to locate, then the user tries to do the same on our mobile friendly website and this takes no more then three seconds.

Next we tried the same on an iPhone, this was faster then the Nokia phone, but still far quicker on the mobile friendly website then the regular site, especially when we start looking at exhibition or what’s on information.

Foursquare is a location-based game which describes itself as being ‘All about helping you find new ways to explore the city, discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people.’

Foursquare basically lets you leave tips for friends and strangers in your favorite places, when someone else comes to that place, they can read the tips that you have left through Foursquare on their mobile phone.

Foursquare is growing in popularity and many museums and galleries are listed on the application. A lot of these institutions are taking steps to engage with those who use Foursquare and  having spent a little more time using this application I want to share a couple of tips.

The image above is taken from the Foursquare account of The Pollak Library in the United States. The library has used the ‘TO-DO’ function on Foursquare to tell people more about what they offer, for example ‘ebooks’.

This is a really nice idea which I think could work brilliantly to create treasure hunts through museums, where the visitor has to tick off a list of twenty items in the collection which they have to track down in your collection.

The other route which I have found many institutions taking to encourage people to check in with them is to offer prizes to anyone who becomes a major (this happens when you check in the most in any one location). With Pratt Library, I believe they offered a tote bag as a prize.

Foursquare is being hyped as the next big thing, so it is worth checking out and thinking how you can engage with it’s users.

Have you used Foursquare for your museum, what tips do you have?

I think the question of control is really important, because while you have always been able to project a message through brand, advertising and PR (as well as everything else your organisation does), you have never had control of this once it has been released into the world.

While there is a perception that using websites like Twitter and Facebook reduces your control, in actual fact it can make it easier to ensure that your organisation is connecting with visitors, because unlike traditional media, the social media space talks back.

It would be naive to think that these conversations didn’t happen before social media, the only difference now is that you are able to listen to this feedback. This gives a museum more control, because it gives you the information you need to constantly improve as an organisation.

So when someone next tells you that they are worried about the lack of control you’ll have if you set up a Flickr account or start using Twitter, ask them how much control they think you have over traditional media, because having control over the look of an advert or the tone of voice of a press release isn’t the same thing as having control over how that is received by your audiences.

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.

Tag! You’re it!:

While the V&A crowdsorucing project focused on finding the right crop for images in it’s collection database, this example from the Brooklyn Museum asks the public to instead tag the images with keywords to make them easier to find.

The Brooklyn Museum turned this task in to a game, encouraging people to compete to top the leaderboard of top taggers.

I am interested to find more examples of crowdsourcing within museums, is this something which your institution is using? Please leave a comment and share your project with our readers.

Insights will give you up to date information about how people are interacting with your page in a number of ways:

Unsubscribed Fans:
Insight allows you to track how many people have unsubscribed from being fans of your museum on Facebook. This is an important metric which can give you a clear indication of whether the content that you are posting is appealing to fans. Look out for sudden increases in people unsubscribing and consider changing the frequency that you are posting and the content that you are posting if this happens.

Interaction:
I personally feel that interaction is more important for a museum then the number of people who become fans. You can view the number of comments, the number of likes and the number of views your content is getting in your ‘insights’ analytics.

Interaction per post:
As well as looking at interaction across your activity, ‘insights’ analytics also lets you view the interaction with your fans for each post. This is a great way to learn what is working and over time this can help you to improve your post quality.

Demographics:
As well as giving you information about how your fans are interacting with you, you can also access information about your fans demographics, how old are they, what sex are they. The chances are that this will differ from the visitor profile of your organisation and it is worth keeping this in mind when creating content for Facebook.

Page Views:
As well as showing you how people are engaging with your content, you can also see how many page views your Fan page is receiving, as your fan base increases, this should grow.

Other ways of keeping track of Facebook Fan Pages:
As well as using the ‘insights’ analytics you can track the success of your Facebook fan page in a number of other ways.

Bit.ly:
If you use Twitter, you will be familiar with URL shortening services like Bit.ly. While these are good for making website addresses shorter, they are also great for tracking how many people click through a link and this can be a useful tool to use on Facebook.

Google Analytics:
If you have Google Analytics set up on your museum website, you can track how many visitors are coming from Facebook and even track which sections of your website these people then visit.

Over the past week I have given an introduction to Facebook for a Museum, I hope that this proves useful and I’d be really interested if you think I have missed anything.