Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Creating a Social Media Editorial Plan for a museum

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Guidelines | 4 Comments »

Developing a social media strategy

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating your own museums social media strategy

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

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

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

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

 

Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

Incomplete Manifesto

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

This is an ‘Incomplete Manifesto for the MuseumNext’ as presented by Jim Richardson at the Join to Create conference in Amsterdam on 19 January 2010. This brings together thoughts on how museums and galleries can use technology to create more engaging experiences for visitors:

1. We will evolve
Technology has caused a cultural shift; the way that people act is changing. Museums must evolve to meet these changing audience expectations.

2. We will shift from the didactic to dialogue
Museums should be platforms for exchange, accepting that everyone can have something valid to contribute.

3. We will be open
We should use technology to take people behind-the-scenes and to give them direct access to our staff and expertise.

4. We will empower our audiences to make us better
We will use technology to create new opportunities for our audiences to volunteer their time to help make our museums better.

5. We will build personalised experiences
Museums need to look beyond delivering the same experience to all their visitors and use technology to give personalised experiences.

6. We will be social
Technology should be used by museums to bring people together and extend the reach of our community projects.

7. We will put the audience in to the story
We should give our audiences the opportunity to be the protagonist in the museum experience or story, acknowledging that many people prefer this way of learning.

8. We will be platforms for creativity
A museum should not only be a place to see other people’s creativity, it should be a platform to encourage everyone to be creative.

9. We will exist beyond the physical museum
Technology enables a museum to engage with people outside of its physical location, increasing geographic reach and the impact which it can have.

10. ?
This tenth point has deliberately been left blank, what do you think it should be? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Social Media | 5 Comments »

Dealing with negative feedback

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

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.

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

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

Posted in Facebook, Social Media, Twitter | 5 Comments »

Twitter guidelines for Museum staff

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

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.

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

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

Posted in Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »

Creating a social media plan

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

While it is tempting to jump in to social media without a plan, it is becoming increasingly important to take a professional approach when looking at how to get the most out of these platforms. This five stage plan will give you a starting point for creating your social media plan.

Step 1: Stop, Look & Listen
There are countless websites which you might be considering, especially as many of you are from different countries and as the websites that are hitting the headlines now like Facebook and Twitter may not be as popular in six months’ time.

I think it’s important that before you take your museum in to a social media space that you take time to understand the websites that your audiences use before you do anything else. Each website is different and users interact with each in different ways. It would be easy for your museum to look like it ‘didn’t get it’ or like you were just there to sell if you stumble into websites like Facebook or Twitter without knowing the unwritten rules of these spaces.

So, your first step in taking your museum and your brand into Social Media is to stop! Don’t start setting up museum pages on every social network you can find, don’t rush out and set up a Twitter account for your museum. Instead take the time to learn about these websites and most importantly, how your audiences are using them.

By learning which social media communities your audiences are already talking about your brand in you can prioritise which websites you need to understand. The social media landscape is constantly changing but by regularly checking where your audiences are talking about you, you can stay ahead of the curve.

As well as looking at where people are talking about your venue, you may also want to see where they are talking about museums or other brands that you admire, is this the same spaces that people are talking about your museum in or are they attracting a demographic that you would like to?

Once you know which websites you are interested in learning about, sign up for an account. I’d recommend you do this as an individual rather then an institution until you get to grips with how things work. Each website has a different set unwritten rules and spending time looking and listening helps you get your head around them, and starts to change the way you think. You start to realise that now any and everybody gets to create content, distribute content and control their own user experiences and to start to consider how a museum can fit in to this.

In many ways this is the most important stage, because too often museums jump in without understanding the way that these networks really work. Right now Twitter is full of museums broadcasting events listings and press releases and in doing so they make themselves both as brands and institutions seem distant and uninviting. It is obvious to the communities who exist in this space that these institutions just don’t get it.

This can be damaging to a museum’s brand, because it projects the image of an institution who can’t be bothered to learn how a space which is important to its audiences works. Social networks are a huge part of the lives of some segments of your audience and a lack of respect for them translates to a lack of respect for these audiences.

For me the organisations who have succeeded most across a diverse range of social media platforms are the ones who have taken time to understand how things work. These are the organisations who are adding value to their brands through social media.

Step 2: Goals
It is important to start with goals rather than technology because the social media space is filled with cool tools, the next big thing and that site you have to be on. It would be easy to waste a lot of time if you jump in without asking yourself why.

TATE and the Brooklyn Museum, two organisations who are well known as leaders in the field of Social Media, both say that they base their goals on the mission of their organisations.

TATE for example aims to ‘Increase understanding and knowledge of art’, and while they may choose to use Facebook or Flickr to reach demographics such as young people, they do this with this mission in mind.

Having goals which align with the overall mission of your organisation also makes it a lot easier to get buy in from your management and trustees then chasing the latest technology.

Step 3: Strategy
Now that you have a goal in mind you need to determine the right strategy and the right social media platform to achieve it. I’d recommend that you start small, concentrating on just one website or social media platform, until you find your feet.

The listening exercise that you will have done should have identified the best place to start, it will be somewhere that your audiences or potential audiences spend time online, and a space that you now feel comfortable that you understand.

As well as having numerous different websites to consider, I would also recommend that you take time to think about how your audience are likely to want to get involved. For example a 16 year old and a 60 year old will both participate in social media but in very different ways. A useful tool when considering this is the ‘ladder of participation’ developed by Forrester research as part of their excellent book Groundswell.

One example of a social media strategy is a project that I developed for the Laing Art Gallery in the North of England, our goal was to try and spread the word amongst twenty something’s that the gallery had a really diverse and interesting collection and to try and increase awareness within that age group and to change the perception of the brand from a gallery which is for older people, to something for them.

We decided that Facebook would be the best social media space to use to spread the word about the gallery, because of the age range of the audience that we were targeting. Our strategy was to create a Facebook application which anyone could add to their profile, and which would show a different piece from the gallery’s collection every day.

The Laing Art Gallery ‘Picture of the day’ application was launched virally, with museum staff adding it to their own profiles and over the next month usage grew slowly. With every new user signing up for the application, we virally spread the word about the gallery to their friends, and with the average member on facebook having 120 friends, it’s reach extended to tens of thousands of people very quickly.

So you can see how we chose a goal, picked a social media platform based on the audience we were trying to reach and developed our strategy based on this.

The Laing Art Gallery facebook application was automated so needed no management once it was launched, but people and how much time they can dedicate to your social media activities are a major consideration and you need to think about this at this stage.

Generally speaking, social media platforms help facilitate conversations between individuals, so once you have a sense of what people are talking about, you need to figure out who will talk on the Museum’s behalf.

One of our clients is going through this process at the minute, looking for staff to contribute to a new blog that they want to launch this summer. They wanted people from across the organization to contribute to this, and with the goal of posting two new blog posts a week they decided to find ten members of staff who could each be asked to write one post per month.

With this in mind they have included a call for bloggers in their internal newsletter, asking anyone interested to write a sample blog post. To give these would-be bloggers a clear idea of what the blog should be about they have been given a brief which gives a broad guideline to would-be participants about the kind of stories the museum is looking for.

This approach of including people from across the organisation in social media activity has several advantages, firstly it spreads the responsibility for writing the blog, it would be hard to for the marketing department to find time to write two blog posts a week.

Secondly the result is more likely to sound authentic if it comes from outside the PR department and instead from enthusiastic volunteers. As I’ve said, social media is about people speaking to people and an important point to make here is that while the museum has suggested the types of stories they are looking for, they have not set a brand writing style or an approved list of stories, preferring instead to let enthusiastic members of staff communicate what they are about in an open and honest way.

Of course social media covers a broad range of websites and applications and it might be more appropriate to have guidelines in some circumstances.

Whether your social media activity is something one person does, or a number of people do, you need to be aware of the time it will take and consider how your social media plan will be delivered in the long term.

A quick search finds many museum Facebook pages which lie out of date, because someone just doesn’t have the time to keep updating it. I would argue that this is more detrimental to the brand than not having a presence there at all. Again this shows a lack of respect for a space that is important to some segments of your audience.

The time that a social media project can demand of you is another reason why it is important to start small and not try and do too much too soon.

The final thing to consider when preparing your social media strategy is how you will respond to comments from your readers.

Comments about your museum could take place on numerous websites, and it is worth figuring out who has the authority to reply to these, how you should engage with people, and more importantly discuss the tone of voice that any replies need to be in.

I personally feel that responding to comments about your museum, whether those comments are positive or not, 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.

It is a difficult line for a museum to walk – you want to be active in social media spaces and to do that you must reconcile the human-to-human informal conversational style of these networks with the fact that you are large institutions who can’t just let everyone say what they want. But museums are of course not alone in this, many large corporations are active in this space and have rules of engagement to try to minimize the chance of going off-message.

While these guidelines differ from organisation to organisation, one constant is that people should try and ‘sound human’ and engage people on an emotional level.

This issue goes beyond commenting, it could be the tone of voice of your Tweets on Twitter, it could be the way you write a fan page on Facebook, social media has magnified the importance of the voice of your brand.

Much has been written about brand personality and how you can determine what yours is, but I would urge caution, while you could run staff workshops and through a number of exercises agree the ‘voice of your organisation’ which everyone should channel when speaking on behalf of the institution, I would worry that this would sound fake.

I believe it would be much better to be a human being, to not try and be the institution, but to be the cool person who works at that museum. Being a real person, rather then trying to be the institution is more authentic and if you make a mistake, you’re only human.

Step 4: Launch
With your planning complete, you’ll be ready to launch in to the world of social media this could be on any number of websites and could be as small or ambitious as you wish and the issues for each will be different.

While this may be a new space for you, some old rules do apply, you wouldn’t open an exhibition without marketing it, and your social media plan should include how you will make audiences both inside and outside your organization aware of what you’re doing.

Step 5: Monitor
With your launch complete you should monitor your progress against the goals that you set at the start of your project, and consider changing course if things don’t seem to be going as planned.

Don’t operate in isolation from the rest of your organisation, make sure everyone is aware of what you’re doing, and keep them up to date with small wins. Social media is often misunderstood and communicating success is essential to validate the effort that you’re putting in. When people start to understand what you’re trying to do, they will hopefully come to you with suggestions of how your social media activity can work with areas of the organisation they are involved with.

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

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

Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Web 2.0 and generation curator

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

You’ll probably have heard a lot of chat about Web 2.0 over the past twelve months. The phrase refers to a perceived second generation of websites, one where the users are not just spectators browsing information created for them, but can participate by creating, sharing and curating content.

Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword. Websites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have rapidly become some of the most popular destinations on the web. Many museums are using these popular websites as a marketing tool, reaching out to the young people who use them in search of the next generation of museum visitor.

More significant though is the changing expectation that Web 2.0 has created. The next generation of museum visitors are no longer happy to just consume content curated for them by experts; they want a museum experience that is relevant to them and their interests. This approach has been dubbed ‘Generation C’ – the generation who want to create their own content. For the museum sector, it would be more relevant to call them Generation Curator – they want to be the Curator.

This desire to create, curate and share has led millions of young people to build their own webpages on MySpace and Facebook to share pictures, music and film and with friends. While much is said about the social network and the desire of these people to be hyper-connected, the time that these individuals spend ‘curating’ their online space is often overlooked. It has become a new hobby and a seriously-considered creative outlet.

Museums are well-placed to appeal to ‘Generation Curator’ because they offer rich experiences which can be virtually ‘cut-up’ and stuck back together online in numerous different ways to reflect the individual taste of each participant.

Remixing, reinterpreting and sharing interesting content is the kind of engaging interaction that draws young people to sites like Bebo, and to really reach this target group, museums need to look beyond using social networks for marketing and embrace this ‘everyone is a curator’ culture both online and offline.

While the idea of ‘Generation Curator’ might appeal to young people, this cult of the amateur raises an important question for museums about their role as trusted experts and how this can be balanced against the creative output of the masses. Though the Web 2.0 culture is one in which everyone can curate content, this does not replace professional curators nor the position of the museum as experts, but instead sits alongside professional content to compliment it where appropriate.

One example of this comes from N8, a Dutch organisation which aims to get young people from the Amsterdam area to visit museums. In 2007 they asked members of the public to create their own audio commentaries about items found in the venues around the city. Audio commentaries about artworks found in prestigious collections may not seem like the most appropriate place to ask for public involvement, these are normally written by trusted experts and listeners expect these guides to be factually correct.

But the audio commentaries created by the public for N8 do not pretend to be by trusted experts; these are something different and additional, as Juha van ‘t Zelfde, music curator for N8 explains, “We think that audio guides created by members of the public have an inviting effect. Rather than beginning with the formal, official explanation, young people can now start with something different, perhaps something that is more appealing to them. They can always decide to listen to the formal audio guide at the museum. But to get their attention and to trigger their imagination, employing this strategy seems viable.”

Each artwork could have several audio commentaries, each from a different vantage point. All have created by museum visitors who have been inspired to take the time to create, curate and share.

In Newcastle, England, a gallery has taken participation one step further. As part of their exhibition LOVE, the Laing Art Gallery asked members of the public to not just comment on artworks in their collection, but to create a new one. The artwork, developed with Yoko Ono, is made up of hundred of ‘messages of love’ sent to the gallery through the exhibition website. The artwork was exhibited alongside paintings by artists such as Goya, Rossetti and Hockney. The gallery used photo sharing website Flickr to show the artwork as it grew, which also allowed the public to interact with the exhibition by adding comments. The LOVE website also enabled users to become a virtual curator and pick artworks from the gallery’s collection to form their own personal exhibition and to share their creation with friends.

The Love exhibition took the creative and social elements which attract ’Generation C’ to social networks and used them to turn visitors to the gallery in to participants, complimenting the work of the artists in the exhibition and resulting in a more engaging interaction.

One area in which museums have traditionally collaborated with members of the public is social history, and Web 2.0 gives us new tools to allow the public to participate quickly and easily.

The Sixties is a new exhibition at York Castle Museum, a venue in the North of England. The curators realised that many visitors would have memories and photographs from that decade which could add something to the exhibition. They decided to use their website not only as a promotional tool, but also to give the public the opportunity to participate.

The exhibition website asks the public to add memories and upload pictures relating to the 1960s. These are then displayed online and also downloaded by curators and displayed on digital screens in the exhibition. This visitor-generated content compliments the main exhibition, allowing ordinary members of the public to share their experiences alongside accurate historic and cataloguing information created by the venue’s professional curators.

This alone provokes another interesting modern issue for museums. The Museums Association was recently highlighting the plethora of objects many museums now have, and counting, particularly social history items such as product packaging. As the same starts to happen with a volume of visitor-generated content, does this need to be edited and catalogued by professional Curators in the same way as their collections before we become inundated? Is it all relevant, good and bad, as a pertinent record of modern times and Web 2.0’s place in history?

London’s Tate Modern answered this with a tactical compromise. In 2006, they launched ‘Tate Tracks’, a soundtrack to pieces from their collection. Professional musicians were invited to find a piece in the museum’s collection which inspired them and write a track about it. These pieces of music by bands such as The Chemical Brothers, Klaxons and Basement Jaxx could be listened to on the Tate website or through headphones next to the piece in the Gallery. Once twelve tracks had been composed, Tate Modern used its presence on MySpace to launch a search only for the thirteenth track. They invited unsigned musicians aged 16 – 24 to create a piece of music inspired by a work of art in Tate Modern.

The partnership with MySpace exposed millions of users to the Tate brand and used the social networking site in an innovative way to ask young people to step beyond being just visitors. John Stack, Head of Tate Online, explains ‘we use social networks, because that is where the people are, and if we approach them in the right way with projects for music lovers or those with an interest in photography, it lets us reach those people’.

Another example of the Tate strategically springboarding existing social networks to reach out to the public was their innovative use of photo sharing website Flickr for their 2007 exhibition ‘How We Are Now’. Tate Britian used Flickr to invite members of the public to contribute photographs which illustrated one of the four themes: portrait, landscape, still life or documentary. Over 6,000 images were entered through Flickr by over 3,000 individuals, of these 40 photographs were selected to be exhibited alongside work by William Henry Fox Talbot, Tom Hunter and David Bailey. As well as the 40 images selected to be part of the exhibition, all the entries were shown on screens in the gallery, giving anyone who participated the opportunity to see their work on display in Tate Britian.

This was the first time that Tate had invited members of the public to contribute to an exhibition, and it attracted a big response. John Stack attributes the success of the project to ‘taking time to understand the Flickr and its users and not just using the space to push the Tate brand’.

Through personalised Web 2.0 pages, blogs and networks, Generation C are creating their own ‘environment’ online, each asserting their place in society and stating their view on what’s important. These ‘life casts’ could be considered a modern day source of social history – the memoirs of today. They also form a new mode of word-of-mouth marketing since it has been shown that the opinions and reviews expressed are often trusted more than those from magazines and newspapers because they come from like-minded people – which is evident since everyone’s credentials are proudly displayed. To encourage these young people to write about their museum experience, venues need not necessarily offer incentives – no more than the promise of being included and on display – but they do need to take down barriers to doing so. This may include giving access whereever possible for members of the public to take photographs for non-commercial purposes. Current protocol makes this particularly difficult but, as we have seen with iTunes, and are likely to with catchuptv.com, if consumers want access to a medium, the rights holders have to get in step with them to find a satisfactory compromise and not vice versa.

Many of those reading this article will already have a presence on sites like MySpace and Flickr, but it is not enough to just be there; in order to stay connected with the museum visitors of the future, museums need to look at ways to use these networks to give individuals an opportunity to create, curate and share content. This need not be a shift in approach, just an extension of existing community liaisons, visitor feedback and creative museum management. It involves using resources wisely, targeting specific groups and being open-minded. These values are all part of any modern, successful museum, they just need to be protracted and evolved to reach the changing expectations of ‘Generation C’.

Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Jim Richardson - MuseumNext

Friday, July 13th, 2001

Transcript of this presentation:

I think there are a lot of things that have been talked about today which are echoed through each presentation and I think there are certainly things which he was talking about there which will be reflected in my presentation as well, which is all about sharing stories, really.

I’m talking about social media from a marketing point of view, but then the lines between marketing and engagement are blurring all the time. I want to suggest that we’re missing an opportunity. Digital has changed marketing, but too often we’re falling into the bad habits of old marketing. And what are the old, bad habits? Talking at people, broadcasting at people, that’s what old marketing was all about. We talk about our exhibitions, we talk about our items, about our paintings, we talk about what’s going on behind the scenes. We talk at people an awful lot, and I think that too often we imagine that this is really engagement.

I asked on Twitter a couple of months ago, “Can you give me some good examples of engagement through social media.” One museum who isn’t here today but will remain nameless nonetheless sent me a message back saying, “Yes. Our Twitter stream is a great example of engagement.” I looked at what they were doing, but more importantly I looked at who was sending them tweets. And this is what I found: no results found. So they were under the illusion that they were engaging with their audience when in fact they were just talking a lot.

I think even in old marketing, talking at people, broadcasting, wasn’t the best way to do marketing. The best type of marketing, everybody knows, is word-of-mouth marketing. So whether it’s saying an exhibition was really good, or whether it’s someone influencing how you’d buy your next phone, whether it’s offline or online, and I hope that you’ve all seen MuseumNext research into social media. You can find it on MuseumNext.org. In these surveys we ask people about the influence of their friends, and unsurprisingly, 83% of people said they would be influenced by a friend to go and see an exhibition.

This isn’t rocket science. If I post a picture of my little girl in a cute little hat — you didn’t say, “Aaaah” come on, it’s my little girl – on Facebook and say that we had a great time at Beamish Open Air Museum, which she went down the pit, which is very apt for Newcastle, where I’m from, and she had a great time. That’s going to be far more effective at convincing my friends and family, who know me, to go there than Beamish doing an object of the day. It just makes sense.

I think we need to move past thinking about how many followers we’ve got, and how we can broadcast those followers, and think about how we can get other people to talk about museum experiences.

I’ve got seven ways that I think you can do that.

One – Make friends with your super fans. In fact, they don’t even need to be super fans. Make friend with your fans. I’ve seen the guys from Dovecot Studios here earlier and I’ve told them that I’m using them as an example of how to deconstruct your followers and this isn’t any reflection on how they’re using Twitter, it’s just that they’ve got 302 followers, which was a really good number to dissect.

You see next to each of those people on Twitter there is a little number. And this is Klout. Klout with a k dot com. And this allows you to measure the influence of your followers on Twitter. I’ve totally ignored this because I think when it comes to doing this it’s a lot of rubbish, because Klout thought that this lady had no influence at all, but by digging manually through their followers, I could see that this lady was a journalist, she’s a journalist at quite a large paper in Scotland. She does have an influence. She’s one of several journalists who are following their institution. And Klout just wouldn’t say that.

We’ve got someone from National Museums Liverpool here. I saw a presentation by National Museums Liverpool the other week and they have a press Twitter feed. I think that’s quite a nice idea if your institution is big enough to put all that talking at people, all that PR and press release stuff into a Twitter feed, just for press people. And it keeps it off your Twitter feed, stops you from just talking at people.

The other thing I could see from looking through their followers, which Klout couldn’t tell me, was how talented some of them are. Dovecot Studios, which is here in Edinburgh, you should go and visit it, is about craft, about weaving, and so they’ve got some great designer makers who are following them, like this lady, Holly.

These are some other things – I went through and looked at the websites of their followers and if I was these guys, I would be having Talented Follower Friday, or something more catchy, and be highlighting these great people who are following them, and advocating on their behalf, because then those people would be more likely to advocate back on the institution’s behalf.
It’s great for the Twitter feed, as well, to have that kind of content in there, rather than just talking about yourself — not that I’m saying they do that — but rather than just talking about yourself, talking about other people. Just having really great content in there.

Another thing that they could do is get some of these designers and makers to come in, look around, and do guest tweets. So tweet from their twitter stream. I think you have to be careful how you do it, but that’s another way that they could have someone talking on their behalf.
Digging further through, I saw this person who does networking events in Edinburgh and I thought that person probably has loads of followers who aren’t engaged in the arts, they’re engaged in business, but this is a way into a different network, by saying to that person, “Hey, you followers, why don’t you have something at our place?” And get those people to know about their institution.

Photography is another great way to engage people. These six people here are all photographers of some shape or form. The top guy there, Sandy, has nearly 40,000 followers and he’s an amateur photographer. I think he’s a great person to get on board by saying, “Come and do some photography in our place.” Because they’ve got a fantastic venue. These are some pictures I found on Flickr. People are taking pictures. To encourage them to do so, encourage them to come in and talk about their organization, rather than the organisation having to do the talking.

The other people, of course, are bloggers and there’s loads of blogs in Edinburgh, but then there’s niche blogs as well. They’ve got a quite a few bloggers who follow them, and I would be looking at those bloggers, looking at how many people are following those blogs. Following them on Twitter and making friends with those people. I’ll come back to blogger outreach in a bit.

The other group that I think are kind of missing here are other cultural institutions in Edinburgh. They’ve got a few who follow them, but not loads. One of the things that we found out with our MuseumNext research was that if someone follows one cultural institution on Twitter, they’re likely to follow several. So there’s a good option to cross-promote and one of the ways that you can do that is through hash tags. I actually meant to put Jenny’s Edinburgh Museum’s hash tag in here, but that kind of thing is happening. I think we have a lot to gain in our sector by working together to cross-promote each other.

Of course you also want to have a look at National Museum Scotland, see who is following them and try and nab some of their good followers.

Second Point. Make your content easy to share. This is the kind of thing that Hugh was just saying. You’re not BIC pens with nine followers, you actually have good content. You’ve got stuff that people want to look at. You’ve got a lot of content for niche audiences, people who – I’m not really interested in trains, but I know that there is a huge number of people who love train stuff, and will do loads of stuff with that if you release it, if you’re a train museum.

Lots of museums have this on their website. “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” and trying to build up the number of followers, which I think is great. But what I think is far better to do is to encourage people to share the content on your website, but adding these, “Share” buttons to all the pages of your website. We have conversations at Sumo about, “Should we really put a share button on the ‘About page?” Who cares, just put it on there and see if someone shares it.

Our experiences at Sumo is if you put a “like” button on a museum website, the number of people visiting your museum website from facebook will increase by 1000%. It could be that you’re already getting traffic from facebook, it could be that you’re not getting much, but we’ll increase it by a 1000%. These buttons are really easy to add. Do a search on Google, “add facebook like button” and you’ll come to this page. It’s that easy to do. Depending on your CMS, you might be able to add the like button yourself through your CMS, or you might need a web designer to do it. I’m selling out my industry here, but it’s an hour’s work to put a like button across a website. You shouldn’t be paying more than a hundred pounds, a hundred Euros, a hundred dollars. It’s a really easy job to do.

I think there’s other kinds of sharing too. This is Manchester Museums YouTube page, who have a load of great content around frogs. This guy is really entertaining talking about frogs, even if you’re not vaguely interested in them. And when they’re putting their content onto YouTube, they’re making is shareable, so it’s really important not only to put your content onto YouTube, but to make sure that when it’s on there, people can share it.

I think that goes for lots of different networks. Look to see how open you can be in terms of copyrighting. If you put pictures on Flickr do you really need to make them all copyrighted? Can you not open them up? We did Picture a Museum Day in March, and one of the things I found really interesting with that was how hesitant people were to post their pictures on Flickr, copyright free, so museums could use them on Wikipedia, but there really are a lot of advantages to being open.

Three, encourage reviews. This is a Susan Hiller exhibition at Tate. This is Tate’s Facebook page. People say, “Tate, they’ve got it easy. They’ve got a big team. They’re Tate after all, they’ve got their brand.” I’m sure that Martin will talk about this tomorrow, I don’t want to steal too much of this talk, but Tate is actually emailing people after they’ve been to an exhibition and saying, “Go to our Facebook page, and leave a review.” So that’s why they’re getting loads of people going to Facebook. That’s why they’re getting lots of people signing up to like them.
Now these reviews up here is something free that anybody can add to their Facebook page. So just go onto Facebook and search “reviews at.” You can add it in thirty seconds, and then you can start to ask people to talk about you, rather than just using Facebook to talk at them.

This is something that I love from MOMA, where you can do a drawing in the gallery, and then they’ll put it on their website. So you can have your picture on MOMA’s website. That’s really cool, and that’s something I would want to share with people. I’d tweet it and Facebook it.

This is something we’ve done for the Hepworth Wakefield gallery, which is a major new art gallery in Yorkshire. Their director is really cool. He said, “I don’t care if someone says they hate us, I just want people to talk about us.” So on their website they’ve got this thing here where you can put in that you love them or hate them or anything in between. You log into this through Facebook connect, so after you’ve posted this, it then posts it onto your Facebook wall as well, so you’re going to get all those people who have written things, friends coming through.

This must be my presentation where I’ve had the least stuff from the Brooklyn Museum, knowing that Shelly was going to be here. Normally I would say a lot more about them, but this is something really cool, which I saw at Brooklyn Museum when I visited. Just having signs around the museum saying, “Tell us what you think” on Twitter. It’s that easy, that’s going to cost like pennies or cents and just really effective.

This is from the Amsterdam Museum, which I saw in their ADAM exhibition earlier this year. Putting the tweets in the exhibition space, which I think is going to encourage people to post what they think of the exhibitions, because they know it’s going to actually appear on the wall, they get that kind of credit for doing it, which I think is a really nice touch.

Four. I’ve kind of touched on being open, but photography is a real bed bug for me. I think that museums really overplay the copyright issue. There’s something in every museum in the world that is out of copyright and could be photographed. As I said, we did picture museum day. One of the reasons to do that was to try and convince museums that photography is your friend and we had 7,000 pictures added to Flickr within 48 hours. We had 4,000 tweets on the hash tag, “Museum Pics.” So lots of people want to take pictures and share them, and a picture tells a thousand words.

This is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of 12,500 pictures that members of the public have added to their Flickr group, so I think being open has created a huge amount of content around the Metropolitan Museums of Arts collection. And Fiona mentioned this earlier, Its Time We Met and Arthur who did this for them is here, and spoke about it at MuseumNext last year. It’s a fantastic campaign where they invited members of the public to take pictures in their exhibition spaces and then turned this into an advertising campaign. Don’t tell Elyse this, Arthur, but this really changed my perception of the Met. I thought that it was really stuffy before this, but a stuffy museum wouldn’t do this. I’m in New York next week and I’m going to go to the Met for the first time. Again, this is all about copyright, about being more open.

Five is quite extreme. Taking a lodger. But this a great project, and something which somebody has to rip off.

This is the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and they invited somebody to live in their museum for a month. It’s just fantastic. So rather than them having to talk about themselves, they get this person, Kate, to come in and tweet about them and facebook about the, and that sort of thing. Kate was one of 1,500 people who applied to live in the museum for a month. They even had their own staff applying to do it. I’ve actually been talking about presenting at our next MuseumNext and they said, “We’re not sure, because we’re doing this project again, and the dates could clash.” So obviously very successful for them. So this lady Kate, she blogged, she did videos, she asked members of the public, “What are you doing in the museum today?” She did experiments and put them on line and then she tweeted and she Facebooked, and built up a really big following. I think that’s a fantastic project, so somebody please steal it.

As I mentioned earlier, another way of doing this would be guest tweets. I was searching for examples of this and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art got this guy from the office in the United States to tweet on their behalf, but it totally backfired because the stuff – I think was really funny what he was tweeting – but people said its really juvenile kinds of things that people say about museums. But at the same time, it’s nice that the museum isn’t taking itself too seriously and would be seen like that. But you maybe want to have an editor.

Six, I’m getting toward the end, don’t worry.

Run a competition. So, the first project that I mentioned is something called Democracy, which Sumo did two years ago, and this was based on Click, which Shelly talked about earlier. We wanted to create the most democratic exhibition in the world, and so members of the public entered their artworks into this exhibition, and they just had to enter something to do with democracy. So it was really open. And then they talked to each other about the art works, a lot of them were just, “You suck” but what can you do?

But we found that having an open competition was a really great way to promote the exhibition, because we had these sharing tools on the bottom of every piece and we encouraged anybody who entered, walked into the exhibition, to share it with their network of friend and family. Here’s the stats for one month. I think 28,500 visitors for one month is pretty good for a stand-alone exhibition.

You can see that Facebook is number two. 3,500 people in a month. And we did nothing on Facebook. All of that is individuals going on Facebook and saying to their friends and family, “Go and vote for me.” The whole thing is a total popularity context, but in terms of marketing it was a great success.

The other competition I want to mention is another project which we’ve already done.

Yorkshire’s Favorite Paintings. And this was a project where we were asked to promote oil paintings across Yorkshire in the UK. And the typical way to do that in the old kind of marketing, would be to broadcast, “We’ve got really cool oil paintings.” But we wanted to move past that, and instead ask members of the public, “Tell us about your favorite painting.” And the incentive was that you can take it home with you, or a replica at least.

In six weeks we got 400 entries, 400 stories, which was a response that I was really happy with.

The stories are a real mix. This guy went to an art gallery with his grandmother, and she said the painting looked like her, he thought she was a crazy old woman, but it’s really true. She showed him a picture, and now he wants to win it for his grandmother. Ahhh.

And then you’ve got really moving stories like this one where the person lost their son in Afghanistan, and this painting reminds them of their son, and so they’d like to win the painting to have on their wall to remind them of their son. So a huge mix of stories. I think this is my favorite. Can you all read it?

(laughter)

The thing is the age 8 wasn’t there when this first went on line, I’m sure. I think a curator’s gone in and added that to make it look not so bad. Not quite as creepy. So this is great, this is lots of people talking about the collections in these art galleries and museum, and saying that they love these paintings. And this is the kind of response we want people to get, to post. Someone’s read the stories and now they want to visit.

And finally, treat bloggers like rock stars. A website for you to write down, “Addict Omatict” I think is a really cool way to monitor social media. And I’ve got our friends Dovecot Studios in here again. This is what the search came back with on them. You can see they are on YouTube, on Flickr, or people posting content about them. But there’s loads of blog stuff there, so I’d be looking at those blogs and learning which bloggers are important locally, and plus on the niche subjects which your collection relates to.

This is a really nice outreach project, trying to speak to bloggers. So you get this and it is going to kind of freak you out. These bloggers were linked through a story, there were 70 bloggers who were talked to, they were led through a story that lasted about six weeks, and there were different things that they got. They saw these adverts in magazines. I think that’s really nice, is that they knew where a lot of the bloggers lived or worked so they could put these things outside where they lived. That’s got to really freak you out. And some of the bloggers were already talking about this state-funded organisation which was stalking them. But they were invited to go to the Albert memorial in London, and they had to dress in a trench coat and glasses and a hat. They were met by this ex-Sergeant Major, and they had to copy everything he did. So they followed him through the streets of London, to the V&A, where there was a preview of Cold War Modern, which really fits with the kind of espionage-esque emails that they’d been getting.

And about half the original bloggers who were originally talked to turned up at the end. They got great blog posts from all of these people who had been led through this story. So I think blogger outreach is something that a lot of institutions are doing, but you can be quite imaginative with it in getting other people to talk about your institutions and your collections.
In the same vein, this was something which I saw from the Natural History Museum in London where they invited their followers to come and do a tweet up, and that’s a great tweet. So it doesn’t have to be bloggers, it could just be interacting with your fans on Facebook or on Twitter and inviting them to come to your institution and talk about you.

So there we go. How to get people to talk about your museum in seven easy steps.

Thank you.

Jim Richardson is Managing Director of Sumo, a leading arts marketing agency with an international reputation, and a co-founder of MuseumNext.

Jim has worked on a broad range of marketing campaigns and social media projects for clients including The National Gallery, The Natural History Museum, The National Trust and BBC.

Jim spoke at MuseumNext about using social media to create dialogue between museums and their audiences, highlighting how encouraging audience participation can be an effective marketing tool.

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